zerosleeps

A wee notice found in the car park in our building. I’m not sure this is the most neighbourly way to solve a parking dispute…

I bought a car. I think we all knew pretty early on into this whole Australia thing that I wasn’t in a hurry to return to Scotland.

Nobody knows what the “RH” stands for on this sign.

I’m a huge fan of the ISO 8601 standard, which describes an international standard for the display and exchange of dates and times. This xkcd comic highlights one of the common problems.

But there’s a super-handy bonus reason to use YYYY-MM-DD: because the format goes from most to least significant component, the dates are easy to sort. This rule continues to hold true if you keep going with the ISO and add times. As long as the dashes, colons and spaces are all consistent, the date effectively becomes a big integer which increases with the date and time.

For example, a file titled 2013-02-28 19:56 important file would, if sorted in ascending order, correctly appear before a file created at a later time (2013-02-28 20:03 foo file) or a later date (2013-10-01 11:34 bar file).

So that’s settled - we must all stop using DD/MM/YYYY, and the even more illogical format of MM/DD/YYYY.

I made sure I moved my ute somewhere safe. I’ve got no job without my ute.

You just don’t read things like this in Scotland.