chilts.org
Andy Chilton
Entries for archive: 2007-07
Found 16 entries.
The End is Nigh 2007
There is a new challenge over at KiwiWriters - go check it out if you want to finish that thing off you've been meaning to do for ages.
The End is Nigh challenge aims at getting you to finish off whatever it is you've been procrastinating about all this time. You know you have one or two, or five or six, things you've been meaning to finish off, but you just need that momentum to get you started.
This is your excuse to finish off whatever it is you've just not had chance to do. The best part about it though, is that you'll be finishing things off with lots of other people to push you, cheer you on and also who are doing it themselves, so you're not alone.
I shall be finishing off my NaNoWriMo novel from last year - The Bright Side of Casey Hill - as well as my SoCNoC novel from this year - Bit and Byte's Adventure.
And some people seem to have already started, so what are you waiting for, Join Us and let's just get it finished.
Labels: kiwi-writers, end-is-nigh
Inserted: 2007-07-31 22:16 (2 years, 12 months ago)
Happiness is a Cigar called Hamlet
There used to be an advert on the TV in the UK back when advertising tobacco was still allowed. It basically put the subject of the advert into an awkward situation, but smoking that cigar made him forget his worries.
Not that I'm advertising smoking (since I absolutely revile it, it's a disgusting habit) but there are some things at the moment which remind me of the advert.
Well, as you guys know, I recently started back at Catalyst. Since then I've been a lot happier there than at my previous place. All in all, there are ups and downs but that's the case in any job. Anyway, for the past while in work I've been grappling with using Oracle. It's been a complete PITA for so many reasons but it really does make me wonder why people still use it.
That aside, I was chatting with a friend at my old work on Jabber the other day. He asked me "Are you happy now?" This was in reference to the fact that I'd told him while I was still working at the old place that "You know, I'm not usually this sad". Anyway, he remembered and asked me. Of course, I said "Yes, 100%".
So this reminded me of the advert. Even if I have to grapple with Oracle, even if I'd have done things differently, even if this that and the other, all the chaos that usually goes with a project of any decent size, as soon as I realise I'm where I want to be work-wise, none of the little things matter.
Also, things have been pretty rosey outside of work too. As you know, I've been fairly busy and last weekend was no exception. A housewarming on Friday (hi guys), the NZSO on Saturday for what was an amazing concert, to see This is New Zealand at the film festival on Sunday and Rock'n'Roll on Monday evening - from which I can't get the moves out of my head!
I asked the other week, Can it get any better than this?. Well, it seems it can!
Inserted: 2007-07-31 21:25 (2 years, 12 months ago)
The Zing Thing
This weekend, KiwiWriters is challenging you to write 2,000 words in a genre you have never written in before.
It's the start of a series of short challenges where we will try to get you out of your comfort zone and try (at least just for a short while) something different.
This month, we are asking you to write in a genre you have never written before. Already there are people have finished and maybe some of those have already edited their story too.
So far, I have written 860 words and I'm really enjoying it. I'm writing a medieval love story though already it has taken a turn for the worst. I think this might be the first romance where the guy didn't get the girl. Oh, and there is blood and guts in it too. It's turning into a mixture of things really, none of which I have ever written before, so that's a good thing.
We will be holding these challenges every so often so there is always a challenge or two coming up.
Once I've finished, I'm going to firstly post the unedited version and then add the edited finished version at a later date. It'll be over in my writing section.
Labels: zing-thing, kiwi-writers
Inserted: 2007-07-29 01:52 (3 years ago)
My Proudest Moment for KiwiWriters
In all the work that I've done in getting the KiwiWriters site up and going this year, I have just finished the thing that I am most proud of.
Finally, after many months of wrangling, I have pretty much wrapped up the Challenge section of the site. So let's look at the stages I had to go through to make it happen:
- I needed to do a quick release so we could use it for The 6,000 Word Easter Challenge and prove the concept and implementation
- that initial release did pretty well and not much was changed to be able to add SoCNoC 2007 not long afterwards
- at the same time, I added the lovely participation icons and the progress bars for anyone that wants them
- since then, I've added the ability to choose your timezone and have the challenge work with your local time
- I've just released updated code to actually use it :-)
- next will be a script to log everyone's daily progress to the database
- soon that will also be reported on the site
- added to all this, the admin interface to add/edit/delete new events
- plus finally, the ability for the members to add their own events
So already there is quite a lot but the other thing I really like is that the challenges can be of many different types - not just word counting. I think it is an uber-cool feature that we wanted from the start and I'm very happy with the implementation being all nice and data-driven.
