The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

SeySayux:
It does make me a Belgian, though.

Oh, great. We've found the re-incarnation of Nagesh.

Tell me, if you really are Indian, how about answering some of these linguistic French questions?

mihi · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Ah, VB(A) fun with internationalization...

On French systems, CStr(True) is not "True" either, but "Vrai", which can given nice results when storing settings into ini files (SaveSetting) and trying to parse the INI files on an English machine. SaveSetting will happily convert the Boolean to String and back, but CDbl() fails with error 13 if it suddenly finds a string it cannot parse.

And I know I wrote an application a long time ago that intentionally changed the system date by setting Date$ to a new value. (As a workaround, one could also deny the current user the right to change the system date, which would also make the assignment fail).

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

HP PhaserJet:
Anonymous non Coward:
"Most common usage See also: Category:Date and time representation by country [edit] Date See also: Date format by country
In terms of dates, most countries use the "day month year" format. In terms of people the big-endian form is also very common, since that is used in East Asia, Iran and partially in India."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Medium Indian is roughly use , in ... The USA only.

So that's about the same as with USI.

What's "Medium Indian"?

I am Medium Indian only.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

snoofle:
As an American developer who routinely deals with overseas users, I spotted the cause in 2 seconds. And that happens in pretty much all languages.
OTOH, setting the system date by assigning a value to a function is (AFAIK - YMMV) unique to VB.

Date is not a function. It's a reserved keyword that sets the date.

Admittedly, it is easy to confuse with a certain function that returns the system date, since it is also named Date.

How can you tell the difference? Because you can't assign to a function.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Anyone who abuses the system clock in this manner should be shot. Not in the head - center mass. The head would just be an air pocket in this instance.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

trwtf:
SeySayux:
It does make me a Belgian, though.
Oh, great. We've found the re-incarnation of Nagesh.
Tell me, if you really are Indian, how about answering some of these linguistic French questions?

What's so special about being Belgian? I'm a half-blind, transgendered paraplegic pigme on schler last round of hormone injections.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Rast a mouse:
Maybe if the presumabley American team responsible used a logical date format like the rest of the world in the first place this would never have happened.

The most logical date format to a computer is ISO Date, YYYY-MM-DD or 2011-07-05 today. This sorts correctly from largest scale to smallest.

English is a Germanic language that places adjectives before nouns. In a similar manner, "July 5th, 2011" has "July" before the day it describes.

The real WTF is how people don't understand that people speak different languages. Don't assume that any other country follows the same dates or numbers you do.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Umwuofia:
I'm a half-blind, transgendered paraplegic pigme on schler last round of hormone injections.

hawt

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Jellineck:
"Yes, I am an US-ian"
Since you are unable to use the correct demonym for a citizen of the US, who really cares that you have your own special way(within the context of your countrymen) to say the date.

The correct term, of course, is "USonian.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

trwtf:
Jellineck:
"Yes, I am an US-ian"
Since you are unable to use the correct demonym for a citizen of the US, who really cares that you have your own special way(within the context of your countrymen) to say the date.

The correct term, of course, is "USonian.

Really? I thought it was pronounced "'merican, from the you ess ov ey"

ducks

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

The international standard is YYYY-MM-DD. Among other advantages, it sorts correctly.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

The portuguese do.

Number - Portuguese - Literal translation 1999 - Mil novecentos e noventa e nove - Thousand ninehundred and ninety and nine; 2001 - Dois mil e um - Two thousand and one; 2159 - Dois mil cento e cinquenta e nove - Two thousand hundred and fifty and nine;

But this is mainly a cultural thing. In the 1900's we used to shorten the year by saying only the last two numbers, but after 2000 we say the full year.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

keith:
The international standard is YYYY-MM-DD. Among other advantages, it sorts correctly.

We're having an endian-ness discussion as pertains to DateTime, I see. In a room full of morons.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Aside from VBA insanity, someone needs a good slap about the head for not realising that you don't have to store dates in the same format as you display them in. Le sigh.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Meep:
Ah, as opposed to the international standard of yymmdd, or, wait, is it ddmmyy?

YYYY-MM-DD. Learn it. Live it. It is the One True Date Format. Thou shalt have no other date formats before me.

And yeah, it was pretty damned obvious that the problem was the US/FR format difference. Should have taken no more than 2 minutes for the devs to reproduce it. Then again I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. These are VBA devs we're talking about.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
Mike:
Even this american non-developer figured out in the first few lines that the problem lie in the backwards dates in the EU. Something was setting system time using the american standard on a french system - tracking it down would be the hard part.
And certainly should never have taken that long.

