Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

Today I am grateful for...

• Small amusements. Yesterday, it was The Problem with Time & Timezones - YouTube. I lost it when he got to leap-seconds. Which of course I'd been waiting for, just to see his reaction.
• Comfort scrolling (opposite of doomscrolling, obviously).
• Good microphones, including the Akg Lyra that I purchased used a week or so ago for use with zoom.
• Parody conspiracy theories such as Birds Aren't Real (which the wandering hen taken into custody at [a] Pentagon security area may have something to do with).
• Not being particularly tied to a specific number (like five?) of gratitude items.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

That time zone video was great and all too true.

The advice at the end to find code that's already done it is useful only if you're not the person creating that code. I'm reminded of the time that I asked on Stack Exchange or some such about an arcane issue in PDF parsing, and someone advised me to just rely on the people who do that stuff. The trouble is, I was writing a new PDF parser! It was necessary because it had to give detailed diagnostic messages on malformed PDF files, including file offsets. It was a very buggy parser, and I don't advise attempting to write one without a hotline to Adobe.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; I had a similar experience implementing a WebDAV server. Fortunately it was part of a research project so we didn't have to finish it, but we did get it to the point where both Windows and MacOS could mount it. Didn't get to the versioning part, which was optional in the spec, but that was about the time Subversion came out and we didn't have to.

The designers' approach to XML namespaces was... different.

[cellio]

Thanks for that time/timezones link! Spot on.

And then there was the time that China changed its clocks by something like five and a half minutes, one-time change, for what I understand to be political reasons. And if you try to do a computation in Java involving that period of time, you'll get wrong results. Or would have ten years ago; I don't know if they ever fixed it.