It seems other challenge-based writing sites put all their effort into one challenge a year, which to me, also sounds like manual-database-editing overhead-hell. Being someone who hates restrictions and one of the most important requirements for KiwiWriters as a group was to have the ability to stage many challenges throughout the year and the ability to let members create their own.
So I/we made it multi-evented from the start and now it's blossoming into it's own little world. Soon we will have even more challenges:
- The Zing Thing Challenge
- The End is Nigh Challenge
...not to mention lots more when we release the 'member' challenge section.
As always, what are you waiting for, Join Us!
Labels: kiwi-writers, challenge, planet-catalyst
Inserted: 2007-07-27 00:02 (3 years ago)
Some Updates
About Welly and Coding.
I chilled at work drinks on Friday, met a few friends for coffee on Saturday and had a pot luck dinner that evening. Went to see Wellington Phoenix thrash Sydney FC 3-0 on Sunday and enjoyed sitting and watching a film in the evening for the first time in ages.
Also, I'm back into coding (lots) again. I did quite a bit in the last couple of weeks - not on Zaapt but on KiwiWriters - some major things including timezone support, member challenges and fixing up lots of other little things no-one really notices.
With some smaller improvements being done for KiwiWriters I'm also adding a few things to Zaapt now too - in fact, I'm almost at the stage where I am re-factoring a few models and adding some new features rather than adding new models themselves. Maybe I'll reach version v0.1 one day. I still want to get some sort of photo gallery model in there first though. And Martyn has also suggested I put in roles for content-types too.
I should also write more documentation, as always.
Finally, I've also added Phliky to Ohloh too (see Phliky Page on Ohloh). I also received and gave out some Kudos :-)
After this brain dump, I should hit the sack.
Labels: phliky, zaapt, kiwi-writers, wellington
Inserted: 2007-07-24 00:10 (3 years ago)
Public Sign of Unity
As a public sign of Unity, I shall be linking from this blog entry to the official OpenID community site.
Here are some details about a nasty bit of URL exploitation which is just plain wrong.
As a public show of unity, I shall link to the OpenID Community Site and not the one doing the exploitation. I did consider linking to the openid.net site using the words openid and org but I fear that's as bad as the original exploitation, so I shall refrain from it.
Finally, if you do require an OpenID, I would wholeheartedly recommended MyOpenID which has also been improved recently to show a log of your recent activities. I can recommend this because it's the one I use.
If you want to research this yourself, take a look at the OpenID Providers on this list.
Labels: planet-geek, open-id
Inserted: 2007-07-21 00:11 (3 years ago)
My Personality Type
What type of personality are you on the Myers-Briggs test?
On Kerryn's blog, she posted that she had done a personality test and showed us the results.
I went and took the test too. In reality, it tells you only what you tell it, but it's funny how it fills in a few gaps and you think 'that's so me'.
But first, let me tell you a little story. You have to answer 4 questions and each has two answers. I noticed at the top that it is considered that there are 16 personality types. So yeah, 2^4 is 16.
I finished answering them. I knew the answers to Q's 1, 3 and 4 straight away but I wasn't sure about Q2. I answered it as best I could and found out my result. I'm of type ISTP, which is a Dominant Introverted Thinking. You can read what it says about me as an ISTP here.
Now, this is where I hit a problem with the page - it only gives you 8 explanations - but whoa, you said there were 16! I, as an ISTP, is lumped in with INTP, and yes, that happens to be Question 2 so obviously those personalities are quite close to each other.
In my quest for finding things out, there was another link to another page of explanations of The Sixteen Types at a Glance. It turns out that after reading both ISTP and INTP that I am more like the former than the latter - which was my answer to the original question.
Anyways, I'll just point out a few sentences from some of the descriptions I found to be quite interesting:
- They distrust action taken too quickly without the necessary investigation.