You're missing a step here because first you have to know there is a date being set. I mean really, who the f*ck sets the system date in a report. I know that wouldn't be my first thought, and probably not most other developers either.

Once you see the system date (or any date for that matter) being set, it's really easy to make the locale connection...

If you knew that the system date was changing on a system that's running ANYTHING in VBA, "Date = " would be the first place to look.

This whole thing could be prevented with a login script utility that would delete all VBA code from a machine.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

TRWTF are numerical dates. The world should settle on commonly used month names and abbrivations. As we surely can not agree on a new spelling for the old month names, new world-wide known names for months need to be used, like McDonalds, Porsche or Beatles.

Written on the 5th of Porsche, 2011.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Ahhh. Thanks you very much Mr. Alex Papadimoulis!!! This is the exact codes I am needful. However, I have much doubt in the VBs, can you possibly post this using Java 1.6 runtime. Using of Scala language is acceptable because I have recently increased my skills in this. Also, as always, I have requirements for JUnit testing.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Lucent:
SeySayux:
1) Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system. 2) The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation
Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

PS. This does not make me a "Belgium fanboy". It does make me a Belgian, though.

To be frank, expecting Americans to know the details of how the Belgian system works, even though Belgians are familiar with the American system, is like complaining that you know everything about some celebrity's personal life and work, but he doesn't even know your name. How inconsiderate!

I propose a trade. We'll adopt international dates when the international community adopts our language. I mean outside of navigation, aviation, software, entertainment, and contracts, where it has already been adopted.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
C-Octothorpe:
Mike:
Even this american non-developer figured out in the first few lines that the problem lie in the backwards dates in the EU. Something was setting system time using the american standard on a french system - tracking it down would be the hard part.
And certainly should never have taken that long.

You're missing a step here because first you have to know there is a date being set. I mean really, who the f*ck sets the system date in a report. I know that wouldn't be my first thought, and probably not most other developers either.

Once you see the system date (or any date for that matter) being set, it's really easy to make the locale connection...
If you knew that the system date was changing on a system that's running ANYTHING in VBA, "Date = " would be the first place to look.

This whole thing could be prevented with a login script utility that would delete all VBA code from a machine.

I congratulate and feel bad for you at the same time for having enough exposure to VBA that the first thought you had was the 'Date =' "feature". And honestly, until VBA docs were mentioned explicitly, I assumed it was SSRS or equiv. simply due to the level of doubt the developer had that it was being caused by the report.

My bad for thinking the dev knew what the hell he was talking about.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
I propose a trade. We'll adopt international dates when the international community adopts our language. I mean outside of navigation, aviation, software, entertainment, and contracts, where it has already been adopted.

In reality, the adoption of languages and standards would be market driven. Americans don't adopt the standards of other countries because they don't have to. Individual European countries couldn't get very far without fitting in, so they adopt each other's standards in order to prosper.

frits · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

The moral of the story is that TRWTF is France, right? No? Drats.

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Julius Caesar:
SeySayux:
1) Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system. 2) The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation
Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

As an American, I admit I'm not all that familiar with parliamentary governments. But 13 months to form a government? I think after Britain's last election it took them about a week, and usually it's a matter of a couple of days. Israel may have the most parties in their parliament of any country -- I read once that Israel has NEVER had a majority government, not sure if that's true -- and they're constitutionally limited to 45 days to form a government.

Anybody else on here from countries with parliamentary systems? How long does it usually take to form a government? I'd guess when one party has a majority, it's a day or two, but when you have to form a coalition, presumably longer.

The important message from this lesson is that governments are universally redundant. Their only use is to give bossy pricks something to do to make them feel important.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

caper:
A TWTF is so much software that still wants users to run as administrator. The Microsoft taskbar date display comes directly to mind.

Except it doesn't. Unless you're referring to the Set Date/Time control panel shortcut in XP, which was replaced in Vista with a calendar display.

C-Octothorpe:
I congratulate and feel bad for you at the same time for having enough exposure to VBA that the first thought you had was the 'Date =' "feature".

