Monday, August 11, 2003
When am I?
Programming for time is an ugly process. You always start out wanting to do something so simple, and as you peel back the layers of complication, you come to realize that the thing you wanted to do really isn't simple at all. I used to believe that the folks at Sun had messed up the time implementation in Java after Java2, but I've come to believe, after many frustrations, that they just created a framework where time-based programming can express its own special ugliness more succinctly.
For a bunch of stupid, ugly reasons, I ended up putting some data in the database a while ago hoping to use the "epoch" date to indicate a sort of baseline. Of course, the epoch is understood as having occurred in Greenwich. Date objects that I don't take a lot of care to build correctly are naturally understood to be hours ahead of GMT here in good old Eastern Standard Time (or is it Eastern Daylight Time? I can never remember). Five hours ahead right now, in August. Six hours ahead when it actually happened, in January (Or is it Four? When exactly are we "saving daylight" again? Is it the other way around? I can never rememember). Of course some of that is moot in Arizona, which deserves credit for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time, and simultaneously deserves a boot to the head for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time.
My personal opinion is that if a single world government were ever established, it would have no choice but to be be tyranny on an almost unimaginable scale. One that would make the old Soviet Union look like elementary school detention in comparison. And yet if it would establish a single, universal, and understandable standard for time in my code, maybe it would be worth it. Or so I come to believe after a day of messing around with this crap.
For a bunch of stupid, ugly reasons, I ended up putting some data in the database a while ago hoping to use the "epoch" date to indicate a sort of baseline. Of course, the epoch is understood as having occurred in Greenwich. Date objects that I don't take a lot of care to build correctly are naturally understood to be hours ahead of GMT here in good old Eastern Standard Time (or is it Eastern Daylight Time? I can never remember). Five hours ahead right now, in August. Six hours ahead when it actually happened, in January (Or is it Four? When exactly are we "saving daylight" again? Is it the other way around? I can never rememember). Of course some of that is moot in Arizona, which deserves credit for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time, and simultaneously deserves a boot to the head for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time.
My personal opinion is that if a single world government were ever established, it would have no choice but to be be tyranny on an almost unimaginable scale. One that would make the old Soviet Union look like elementary school detention in comparison. And yet if it would establish a single, universal, and understandable standard for time in my code, maybe it would be worth it. Or so I come to believe after a day of messing around with this crap.