- They are fiercely independent, seeking input and comments from a chosen few.
- When reporting to others, they need to establish credibility first: their own and that of the person they are reporting to.
- They are less interested in running the world as they are in understanding it.
- They may spend a lot of time defining words, concepts and systems in order to define a problematic solution.
- Although they do have a spontaneous, even playful side, what people often first encounter with them is their detached pragmatism.
So yeah, a perfect fit for a programmer I think. I particularly liked point 2, the second half of which is exactly what I was talking to Kerryn about yesterday. Very strange.
Labels: planet-geek, personality, myers-briggs
Inserted: 2007-07-20 23:37 (3 years ago)
A Superhero? I'm not.
I decided to submit Zaapt, my CMS, to Ohloh and here's the results.
The page for Zaapt on Ohloh shows a few interesting things about Zaapt the CMS.
Firstly, they show that I have done 3,039 lines of code, by hook or by crook (of course, they don't know that I have Perl generating at least a thousand or so more than that). I thought I'd done more than that, but hey, at least it's succinct. As it stands, they estimate that, at something less than 1 Person Year averaging $55,000USD a year then the Zaapt code base is worth a whopping $34,834USD.
It turns out that Zaapt is 7 months old today so I reckon I've done well to get it where it is now. Though I don't believe the calculations Ohloh generates I guess it's just an indication of what's been happening on the project.
What's more interesting is the code analysis page. I always think I comment code about right - who doesn't? - so I might have to compare (my 12.1%) with other projects and see where it fits in. I suspect that the weird mix of HTML/Perl in Mason might throw the 'Languages' used off a bit. Certainly there is more than 3% HTML and much less than 73% Perl so I reckon all Mason files are treated as solely Perl.
In the Contributors section (yes, I'm the only one), the other feature I find quite useful is my personal metrics for Zaapt. It's nice to see how many commits and lines I'm changing (per language and) overall on a monthly basis.
It's just a bit of fun so I'm not too bothered what it says, but it is interesting. I'd also like to know what adding the KiwiWriters repository would make all these figures. Unfortunately that SVN isn't public so I can't. Maybe I'd hit $50,000USD for half a year's very part-time work.
Not bad eh!
Labels: zaapt, cms, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, ohloh
Inserted: 2007-07-20 00:03 (3 years ago)
Busy Weekend
The thing about Welly is, it's just so damn good.
On Friday evening, I met up with a friend and headed off to see (hear?) the NZSO. I really liked the Mendelssohn and she really liked the Sibelius, especially the last one (her opinion counts so much more than mine though).
On Saturday I met up with a couple of friends for coffee late afternoon, then with a larger other group for dinner (including Travis, Jason and Michelle). We had lovely food at Strawberry Fare, went to see Carl Barron and went back to Strawberry Fare for desert.
Sunday, a couple of other friends and I did a short version of the Southern Walkway and then we just chilled with coffee in Newtown afterwards.
Then last night, Kerryn and I went to a dancing lesson at Wellington Rock 'n' Roll Revival Club. It was my first ever lesson and yes, it was good fun, in fact, it was excellent. Thanks Kerryn.
Can it get any better than this?
Labels: nzso, walking, wellington
Inserted: 2007-07-17 11:37 (3 years ago)
Open Letter to Information Technology Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
The Information Technology Division in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has chosen to push through the use of ECMA-376 OOXML as an 'approved standard'. This is a bad decision and is subject to a very short public comment period that will expire on 20th July. Here, I present an open letter from me, a Citizen of New Zealand, to the ITD on how this decision will adversely affect themselves, others, me and my country.
This letter was sent to 'standards at state.ma.us' and copied to Pamela Jones at Groklaw.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
---
Information Technology Division
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Attention: Beth Ann Pepoli
Re: Public Comment on ETRM Draft 4.0
Dear Ms. Pepoli,
I write to you in regard to considering adding Microsoft's OOXML to your list of approved standards in the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) 4.0.