TRWTF is that a developer didn't spot the localisation issue immeadiately and check the VBA docs to see how they'd set the system date. From there diagnosing and fixing the fault should take 5 mins, not three years.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Julius Caesar:
SeySayux:
1) Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system. 2) The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation
Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

As an American, I admit I'm not all that familiar with parliamentary governments. But 13 months to form a government? I think after Britain's last election it took them about a week, and usually it's a matter of a couple of days. Israel may have the most parties in their parliament of any country -- I read once that Israel has NEVER had a majority government, not sure if that's true -- and they're constitutionally limited to 45 days to form a government.

Anybody else on here from countries with parliamentary systems? How long does it usually take to form a government? I'd guess when one party has a majority, it's a day or two, but when you have to form a coalition, presumably longer.

The important message from this lesson is that governments are universally redundant. Their only use is to give bossy pricks something to do to make them feel important.

Don't forget about the busy-bodies who want to ban every benign thing you do because it doesn't please their god/philosophy/moronosity.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

frits:
The moral of the story is that TRWTF is France, right? No? Drats.

Sure it is! Those arrogant fucks even have their own calendar. I think we're in the year 220 or something thereabouts.

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

MMM:
TRWTF is running the report generation software with admin rights.

As a guess it went:

"Here's your progra-yum, boys."

"Putain de merde! La programme ne fonctionne pas!"

"Ah yeah, looks li-yuk you gotta be admin to run thay-at report."

"Mais pourquoi? Cela n'est pas sans risque!"

"Yeah, but hey-ull, Bubba's gawn an' fall'n asleep again, y'all ..."

(Gallic shrug, mutter under breath: "Scheisskopf ...")

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

SeySayux:
Someone who can't be bothered to login from work:
Meep:
Zebedee:
It was fairly obvious from the first sentence that this was going to have something to do with the unusual way Americans represent dates.

Ah, as opposed to the international standard of yymmdd, or, wait, is it ddmmyy?

It just breaks my heart that I'm not a European and don't have a bunch of obsessive compulsive Belgian bureaucrats to regulate every fucking aspect of my life.

Belgium can't regulate anything, they can't even elect a government right now. Seriously, they went for nearly eight months without one. They might still be without one for all I know.

I'm sure the US and everywhere else in the world has its own fair share of stupid bureaucratic laws anyway.

Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system.

The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation

Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

But to recap: he's saying Belgium can't regulate anything, and you're countering by saying that they're just lost in the sauce because of months of pointless negotiations just to form a government, but soon they'll gear up to start producing unbelievable quantities of red tape.

Is there a point to this? I mean, will you ever have enough regulation, enough laws and enough welfare?

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
trwtf:
Jellineck:
"Yes, I am an US-ian"
Since you are unable to use the correct demonym for a citizen of the US, who really cares that you have your own special way(within the context of your countrymen) to say the date.

The correct term, of course, is "USonian.

Really? I thought it was pronounced "'merican, from the you ess ov ey"

ducks

Close, it's "merkin". (GIYF btw)

ContraCorners · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Bombomil (guest):
Here in The Netherlands we swap, when speaking, some of the digits in the value. Like 21 becomes een-en-twintig (one-and-twenty). If the value has 4 digits we often pronounce it as a number of hundreds. This means that something like 2345 becomes drie-en-twintig honderd, vijf-en-veertig (three-and-twenty hundreds, five-and-fourty).
I would just love to see that expressed in computer-programming (most, but not all pairs of digits swapped). It would make a language as white-space an easy one to decipher. :-)

Oh, by the way: wasn't yesterday "the fourth of july" for you guys ? :-p

It does seem that most of us guys say "the fourth of july(sic)." However, it's not as universal as you Europeans seem to think it is. There are always lots of media outlets who will say and write "the July fourth holiday" when describing how us guys will spend (or have spent) the holiday.

Here are a few examples: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGHP_enUS433US433&q=%22july+4th+holiday%22

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
I congratulate and feel bad for you at the same time for having enough exposure to VBA that the first thought you had was the 'Date =' "feature".

Yes, I'm at the beginning of a project to rewrite a ginormous transaction processing engine written in VBA. Can you tell I'm crying right now? 14 page long subroutines sans indentation. GOTO everywhere. Horrible variable naming. SQL queries written with VBA function calls in the query string.

My goal is to turn it into a highly-abstract class library with lambda expressions and iterators all over the place. That should frighten off anyone like the person who wrote the goddamn thing in the first place.

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
Matt Westwood:
Julius Caesar:
SeySayux:
1) Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system. 2) The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation
Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

As an American, I admit I'm not all that familiar with parliamentary governments. But 13 months to form a government? I think after Britain's last election it took them about a week, and usually it's a matter of a couple of days. Israel may have the most parties in their parliament of any country -- I read once that Israel has NEVER had a majority government, not sure if that's true -- and they're constitutionally limited to 45 days to form a government.

