About timezones, I love this quote (from the core utils manual! [1]): Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. ...
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. ... —Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living. (needless to say it is very soothing to find this when you're looking on how to do something with `date`...) Luiz [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Date-input-formats.html On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 10:39 AM, Greg Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > short version: Please start using two-letter country codes like 'au' and > 'nz' for workshops' countries in workshop websites. > > long version: > > We'd like to start using two-letter codes like 'nz' for countries, rather > than hyphenated names like 'New-Zealand'. I've submitted a pull request to > the workshop-template repository to make this change [1], and another to the > repository for the main website that mirrors the change [2]. The second > pull request also patches the tool we use to harvest information from > workshop websites so that if you're using a Hyphenated-Name for the country, > we'll translate it into an ISO code. > > Note that we're also using two-letter codes for languages (the human kind) > in workshop home pages' headers. You might think they'd be the same codes, > but no: 'ar' is Argentina as a country, but Arabic as a language. And the > parser reads 'no' as Norway when it has quotes around it, but as false when > it's not quoted, because someone thought that allowing English-language > synonyms like 'yes' and 'no' for Booleans would make our lives better. And > after a bit of noodling around, I've decided that we are NOT EVER going to > try adding time zone information to workshops, because time zones and > daylight savings are clearly some sort of warped psychological experiment > thought up by alien scientists from a parallel universe that never invented > ethics review... > > Thanks, > Greg > > [1] https://github.com/swcarpentry/workshop-template/pull/226 > > [2] https://github.com/swcarpentry/site/pull/990 > > -- > Dr. Greg Wilson | [email protected] > Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
