Comments on: Epoch win!

By: JB

JB — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:26:41 +0000

Epoch? I was hoping for amusing at the very least. Dorky? OK you got me! I’ll see if I can cook up something more amusing. I’m guessing you are only in your twenties. I’m in my fifties…, all I have to do is dust off some of my time tested jokes.

Maybe say something in programming. I’ll make it easy, I’ll use Cobol 77. I really appreciate the nomination, however, it seems that there are more prospective candidates on your end. I’m here by myself. I need reinforcements.

I’ll keep an eye on you to see how you perform online. Oh, thanks for the compliment.

jeff

By: mike

mike — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:04:38 +0000

I have a mac, I put that into the terminal and got a syntax error, wtf is up with that?

By: BethK

BethK — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:59:27 +0000

Low tech geeks remember that March 14 is pi day with 1:59 adding more precision and then 26 seconds for even more. Aside: I just learned that my 13yo son knows pi to 30 digits.

And my 15yo daughter already knew about the 1234567890 date thing.

Where did I go right in raising them?

By: John B. Sandlin

John B. Sandlin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:57:14 +0000

I get the Unix time gag. I’m not geek enough to have run the math and remembered it. I didn’t feel too bad about that… but the Crab reference got me…

10:54 for the Crab? I had to look up the Crab.

Star Chart gave me:
NGC 1952 / M1 / The Crab Nebula – RA 05h 34m 31.97s / Dec. +22° 00′ 52.1″…

Then I looked it up in Wiki….

Oh! That’s when it went KerPow (well, the year was 1054… I don’t know what time of day…)

I feel bad for not getting that without looking it up.

jbs

By: TheBlackCat

TheBlackCat — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:27:02 +0000

@ Kid: Bah, geeks don’t car about odd numbers. Odd an even are simply a result of our arbitrary obsession with the number 2. If we had trilateral symmetry it would probably be looking for numbers that are divisible by 3. Real geeks are waiting until 2/2/2011, the next all-prime date.

By: Kid Cool

Kid Cool — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:22:19 +0000

I surprised at all the geeks here not mentioning 11/19/1999 being the last all odd number date until 11/11/3111. Maybe 01/01/3111, but do the 0′s count?

How about 02/02/2000 the first all even number date since 8/28/888

By: ProofByInduction

ProofByInduction — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:05:43 +0000

“If you thought you could outdork me, give up now.”

Phil, most of the above entries leave you in the dust as to dorkiness….:-)

By: cardoso

cardoso — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:23:17 +0000

Don’t forget the 17:01, Trek Hour.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:02:48 +0000

@Mike:

I don’t know why you say my system isn’t POSIX compliant (I haven’t checked the latest POSIX spec or proposals).

@Caleb:

64 bit could be the problem; I tried using GNU ‘date’ as blf suggested and I still get the naively expected time rather than the time warp. I’ve got a ‘pure’ 64-bit system on an AMD Opteron. So is it my kernel, the GNU libraries, or both. Now I don’t even know if it’s just Perl or something else in my system. Oh well, it’s not something I need to worry about at the moment.

By: James McCann

James McCann — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:34:53 +0000

Replacing the characters you typed with different characters – with features like that who needs bugs?

gawk — ‘BEGIN { print strftime(“%c”, ARGV[1]) }’ 1234567890

gives the inverse of date +%s

By: Perl Guy

Perl Guy — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:28:17 +0000

It should read:

perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890) . “\n”;’

Replace the , with a . and change the open/close single quotes with apostrophes.

And DAMN Phil, you should have left it in on thursday. I missed it on Friday.

By: blf

blf — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:40:55 +0000

Using GNU date(1), date –date=@1234567890 will also print the time; add –utc if you want it in UTC; or export an appropriate TZ. No reason to use perl(1) at all.

For those of you arguing about 32-bitness, whether or not time_t is unsigned, etc., the Rationale in the original (IEEE) POSIX.1-1988 standard contained a fairly lengthy discussion of the entire subject.

By: freespace

freespace — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:06:31 +0000

Ah, good pick up. I think my poor 32bit processor overflowed… the 11 digit pi I used is ~31x larger than the largest unsigned 32bit int can hold…

So some one on a 64bit system can try it and let us know

By: John Weiss

John Weiss — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:59:27 +0000

Freespace? Shouldn’t pi-time be in like 60 years? It’s taken nearly 30 to get to 1.2×10^10 seconds, shouldn’t it take nearly twice that to cover another 2×10^10?

(Also, you have 11 digits, there. That’ll be… 1000 years?)

By: freespace

freespace — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:26:11 +0000

date -u will output in UTC time too.

By: freespace

freespace — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:20:34 +0000

Extra dorky, pi time:

date -r 31415926535
Thu 25 Oct 2012 19:57:43 EST

By: C. ALan Zoppa

C. ALan Zoppa — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:34:40 +0000

Phil, FYI—

date +%s

will do the trick

By: The Chemist

The Chemist — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:32:07 +0000

Must make it to my Linux box before midnight.

By: Harold

Harold — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:57:05 +0000

Oh. Just sounded it out. Never mind.

By: Harold

Harold — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:56:27 +0000

OK, now I’m confused about the “comb jelly time” comment.

By: Timothy from Boulder

Timothy from Boulder — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:37:51 +0000

The Google logo this afternoon commemorates nerddom.

By: lagomorph

lagomorph — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:35:54 +0000

No worries. I guess it comes down to the definition of UNIX. I'm fairly minimalist. To me, OpenBSD simply shares my goals. They adhere to standards when they make sense. They put files where they belong. They care about quality and correctness and tight code. I associate this with true, traditional UNIX. OS-X is not typically used in any way that would feel like UNIX in a traditional sense. When you probe under the hood, in my opinion, the part that is UNIX-like is a mess. It's UNIX with a whole bunch of stuff grafted on and that "stuff" is pretty much what most users are going to interact with. It can look pretty slick on the outside though.

By: Caleb

Caleb — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:31:55 +0000

There it goes!

http://coolepochcountdown.com/

By: Cusp

Cusp — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:19:37 +0000

>> If you have a Mac or Unix machine

Modern macs are unix (for small values of unix)

By: John Weiss

John Weiss — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:16:24 +0000

Er, and to be clear: that post wasn’t mean to be snarky. Re-reading it, I worry that it might sound that way. Frankly, I’m not really concerned about this issue. I’m just a Stickler for Accuracy. (Also, I sit on the Axiom Appeals Board.)