Anybody else on here from countries with parliamentary systems? How long does it usually take to form a government? I'd guess when one party has a majority, it's a day or two, but when you have to form a coalition, presumably longer.

The important message from this lesson is that governments are universally redundant. Their only use is to give bossy pricks something to do to make them feel important.
Don't forget about the busy-bodies who want to ban every benign thing you do because it doesn't please their god/philosophy/moronosity.

Religion became redundant the moment the police force was invented.

ContraCorners · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

HP PhaserJet:
Zebedee:
That's interesting, most people in the UK would say two thousand and eleven. How would you say the year 2000, twenty-hundred?

You're misunderstanding the pattern, the pattern is what way is shortest.

We'd say it "Two-thou-sand" because it has fewer syllables than "Twen-ty-hund-red".

And we say "Twen-ty-ele-ven" because it has fewer syllables than "Two-thou-sand-and-ele-ven".

When it comes to informal language, I think this shortest-way pattern is acceptable. You just used a contraction. Are you going to start throwing apostrophe's everywhere.

I agree, but shouldn't it be el-le-ven with 3 syllables?

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

ContraCorners:
HP PhaserJet:
Zebedee:
That's interesting, most people in the UK would say two thousand and eleven. How would you say the year 2000, twenty-hundred?

You're misunderstanding the pattern, the pattern is what way is shortest.

We'd say it "Two-thou-sand" because it has fewer syllables than "Twen-ty-hund-red".

And we say "Twen-ty-ele-ven" because it has fewer syllables than "Two-thou-sand-and-ele-ven".

When it comes to informal language, I think this shortest-way pattern is acceptable. You just used a contraction. Are you going to start throwing apostrophe's everywhere.
I agree, but shouldn't it be el-le-ven with 3 syllables?

Nope. It's: "Twen-ny-lev-ven".

hoodaticus · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
MMM:
TRWTF is running the report generation software with admin rights.

As a guess it went:

"Here's your progra-yum, boys."

"Putain de merde! La programme ne fonctionne pas!"

"Ah yeah, looks li-yuk you gotta be admin to run thay-at report."

"Mais pourquoi? Cela n'est pas sans risque!"

"Yeah, but hey-ull, Bubba's gawn an' fall'n asleep again, y'all ..."

(Gallic shrug, mutter under breath: "Scheisskopf ...")

What privileges are required for doing COM again?

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
C-Octothorpe:
I congratulate and feel bad for you at the same time for having enough exposure to VBA that the first thought you had was the 'Date =' "feature".
Yes, I'm at the beginning of a project to rewrite a ginormous transaction processing engine written in VBA. Can you tell I'm crying right now? 14 page long subroutines sans indentation. GOTO everywhere. Horrible variable naming. SQL queries written with VBA function calls in the query string.
My goal is to turn it into a highly-abstract class library with lambda expressions and iterators all over the place. That should frighten off anyone like the person who wrote the goddamn thing in the first place.

Throw in a coupla' Funcs and some events, and they'll swear it's the work of the devil. (not saying that your not evil though)

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
C-Octothorpe:
trwtf:
Jellineck:
"Yes, I am an US-ian"
Since you are unable to use the correct demonym for a citizen of the US, who really cares that you have your own special way(within the context of your countrymen) to say the date.

The correct term, of course, is "USonian.

Really? I thought it was pronounced "'merican, from the you ess ov ey"

ducks

Close, it's "merkin". (GIYF btw)

What? I looked up merkin and found that it used to be a wig worn by prositutes after shaving their genitalia.

Ah, I see what you did there...

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

We need a 'like' option for posts... or in this particular case: a 'ftw!' option...

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
Lucent:
SeySayux:
1) Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system. 2) The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation
Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

PS. This does not make me a "Belgium fanboy". It does make me a Belgian, though.

To be frank, expecting Americans to know the details of how the Belgian system works, even though Belgians are familiar with the American system, is like complaining that you know everything about some celebrity's personal life and work, but he doesn't even know your name. How inconsiderate!
I propose a trade. We'll adopt international dates when the international community adopts our language. I mean outside of navigation, aviation, software, entertainment, and contracts, where it has already been adopted.

It isn't your language

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Ton:
We need a 'like' option for posts... or in this particular case: a 'ftw!' option...