Firstly I urge you to look further into the ECMA-376 Office Open XML standard to discover for yourself a number worrying inconsistencies [1], incorrect fundamentals [2] and dubious instructions [3] contained within the so-called standard. The standard itself reads more like a 'what Word does' rather than 'what an open document should describe' which is unlike any other open standard I know of. All of this is even before looking into the almost impossible technicalities of implementing such a long specification in itself, something that even Microsoft will find hard to do, let alone an independent software supplier. Considering that an alternative format, ODF, is already specified completely, already has a number of independent implementations and already provides a future proof format I consider the proposal of OOXML not only wrong but also redundant.
As shown in the above links, there are many arguments against OOXML but I shall not concentrate on those since I'm sure that others who write to you in regard to the same subject will already point these out. Alternatively, I'd like you to consider the following situation.
It has been recently reported [4] that the UK National Archives has chosen to access their old proprietary data using a proprietary operating system running a proprietary emulator to run old proprietary programs [5]. This, in my opinion is the wrong way of doing it. While this might be one solution to reading the data, there is no mention of actually converting it to a new format. If they did, in their case the UK National Archives may choose to convert to OOXML but this still leaves them in exactly the same position as they are now - their data will still be stored in what is essentially a proprietary format which can only be read by programs from one company, Microsoft.
No matter how you look at it, this still equates to a monopoly for one company and leaves the UK National Archives in the same position Microsoft admitted to putting them in in the first place. This is the same company who, by stating that OOXML is an 'open' format (they're wrong [6]) is trying to push ODF (a truly open format) off the rails and into oblivion. Who is to say that in 3 or 5 years time, if ODF has been pushed aside, Microsoft won't just go back on their word and create incompatibilities with OOXML just like they have deliberately done with previous versions of Word itself.
This then means that you are in exactly the same position, or worse, as you were previously and the good judgment of specifying ODF as an approved standard in ETRM 4.0 will have been all for nothing. It will also leave us in the 'digital dark age' Mr. Frazer, Microsoft UK, predicts, at his company's doing.
Finally, I'd like to mention why I, a Citizen of New Zealand, would want to write to you regarding your choice of approved standards within your state and how that affects me and my country.
You are probably aware in the importance of your decision for the future of data standards and accessibility. We live in an information age, a data sharing world, the Internet Revolution and make no mistake about it, this revolution is just as important as the Industrial Revolution before it, if not much more so. It is important that our decisions now are good not only for us but for our future and for those that come after us. Were it not for completely 100% open standards in the computer world this information age could never have happened. Computers wouldn't even be able to talk to each other let alone speak the same language, if truly open standards had never existed.
Countries like New Zealand are influenced heavily by decisions made in other countries. As a small country, we are ripe for the Government to take a stand against phony standards and choose to save and store all our data in open formats. It's an ideal situation to be able to choose open standards such that the Government won't waste public money on converting from one proprietary format to another and still get it wrong. We can't afford to spend millions of New Zealand dollars on incorrect storage and conversions to broken and incomplete standards unlike the UK tax payer is being forced to.
Massachusetts, as a state of 6.4 million people and we, New Zealand, as a country of 4 million people have many similarities and therefore any decision you come to may affect decisions that we, or other governments or central organisations throughout the world, make. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to take the lead, take a stand and show the rest of us the way.
So finally, I urge you again, please do not accept the ECMA-376 OOXML proposal as an approved standard in the ETRM 4.0 and choose only those which attain a 'true' standard, such as ODF. This will enable countries like New Zealand to point to previous examples, such as Massachusetts, where open standards have worked, are being used, have saved money and also have the freedom to choose supplier of such solutions. None of this would be true if ECMA-376 OOXML is chosen as an approved standard.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Chilton
[1] http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections#Ecma_376_is_immature_and_inconsistent
[2] http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html
[3] http://fussnotes.typepad.com/Achieving_Openness_1point0.html#sdendnote8anc
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm
[5] http://kapiti.geek.nz/random/updating-proprietary-file-formats-the-wrong-way.html
[6] http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/06/14/achieving-openness-a-closer-look-at-odf-and-ooxml.html
Labels: ooxml, ecma376, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, odf
Inserted: 2007-07-15 01:43 (3 years ago)
kapiti.geek.nz Now One Year Old
Yay! Party time. Excellent!
Not much more to say that that except I still need to update KapitiGeekNZ to a new design.
Am not sure where time has disappeared since June but consider Christchurch and Postgres being my major time sinks.
