numbers page 2 - Dave's Blog

Kirkland Uncorked Weekend

2008 Jul 21, 10:36

Saturday we went to Kirkland Uncorked, a wine tasting festival near our home. We took the bus and after finding the correct one (they really should have different numbers for buses that are on the same route but traveling in different directions) made it to the festival. Unfortunately I don't remember any of the names of the wines just which ones I enjoyed by order. Recalling that I enjoyed the first one I had and the second to last one, doesn't really help me find them again. There were local artists who had setup booths and Sarah got a lovely necklace. After that we ate at Cactus which, because it was such a lovely day, had all its windows and doors open.

Sunday was quieter. A few household chores and plenty of GTA4. I almost got the One Man Army achievement but I found that after four minutes with six stars I eventually dropped back down to three stars without realizing it.

wine weekend nontechnical

Date Time Formats

2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:

"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)

Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values. Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.

It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one 2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00

• W3C Recommended Date and Time Format
• IETF: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps
• XML Schema dateTime

On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.

date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss

Office with a View

2007 Jul 14, 3:12I've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.

Of course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.

Additionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of Diversity Inc. for his amazing philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork up to the viewer.microsoft personal office nontechnical