Argh. I meant to quote "Yup. Just like that grand American holiday, "July the 4th," that we just saw... ".

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Ton:
Ton:
We need a 'like' option for posts... or in this particular case: a 'ftw!' option...

Argh. I meant to quote "Yup. Just like that grand American holiday, "July the 4th," that we just saw... ".

As a Brit in the US one 4th of July, I was asked by a native how we celebrate 4th of July in Britain.

dkf · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

David Emery:
strongly typed objects

Are they the ones where you bash the keyboard extra hard when writing them?

Flash · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

HP PhaserJet:

You just used a contraction. Are you going to start throwing apostrophe's everywhere.

Are you going to start throwing apostrophes everywhere?

FTFY

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

You have a point there. Months are pretty worthless as units (arbitrary, inconsistent...), and there's no real reason to have them to begin with. Why not just have a 365-day year, and do billing cycles by 4 weeks?

ContraCorners · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Kev:
Bort:
It's because when you say the date out loud, you don't say "5th July." You say "July 5th."

But you say "the 4th of July" (or at least the New York Times does), and we do actually say things like "the 5th of July Two Thousand and Eleven" here in the civilised world ;o)

Is that what the New York Times does? Really?

How do you explain this then?

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/142094/many-new-yorkers-beach-bound-this-holiday-weekend

Damn...wrong link and can't delete. Ignore this for now. Sorry.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

MeRp:
kikito:
That mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy business is just a blasphemous invention from devil itself.
There is only One True Date Format and that is yyyy-mm-dd.

There is only One True Date Format and that is x, where x is the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

Ha! Your meager OTDF still falls prey to the dreaded threats of Leap Seconds, Time Zones, Daylight Saving Time! (that's "Summer Time" for our friends across the pond)

There is only One True Date Format and that is (x, y), where x is the number of weeks since January 6, 1980; and y is the millisecond offset into that week starting from midnight (UTC, not including leap seconds since January 6, 1980).

Coyne · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Ahhhh...yes! The old application destroys operating system problem class. Brings back memories.

On the HP/3000 line of computers, back when MPE III was the proprietary operating system, we had what were called "system failures". These occurred, usually, when the operating system discovered it had "immolated itself", such as by trying to deadlock itself; or by corrupting a critical system table; or by terminating its own memory manager; and etc.

We had a BASIC interpreter on this system that had a list command used to list source lines. If you tried to list lines that didn't exist, you would get something like this:

  > LIST 1-5 
  LINE NOT FOUND

Repeat your erroneous command 4 times in a row (yeah, why would you, but users are called "lusers" for a reason) and the result would be a System Failure.

Why? No idea. HP fixed the problem in the next version of the O/S, without providing any insight.

But (as you might imagine) it's kind of...undesirable...to have the lusers on a time-sharing system be able to bring a whole system down by typing an erroneous user-application command 4 times in a row.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Stephen Cleary:
MeRp:
kikito:
That mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy business is just a blasphemous invention from devil itself.
There is only One True Date Format and that is yyyy-mm-dd.

There is only One True Date Format and that is x, where x is the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

Ha! Your meager OTDF still falls prey to the dreaded threats of Leap Seconds, Time Zones, Daylight Saving Time! (that's "Summer Time" for our friends across the pond)

There is only One True Date Format and that is (x, y), where x is the number of weeks since January 6, 1980; and y is the millisecond offset into that week starting from midnight (UTC, not including leap seconds since January 6, 1980).

And the biggest benefit is that it's human readable.

Coyne · 2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Bryan the K:
TL;DR The real WTF is VB amirite?
First??

No, the real WTF is functions that outlive their usefulness. Setting the date from Microsoft Basic (yeah, about 99 versions ago) was useful on the IBM PC, or even the IBM PC AT.

It is more hazardous than useful these days. Yet it survives: An obsolete function looking for a place to happen.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

In Danish, we count ....eighteen, nineteen, twenty, one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, three-and-twenty etc. So we're using "middle endian" with numbers: "one thousand nine hundred four and eighty" (but "nineteen hundred four and eighty" when talking about calendar dates).

And the names for 10^n, where n is an integer and 5<=n<=9, are actually named after the number's multiplum of 20. So 50 is actually "half-third-times-twenty" and 80 is "four-times-twenty".

Not that any of you care.

At least it's better than the old British monetary system where you had to do Mod(x, 12) constantly.... :-)

Trans-Atlantic Time Trap

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