Anyways, am looking forward to a good weekend of doing things, lots of things, so I hope you have a good one too.
P.S. Fridays and Sundays are the best days of the week!
Labels: kapiti-geek-nz, birthday
Inserted: 2007-07-13 17:54 (3 years ago)
For Those That Didn't Read the Previous Entry
I'm much happier today. 'Twas a good day.
Got many things done, sussed out a few things, made a number of things and generally just enjoyed myself.
Two of the things that had been on my mind yesterday have cleared up. There is still one or two other things nagging me, one of which is easily fixed, the other I'm not sure - but don't worry, it's nothing major, just a little hill I have to get over.
Labels: general, thinking, stuff
Inserted: 2007-07-13 00:13 (3 years ago)
Timezones Freak Me Out
I've been playing with Timezones inside PostgreSQL for the last wee while, experimenting and trying to figure some things out.
The first thing I figured was that I couldn't use NZT, NZST or NZDT or any of the other acronyms (CEST, UTC, GMT, CET, CST, PST etc) for timezones since they are always calculated as offset from UTC.
Instead I realised that I would have to use something along the lines of America/New_York, Europe/Helsinki and Pacific/Auckland. This way any Daylight Savings Time will be automatically incorporated in any time calculations I have to do.
This is where the problems with Postgres started.
Using Postgres, you can ask for a date at a particular time zone, such as:
db=> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'NZST';
timezone
----------------------------
2007-07-12 23:01:37.020998
(1 row)
We knew that would work even if it isn't what I actually want. I also played with setting the time zone in the database session:
db=> SET TIME ZONE 'NZST'; ERROR: unrecognized time zone name: "NZST"
That's a little strange! Why can I specify it as a time zone in a query but not as a default. Alright then, I'll try something else, something more akin to what I want anyway:
kiwiwriters=> SET TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland'; SET
Aha, that's more like it. It recognises exactly what I want it to be. I didn't actually want to do this since I thought it would be better in the query. Okay, let's try it in the query:
db=> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland'; ERROR: time zone "pacific/auckland" not recognized
WTF?
In the query you have to specify the time zone as an accronym (which may be wrong for 6 months of the year) and trying to set the default you can only use the location style. The other two combinations don't work which I find strange.
In which case, I still need to do something magical to get it all working. Today when I was thinking about it, it clicked that I could get around this, but before that, let me tell you the two things I need to do with these time zones.
Firstly, I need to know if a local time in a particular time zone has passed. For example, I want to know if 2007-07-12 11:59:59 has passed for me in Pacific/Auckland and also at a later stage, that same local time has passed in America/New_York. Quick test:
db=> SET TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland'; SET db=> SELECT CASE WHEN CURRENT_TIMESTAMP > '2007-07-12 23:00:00' THEN 'Passed' else 'Not' END; case -------- Passed (1 row) db=> SET TIME ZONE 'America/New_York'; SET db=> SELECT CASE WHEN CURRENT_TIMESTAMP > '2007-07-12 23:00:00' THEN 'Passed' else 'Not' END; case ------ Not (1 row)
Well, that looks good. I knew I couldn't ask for the timestamp using a location time zone so I have to set the default time zone first. So far this seems to work.
Secondly, I have to figure out when a particular time zone has just passed midnight. This way, I can do some processing just after midnight for each time zone and have it save off some data. For this, I need a big list of time zones. Luckily for me I found that the /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab file in Debian stores all the info I need and more. Wikipedia also has a list of time zones by country. I shall use the former since it is already machine readable and I need to insert all the time zones with their textual info in the database.
As it turns out, there are 394 different time zones which I bet you didn't guess (although maybe some of these are the same, just named differently). Here's a bit of analysis on each time zone.
