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::: My Opinions
Unusually, I'm willing to share some thoughts normally kept private
Palestine and Israel
Palestine should be given some land.
Israel should enforce security in its land. They are justified in attacking Hammas.
Terrorism is the lowest and most cowardly way of "fighting" a battle.
Both Jews and Arabs should not have to live in fear of this.
However, since the Palestinian government has been unable
to bring its own people under control, Israel is justified in seeking to eliminate the threat from Hammas.
Your views? My guestbook.
12 06 2003 [that's TWELFTH JUNE, you damn Yankees!]
Israel should enforce security in its land. They are justified in attacking Hammas.
Terrorism is the lowest and most cowardly way of "fighting" a battle.
Both Jews and Arabs should not have to live in fear of this.
However, since the Palestinian government has been unable
to bring its own people under control, Israel is justified in seeking to eliminate the threat from Hammas.
Your views? My guestbook.
12 06 2003 [that's TWELFTH JUNE, you damn Yankees!]
American/Rest-Of-World Date Formats
As a programmer, dates are a real bitch. Since all the good tools are from the US,
one has to adopt their stupid standards.
My high horse tonight is about the date format: the way the US put the day and the month the wrong way around.
What? The wrong way around? No, I hear you cry, it's you darn Limeys who have it wrong! Really? Let me explain...
When you write the time, you start with the most significant part first, then the second most significant part next, then lastly the least significant part: i.e., hours then minutes then seconds 10:27:59.
Similarly, when we write an numeric value using the decimal system, we put the digits in order of significance - "123" is one hundred, two tens, and three units. Most-to-least again.
For a further example, in our address we write our house number, then our street name, then our
town, country, and finally country. Here we write the most significant part last, but you can still see that the
elements of the address change in their significance (here low to high) in the same way.
Now, why then do Americans insist on writing their dates in a way that has the elements NOT IN ORDER OF SIGNIFICANCE? They write month, then day, then year! The twelfth of June is 6 12 2003.
MADNESS!
To my mind, that is equivalent of writing the time as 27:10:59 when we mean 27 minutes and 59 seconds past 10 o'clock.
Or like writing numbers with the tens after the units, like "132" meaning "one hundred and twenty three".
This may seem like just another rant (which it is), but my point is that so many programs have to be written in a special way to ensure there is no ambiguity.
Example: My machine is set up for "dd mm yy" as my short date format. If I install MS SQL 2000 and then write a program that inserts VB's Now() function into a DateTime field in the database, it can FAIL saying that I've given a funny date. I then have to change my program to insert Format(Now(), "dd mmm yy") or Format(Now(), "mm dd yy")
I even saw a colleague of mine tearing his hair out trying to get a C#.NET program to work... he had to change his user's Language settings on the SQL server to "British English" before it would work!!!
So in conclusion, come on America, greatest nation since the fall of the British Empire yada yada yada, get with the rest of the World and write your dates correctly!
12 06 2003
My high horse tonight is about the date format: the way the US put the day and the month the wrong way around.
What? The wrong way around? No, I hear you cry, it's you darn Limeys who have it wrong! Really? Let me explain...
When you write the time, you start with the most significant part first, then the second most significant part next, then lastly the least significant part: i.e., hours then minutes then seconds 10:27:59.
Similarly, when we write an numeric value using the decimal system, we put the digits in order of significance - "123" is one hundred, two tens, and three units. Most-to-least again.
For a further example, in our address we write our house number, then our street name, then our
town, country, and finally country. Here we write the most significant part last, but you can still see that the
elements of the address change in their significance (here low to high) in the same way.
Now, why then do Americans insist on writing their dates in a way that has the elements NOT IN ORDER OF SIGNIFICANCE? They write month, then day, then year! The twelfth of June is 6 12 2003.
MADNESS!
To my mind, that is equivalent of writing the time as 27:10:59 when we mean 27 minutes and 59 seconds past 10 o'clock.
Or like writing numbers with the tens after the units, like "132" meaning "one hundred and twenty three".
This may seem like just another rant (which it is), but my point is that so many programs have to be written in a special way to ensure there is no ambiguity.
Example: My machine is set up for "dd mm yy" as my short date format. If I install MS SQL 2000 and then write a program that inserts VB's Now() function into a DateTime field in the database, it can FAIL saying that I've given a funny date. I then have to change my program to insert Format(Now(), "dd mmm yy") or Format(Now(), "mm dd yy")
I even saw a colleague of mine tearing his hair out trying to get a C#.NET program to work... he had to change his user's Language settings on the SQL server to "British English" before it would work!!!
So in conclusion, come on America, greatest nation since the fall of the British Empire yada yada yada, get with the rest of the World and write your dates correctly!
12 06 2003
© Daniel Clarke 2003 |
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