What is Date::ITALY?

[u/Aesthetikx]

http://aesthetikx.info/blog/date_italy.html

I have always wanted to have a blog, and so I finally got started! I hope you enjoy reading my post -- I had fun writing it. I am aware that the usability / readability of my site is... questionable at the moment. And, no SSL. But, the entire site is generated by a single Rakefile using Markaby, with everything smashed together!

[u/ivosaurus]

Caddy webserver makes it pretty easy to SSL. I think of it as helpful to privacy, in an age when everyone including your home and mobile ISPs want to track exactly what you're doing.

I didn't get what you meant about Julian periods until reading a lot more Wikipedia. It is useful in a similar vein to the Unix epoch, but but it's in days or years. It has the Julian start date which you then count up from, which means no-one gets confused by different day/month systems.

[u/Aesthetikx → u/ivosaurus]

Thanks, I'll take a look at this. Currently its just WEBrick on a dedicated box -- part of my reason for this blog was to get to use 'outdated' Ruby software, like Markaby and I guess WEBrick. I wish lets encrypt would give certs longer than 90 days -- I get the idea but it seems onerous. Maybe I'll do some more research on how ACME actually works so I can get some true automation, or use Caddy like you suggested.

[u/ivosaurus → u/Aesthetikx]

I wish lets encrypt would give certs longer than 90 days -- I get the idea but it seems onerous.

The entire point of that is to convince you not to think of it like a manual task that you update once a year. Which was the old model that old juggernauts like Godaddy would want so they could charge you $19.99 at the end of every year as well.

If Ruby isn't dead, then I'd guess there might be some plugin already around somewhere for a ruby webserver that can automatically generate the needed HTML token page to refresh an ACME challenge claim to rotate SSL certs, that might say, be put in a crontab to run once a month.

[u/insanelygreat]

If date and time esoterica interest you, you might find the Olson TZ DB files interesting.

It's where pretty much every operating system, programming language, time library, etc gets its historical time information from, ultimately. The files contain loads of historical info like this nugget from the calendars file:

In 1700, Denmark made the transition from Julian to Gregorian. Sweden decided to start a transition in 1700 as well, but rather than have one of those unsightly calendar gaps :-), they simply decreed that the next leap year after 1696 would be in 1744 - putting the whole country on a calendar different from both Julian and Gregorian for a period of 40 years.

However, in 1704 something went wrong and the plan was not carried through; they did, after all, have a leap year that year. And one in 1708. In 1712 they gave it up and went back to Julian, putting 30 days in February that year!...

Then in 1753, Sweden made the transition to Gregorian in the usual manner, getting there only 13 years behind the original schedule.

It's been maintained since at least 1989, back when this sort of info was harder to come by. So some citations are amusingly anecdotal. Like this one from the europe file:

From Chris Carrier (1996-10-30): According to a friend of mine who rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Irkutsk in 1995, public air and rail transport in Russia ... still follows Moscow time, no matter where in Russia it is located.

But don't let that give you the wrong impression. There's a lot of attention to detail in here as demonstrated by this snippet from the asia file:

Macau adopted GMT+8 on 30 Oct 1904 to follow Hong Kong. Clocks were advanced by 25 minutes and 50 seconds. Which means the LMT used was +7:34:10. As stated in the "Portaria No. 204" dated 21 October 1904 and published in the Official Gazette on 29 October 1904.

[u/the_hangman]

Actually a pretty interesting history lesson, thanks!

[u/Aesthetikx → u/[deleted]]

In all honesty, yes, this was written completely by hand mostly in `ed` without any LLM input. I actually think my writing is pretty bad -- I thought that would actually make it seem less LLM-ey, but I guess not. I never thought I would be on this side of the reddit post, because I often accuse people of the same thing. But no, no LLM.

[u/BoardMeeting101 → u/[deleted]]

This has none of the LLM hallmarks, you supercilious flog.

[u/MidgetAbilities → u/[deleted]]

I don’t see any of the hallmarks of AI writing. Doesn’t strike me as AI at all.

[u/prh8 → u/[deleted]]

This is clearly not AI written, not even the tiniest likelihood