I wrote a little script to loop through all the time zones, set it and retrieve the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. I ended up with a big list like this (alphabetical order):
2007-07-12 11:17:03.967815+00 - Africa/Abidjan 2007-07-12 11:17:03.967815+00 - Africa/Accra 2007-07-12 14:17:03.967815+03 - Africa/Addis_Ababa ... 2007-07-12 21:17:03.967815+10 - Pacific/Truk 2007-07-12 23:17:03.967815+12 - Pacific/Wake 2007-07-12 23:17:03.967815+12 - Pacific/Wallis
Not very useful but interesting nonetheless so I decided to also show them in time order instead. As it turns out, many of the almost 400 time zones are currently the same time (obviously). I was expecting a few more than just 24 since I knew some time zones were on the half hour and others were at UTC+13 or so. I was a little surprised however to see that there were currently 39 different time zones in play. So how many of each (for NZST 2007-07-12 23:23:12.967336+12):
4 - 2007-07-12 00:23:12.967336-11 5 - 2007-07-12 01:23:12.967336-10 1 - 2007-07-12 01:53:12.967336-09:30 2 - 2007-07-12 02:23:12.967336-09 5 - 2007-07-12 03:23:12.967336-08 8 - 2007-07-12 04:23:12.967336-07 18 - 2007-07-12 05:23:12.967336-06 24 - 2007-07-12 06:23:12.967336-05 48 - 2007-07-12 07:23:12.967336-04 27 - 2007-07-12 08:23:12.967336-03 1 - 2007-07-12 08:53:12.967336-02:30 4 - 2007-07-12 09:23:12.967336-02 1 - 2007-07-12 10:23:12.967336-01 20 - 2007-07-12 11:23:12.967336+00 22 - 2007-07-12 12:23:12.967336+01 46 - 2007-07-12 13:23:12.967336+02 40 - 2007-07-12 14:23:12.967336+03 1 - 2007-07-12 14:53:12.967336+03:30 9 - 2007-07-12 15:23:12.967336+04 1 - 2007-07-12 15:53:12.967336+04:30 13 - 2007-07-12 16:23:12.967336+05 2 - 2007-07-12 16:53:12.967336+05:30 1 - 2007-07-12 17:08:12.967336+05:45 9 - 2007-07-12 17:23:12.967336+06 2 - 2007-07-12 17:53:12.967336+06:30 10 - 2007-07-12 18:23:12.967336+07 18 - 2007-07-12 19:23:12.967336+08 1 - 2007-07-12 20:08:12.967336+08:45 8 - 2007-07-12 20:23:12.967336+09 3 - 2007-07-12 20:53:12.967336+09:30 13 - 2007-07-12 21:23:12.967336+10 1 - 2007-07-12 21:53:12.967336+10:30 7 - 2007-07-12 22:23:12.967336+11 1 - 2007-07-12 22:53:12.967336+11:30 12 - 2007-07-12 23:23:12.967336+12 1 - 2007-07-13 00:08:12.967336+12:45 4 - 2007-07-13 00:23:12.967336+13 1 - 2007-07-13 01:23:12.967336+14
So, as an example, there are currently 48 time zones which are UTC-4 and just one at UTC+14.
This proves that I can get the current time at each time zone so that's great. The second thing to work out is when one of those reached midnight.
At first, I was going to set up a cron job for every half hour but obviously from this data I'll need to do it every 15 minutes. Calculating when a timezone passes midnight can be done with a few neat tricks PostgreSQL provides. You can extract various aspects of the timestamp such as the hour and minute - you see where I'm going here. In the end, after setting the default timezone to the one I wanted to test, I came up with a quick test to give me a straight 0 or 1. If 1, then do my processing for that time zone, if 0, leave it be for the moment.
SELECT
CASE WHEN
EXTRACT(HOUR FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) = 0
AND
EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) >= 0
AND
EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) < 15
THEN
1
ELSE
0
END AS yes
It's a little warped (any better suggestions welcome) but I reckon it'll do the job. In fact, here's another way I just thought of:
SELECT
CASE WHEN
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP >= CURRENT_DATE::TIMESTAMP
AND
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP < CURRENT_DATE + '15 mins'::INTERVAL
THEN
1
ELSE
0
END AS yes
If I cron for 0, 15, 30 and 45 mins then I'll pretty much know immediately which time zones have just passed midnight and therefore which ones to process.
