51–60 of 466 posts
I find it slightly ironic that a blog that’s educating (and entertaining) us on time and timezones does not itself mention when its blogposts were published, at least on mobile. This one appears to have been published in the summer of 2024.
This might not 'mean much' to the computer, but it means a lot to the human. The computer uses it to communicate with the human and the humans between each other. When I arrange a meeting across timezones I will say CET 16.00 or ET3.00PM and they will understand it faster than saying how much offset we are from UCT.
I’m not sure that’s right! According to legend among metrologists I’ve talked to, “UTC” was chosen as a compromise candidate: it makes sense as an acronym in neither English nor French.
I convert the target TZ to UTC, using my local utility, then use my local TZ utility to convert from UTC to local.
But I write iOS software, so I have very solid local tools at hand. It might be more problematic, on, say, a webserver.
On a related note, I wrote this utility[0], some time ago. It uses the TZ map from the TZ Boundary Builder project[1].
Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
Sounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.
Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
Of course every sane person runs their default system clock on UTC and lets users pick their own local time. That way cron always does the "right thing"(TM).
Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
And they live 7 years in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.
But whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?