Palindromic date today !

[meddyg]

for those who like those things.. 

7.11.17

well it's nicer than Hallowe'en !

[clarion]

I noticed that, too.  I thought I would be the only geek, but I hadn't reckoned with YACF!

[Kim]

Geeks write it as 2017-11-07 thobut.


Incidentally, I was re-reading some early-90s Clarke recently, and one of the most striking anachronisms was the idea that 23rd century humans would be using two-digit years.

[clarion]

ISO

Attempts to use the logical convention for dating files so they appeared in the correct order of newsomeness failed on account of colleagues failing to obtain Clue.

[rogerzilla]

Geeks write it as 2017-11-07 thobut.


Incidentally, I was re-reading some early-90s Clarke recently, and one of the most striking anachronisms was the idea that 23rd century humans would be using two-digit years.

Didn't take us long to go back to two digits once all that millennium stuff blew over.

[SteveC]

ISO

Attempts to use the logical convention for dating files so they appeared in the correct order of newsomeness failed on account of colleagues failing to obtain Clue.

I have a colleague who doesn't seem to understand this. His file names for our weekly reports were "dd Month 201n" format. Fine as long as you sort the directory by date created. Wouldn't be so bad but we do work for a software organisation. 

[Polar Bear]

Geeks write it as 2017-11-07 thobut.


Incidentally, I was re-reading some early-90s Clarke recently, and one of the most striking anachronisms was the idea that 23rd century humans would be using two-digit years.

All of my documents are named starting yyyymmdd followed by the surname and then initials of the client, followed by a brief description.  Sorted latest first this system is simple and effective. 

[clarion]

ISO

Attempts to use the logical convention for dating files so they appeared in the correct order of newsomeness failed on account of colleagues failing to obtain Clue.

I have a colleague who doesn't seem to understand this. His file names for our weekly reports were "dd Month 201n" format. Fine as long as you sort the directory by date created. Wouldn't be so bad but we do work for a software organisation. 

Headdesk

[Kim]

08-Nov-2017 format is my compromise when dealing with muggles who may not understand the significance of the '-' delimiter and be confused by ISO dates in the first half of the month (typically when filling in forms).  It's unambiguous, which is more important than ability to sort ASCIIbetically.

Stupid for file names, thobut.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The Anno Domini system for numbering years was invented in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus. Apparently Bede was instrumental in popularising it. Before that, I think it was generally since the founding of Rome (AUC), which is assumed to have been 753BC, though the Romans didn't bother with this, using Emperors' regnal years. So it's quite sensible to assume that in some sci-fi future, especially if post-apocalyptic, we'll have abandoned this system and started again from scratch.

[Kim]

The POSIX committee did that in the 80s (the modern era began on the 1st of January 1970).  The only sane way to manipulate time/date in a general-purpose computer is to work in unix time and call some library function to convert to and from human calendars at the input/output stage.  It's simply impractical for a human programmer with something more important to do to keep track of all the vagaries and exceptions involved in the way we like to tell the time.

I reckon unix time will be with us for a very long time.  Or until 2038, anyway, when systems that use a 32-bit integer for the time suffer their version of the millennium bug...

[Vernon]

Whereupon we jump back to December 1901. I imagine they will transition to 64-bit in the fullness of time (if they haven't already).