Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Faydra said:
I have such mixed emotions!

On the one hand, YAY Brazil!!! Wish we'd do that.

On the other hand, oh crap - timezone changes in my future.
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Next year in the EU the individual member states must decide if they want to keep DST as their time or they want to go back to standard time. This change will be final. No more switching between DST and standard time.

No more DST. Yay! Except... Leaving it up to the individual states means that you might get a situation where when you travel from north to south in the EU you go through several time-zones. Denmark may decide to stay on CEST because we are in the north, Germany perhaps wants to stay on CET, France chooses CEST because France, and Spain goes with CET. You might even get time-zone enclaves. Yay.. :boggled:
 
arthwollipot said:
I worked through Y2K. I've got a deep-seated fear of years that end in 0.
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I worked through Y2K. I like money for old rope. :)


(Which isn’t to say that the worry about Y2K was misplaced, but the computer industry put in a lot of work to make sure that the problems were dealt with before the date rolled over.)
 
erlando said:
Next year in the EU the individual member states must decide if they want to keep DST as their time or they want to go back to standard time. This change will be final. No more switching between DST and standard time.

No more DST. Yay! Except... Leaving it up to the individual states means that you might get a situation where when you travel from north to south in the EU you go through several time-zones. Denmark may decide to stay on CEST because we are in the north, Germany perhaps wants to stay on CET, France chooses CEST because France, and Spain goes with CET. You might even get time-zone enclaves. Yay.. :boggled:
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Most of the state of Arizona, USA, is in the Mountain time zone (UTC -7). Some of the surrounding states also on Mountain time and some are are on Pacific time (UTC -8).

Wikipedia notes that "nlike most of the United States, Arizona does not observe daylight saving time (DST), with the exception of the Navajo Nation, which does observe DST. The Hopi Reservation, which is not part of the Navajo Nation but is geographically surrounded within it, does not observe DST."

This means that in the summer, if one drives from Holbrook, AZ to Tuba City AZ, one can change time zones six or seven times in 150 miles. It is disconcerting to go to a store or restaurant only to find out that it closed an hour ago, or that it won't open for another hour.
 
zooterkin said:
(Which isn’t to say that the worry about Y2K was misplaced, but the computer industry put in a lot of work to make sure that the problems were dealt with before the date rolled over.)
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Exactly. I absolutely hate it when someone says "Nothing happened, it was all a big hoax". Yea, clownface, nothing happened because a great many people worked their asses off fixing the code that would have caused problems if left untouched.
 
xterra said:
Most of the state of Arizona, USA, is in the Mountain time zone (UTC -7). Some of the surrounding states also on Mountain time and some are are on Pacific time (UTC -8).

Wikipedia notes that "nlike most of the United States, Arizona does not observe daylight saving time (DST), with the exception of the Navajo Nation, which does observe DST. The Hopi Reservation, which is not part of the Navajo Nation but is geographically surrounded within it, does not observe DST."

This means that in the summer, if one drives from Holbrook, AZ to Tuba City AZ, one can change time zones six or seven times in 150 miles. It is disconcerting to go to a store or restaurant only to find out that it closed an hour ago, or that it won't open for another hour.
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That's.... stupid. :boggled:
 
My favorite thing to do on a Tuesday morning.

Conference call with 2 vendors who are pointing fingers at each on an intermittent problem that cannot be reproduced.

<banging head on wall>
 
erlando said:
That's.... stupid. :boggled:
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What's stupid about it? Time zones are a useful tool for some things, but not everybody needs them all the time. For people passing through, it's a novelty. For the residents, it's probably no big deal. Obviously it suits the folks who live there well enough. Why make it into a "down with people" thing? Why do you need someone to be stupid, in this anecdote?
 
It is a fact of modern webservers, often overlooked, that if you request
Code: 
http://server/folder
the webserver will tell you to try
Code: 
http://server/folder/
instead.*

This is a very minor, but very important distinction, to the webserver. It's often overlooked, because modern web browsers handle it gracefully, just going to the new address and updating the address bar without bothering you about the change.

There's basically three "good" responses a webserver can make to a vanilla request from a browser:

- "It's over there, now". This is a normal redirect message, telling you that the resource is actually at a different address entirely.

- "It's over here, now". This is similar, but says that the resource is right here, but the address is slightly different. This is the trailing "/" issue I'm talking about.

- "I've got it for you right here". This is the default "OK" message, when your address matches the address of the resource, and it's there for you.

Your web browser will turn all three of these messages into the same experience for you, the user: The requested resource just loads, from the correct address.

However. Your java package build tool, gradle, will not handle these messages gracefully. If gradle asks for:
Code: 
http://server/folder
And the server replies:
Code: 
302 FOUND http://server/folder/
Then gradle will give up, and your job run will fail. This is super obnoxious, because nobody knows that the "/" actually matters, and so even technically proficient software developers don't think to check it.

The people who developed the gradle tool are jackasses, for not thinking to gracefully handle such standard server responses as "HTTP 302 FOUND".

---
*This isn't true about all webservers. It actually depends on how the site is designed, and on how the webserver is configured to handle these kinds of minor address mismatches. But it's true for a lot more webservers than you probably think.
 
erlando said:
Exactly. I absolutely hate it when someone says "Nothing happened, it was all a big hoax". Yea, clownface, nothing happened because a great many people worked their asses off fixing the code that would have caused problems if left untouched.
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Definitely me too. It's one of those things that when someone says it I have to push my glasses up my nose, nerd snort and say "well actually..."
 
theprestige said:
Then gradle will give up, and your job run will fail. This is super obnoxious, because nobody knows that the "/" actually matters, and so even technically proficient software developers don't think to check it.
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Amazon s3 storage does something similar. It's annoying because they sort of adopted unix syntax (ls,cp, etc) but have this.
Also vendor products that have their own scripting language that is almost but not quite the same syntax as perl or existing languages. Just write perl packages or something you <expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted><expletive deleted>!
 
theprestige said:
What's stupid about it? Time zones are a useful tool for some things, but not everybody needs them all the time. For people passing through, it's a novelty. For the residents, it's probably no big deal. Obviously it suits the folks who live there well enough. Why make it into a "down with people" thing? Why do you need someone to be stupid, in this anecdote?
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I don't "need" someone to be stupid. But having multiple timezones on a 150 miles long north-south journey where the time of day doesn't actually change is pretty stupid. It's also pretty stupid to have DST observed or not on an almost county level.
 
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