It's taken me so long to write this entry, that it's now just gone passed midnight. So, at the moment, the following time zones are considered ripe for processing (both above queries gave the same results), including Pacific/Auckland which is mine:
Antarctica/McMurdo Antarctica/South_Pole Asia/Magadan Pacific/Auckland Pacific/Fiji Pacific/Funafuti Pacific/Kwajalein Pacific/Majuro Pacific/Nauru Pacific/Tarawa Pacific/Wake Pacific/Wallis
All in all, I've been battling this for a while and now I think I've got it sussed. I haven't actually done the web page (which checks if a time has passed) or the cron (which checks each midnight) but I'm pretty sure it'll be alright now. I have done the database patch though that is by far the easiest part of the whole thing. It's been an altogether complete pain so maybe you'll find something useful in this lot if you have problems yourself.
Oh, and yes, all of this would have be really easy if I'd just stuck with using offsets from UTC (incorrectly), but yeah, you didn't expect that fudge from me did you?
Labels: postgresql, planet-geek, timezones
Inserted: 2007-07-12 23:54 (3 years ago)
I have Loads to Say, but Just Don't Feel Like It
For some reason, I've been a bit down the last few days. Not sure why.
I wonder if it's because I saw some of my family at the weekend for the last time in a while.
I know there are a few other things niggling in the back of my mind which I'm not sure what to do with. Also, I think after being really productive for basically the first half of this year, ending with a novel in June, I just need a break for a while.
Also the things I'm meant to be doing are just really hard and I can't find a solution for them yet.
Oh, you know on LiveJournal when people post blog entries, they can also put in their current mood. Well mine at the moment is tired, frustrated and not quite so happy.
Bollocks to that, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning all refreshed and just ride it out.
Inserted: 2007-07-11 21:52 (3 years ago)
Updating Proprietary File Formats the Wrong Way
The UK National Archives have chosen Microsoft to access their old proprietary data by using proprietary operating systems running proprietary emulators to run old proprietary programs.
Put your hand up if you see a problem with that approach (and put one up for me too).
Ah, the joys of silly decisions. Let's look at it from the top.
Natalie Ceeney (chief executive of the UK National Archives) says that they shall only be 'accessing' the data and not actually converting it. That basically means they will become locked into an eternal license-hell-money-eater with MS. Until they convert to something more sane (ie. open), they'll never get out of it. The archives obviously plan on rehashing this whole problem again in 5 years time, at which point they'll find they are in a worse position than they are now, it'll cost 100 times more and they'll end up choosing what should be the right decision now! Shame.
For the benift of the doubt, let's assume that they do convert their old documents to the newer MS Office Open XML right now. Unfortunately, that road still locks them into MS products. No other software vendor in their right mind will ever implement (the supposedly open) Office Open XML format since the standardisation process has been a complete failure at every turn. An unimplemented standard of 6,000 pages just isn't the best way to go.
Why do people never learn? The archives got into this mess in the first place because of MS (along with other companies) and now they'll just get deeper and deeper into this mess. It's just one bad decision after another.
I just hope that when the UK National Archives have to make this decision for a second time in 5 years or so, someone at the top will have a little more sense than to go proprietary again and finally convert to ODF, plain text or a simple markup language. Basically, something they should be doing right now.
If I was a UK tax payer I'd be pretty annoyed annoyed at the moment. It's going to cost a small fortune now and once again in the future. I just hope that the NZ government doesn't make stupid decisions like that on the data we all own.
Labels: no-ooxml, planet-geek, odf
Inserted: 2007-07-05 19:56 (3 years ago)
SHDH this Weekend and I Can't Go :-(
SuperHappyDevHouse originated as a monthly hackathon in San Francisco and thanks to a few people here in Wellington, it is now starting over here too!
There's been quite an overwhelming response to go to it I hear. Both Penny and Brenda are 2 of the 4 organisers and you know what, it sounds like it's going to be oarsum (with a capital OAR).
So, I was one of the privileged few that scored an invite for the first event (yay me) but I can't go (which sucks big time).
Then again, I can't be too sad since I'm seeing family for the weekend and it might be the last time I see them for a year or two and even then it'll be sparse.
Still wish I could go though. Some expletives were said when I realised it was the same weekend. And I saw a preview of the T-Shirts today, which are also oarsum.
So sorry Penny and Brenda - will definitely get to the next one.
Labels: planet-geek, planet-catalyst, shdh
Inserted: 2007-07-04 20:53 (3 years ago)