Happy 1234567890!

UNIX timestamp clicks over to 1234567890 this afternoon. Will the world end?

The UNIX timestamp clicks over to 1234567890 today, that's 1,234,567,890 seconds since the 1st Jan, 1970. Check out this site celebrating 1234567890. Now there's a site without much longevity...

I remember when the timestamp clicked over from 999,999,999 to 1,000,000,000. I wasn't watching and refreshing at the time or anything, what an amazingly geeky mileometer moment that would have been, but I was suddenly aware that some things I wrote broke. It had more of an effect than the so called millenium bug ever did, because I was comparing two time stamps as if they were strings. 1,000,000,000 is obviously > 999,999,999, but "1000000000" is < "999999999". It must have been something in popex, or in the forum software I'm still using for this blog, I still store the time and date of posts here in this timestamp format instead of in a proper database format.

Thanks to Peter and Dan and Simon for alerting me to this earlier this week, or should I say @dan_jenkins and @hpoom and Peter, now I am all a-twitter again. Peter are you on twitter or what?

Feel like I should be eating some serious humble pie, as I have been slagging off twitter as being pointless rubbish for the last two years, but now so many people I know are using it it seems quite cool. I'm still not quite at the stage of "@pauly is having a cup of tea" "@pauly is going to the toilet" "@pauly is back from the toilet" yet, but I am writing some applications to do some fun things using it's interface. Yes soon you'll be able to use your mobile phone to turn my music down!

pauly :: 2009 :: Comment / reply