ExTechOp
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Posts posted by ExTechOp
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As I previously asked someone else, can you name a place where YYYY-DD-MM is commonly used in all-numbers dates, as neither I nor Wikipedia has heard of such? USA commonly uses the "middle-endian" format of MM-DD-YY.Yes, but my suggestion is that the site would show the date format based on your profile details (once you're logged in). Generally, it would be YYYY-MM-DD, but for some users YYYY-DD-MM would be displayed, simply because it would be too impractical to enforce the standardisation on North America...
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Would you care to name a place (on this planet, please) where Y-D-M is commonly used in all-numbers dates, as neither I nor Wikipedia has heard of such?
Only in those areas where the Y-M-D convention is used. There are areas where the convention is Y-D-M, in which case the example you give translates to 7th January, 2007. I agree that Y-M-D makes a lot more sense, but it is not universal.Thus, the ISO 8601 date for today (Finland is UT+3) is 2007-07-01 which doesn't really leave much room for confusion anywhere in the world.
Being a part-time website designer, I can see there is the not-so-small problem of having the month code change from 1 to 4 characters in length, and the fact that in many fonts all digits are the same width (making tables line up nicely), but I, V and X are different.Using Roman Numerals for the month removes much (not all) of any possible confusion.BTW, I've seen roman numerals being used in gravestones from the 1700's and 1800's, pretty much the way you propose, though often in a very obscure way like 18-27/X-08 (which would mean 27th of October 1808).
My original suggestion was only for the places on the website where all-numbers dates are used for brevity, like when listing several caches that match a given criteria on one page. Places where the date can be written out "in full" are of course a whole different kettle of fish. I18N is a horrible mess, you don't want to go there.BTW, Canadians (in my experience) are as likely to use D-M-Y (e.g. 7th June, 2008) as what we Americans generally use. I still find this to be the most logical system, but I certainly had no problem with adjusting to the local standard when we visited Italy and Switzerland in 2005. "When in Rome..." and all that
Why do I suddenly feel like I'm reading the "Freedom2Measure" website?Also, while the ISO 8601 standard is logical in its structure, it is not a practical structure for day-to-day living. ISO standards make much sense in a business, scientific, military and even a political context, when one is documenting current activities for future use and analysis, but in those of how people operate their daily lives, it is cumbersome and awkward. How many people don't know what year they are living in? Very few. How many won't know the month? More, certainly, but I would still think that the percentage is quite small. The date? Rather more; we all screw up when writing a check, or doing something else that requires the current date, at some point in our lives. Still, that number is going to be fairly small at any particular time. The exact time, however, is very tough for most people to get right without a clock. Putting the time at the end of a date-stamp makes sense in some applications, but if someone asks me what time it is, I am not going to tell them, "2007, June 30th, 3:44 pm PDT (+9)" No, ISO 8601 is not really appropriate here; it is overly-qualified. Let's pick either Y-M-D or D-M-Y, and leave it at that. Having figured that out, the only thing to determine is how we denote the month. I would opt for using something that amplifies (or at least more-strongly delineates) the information needed, but that's just meIF you had actually read the ISO 8601 link that I've now twice provided, you would have found that the standard is fine with giving YYYY-DD-MM as a date stamp in places where no time information is required.
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The whole geocaching site is kinda wonky at the moment, maybe that's it.Obviously, ExTechOp, I either can't type straight, otr else I can't process simple instructions. I did your hack and got an error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. I must be doing something wrong. Or maybe it isn't me, after all. I tried to log out and log back in, to start over fresh, and now I'm getting a general network error. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice -
I'm so glad you looked up the ISO 8601 link I put in my post; "ISO 8601 prescribes a four-digit year to avoid the year 2000 problem."Someone mentioned ISO 8601. The problem with it is that it is all number-based, with only two places for letters, and they don't help for dates. When you get a date such as June 7th, is it 06-07, or 07-06? If you aren't really familiar with the thing, it gets dicey. Also, some places put the month first, others put the date.Thus, the ISO 8601 date for today (Finland is UT+3) is 2007-07-01 which doesn't really leave much room for confusion anywhere in the world.
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I assume this means you've never heard of GLONASS or EGNOS nor seen a receiver that can use multiple systems?Just remember geocaching.com is free (unless you pay for a few extra features) AND I propose the US military make all other countries pay for use of the GPS system that us American tax payers pay for that the rest of the world uses for free or at least scramble it for everyone else unless they pay for a code for the GPSr.I would also like to point out that one of the reasons the Galileo system is so delayed is that the US Government officially stated in 2002 that they still wanted to have selective availability if need be.
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A quick hack (cribbed from the TB Forum): open the travel item home page, and edit the URL, replacing details with edit and you'll get the edit page.Oops. It happened again. -
For example, the month names in Finnish have nothing to do with the romance language -originated versions: tammikuu, helmikuu, maaliskuu, huhtikuu, toukokuu, kesäkuu, heinäkuu, elokuu, syyskuu, lokakuu, marraskuu and joulukuu. And, generally speaking, three-letter abbreviations for month names are not used and look extremely odd when forced on us by too-rigid computer systems.
Well, clear to all who read English. If "7th-Feb-2007" became the standard, wouldn't that also become an issue for non English speakers? I know the months in German, and they are close enough to English that it should not be a problem. But I have no clue how close any other language is.Several have suggested a more text based format that would be clear to all - like: 7th-Feb-2007I would prefer to see the ISO 8601 format in use, it is at least fairly well understandable to everyone on the planet. Of course the best alternative would be for the date format to be selectable per user, just like the distance units are.
I believe one of the reasons for the existence of Geocaching.ru is that at the time, the Russians found Geocaching.com to be lacking in support for non-latin character sets and non-american notations (like the distance, maybe also the date format). I know these things had a part in the birth of Geocaching.fi, which has a cache owner-maintained "backup" of Finnish cache listings from Geocaching.com. Developments like this of course in the end can mean this hobby ends up being split up into numerous non-connected national niches, which is not good for anyone.
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I've recently noticed some confusing sorting methods used by the site when looking at my summary pages. The "All logs" will sort chronologically by day and reverse chronologically by cache. It makes it hard for the user (me) to find landmark caches (and frankly, just doesn't make a ton of sense). [...]
Did I confuse everyone or does this make sense?
What I find makes it even more confusing is that all traveller events (travel bug and geocoin picks, drops and discoveries) get added to the start of the daily listing in forward chronological order, just opposite to the way cache finds are listed.
I suspect this is the way it was originally hacked together, and "everyone" is so used to it the geocaching.com crew does not feel comfortable changing it. I wouldn't complain, pretty please?
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Currently, the only choice for the date format on the website is mm/dd/yyyy (which is sometimes called "middle-endian"). This is a format commonly used in the United States, Canada, Palau, Philippines and Micronesia. The rest of the world mostly uses either dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd (see Wikipedia for more on the subject).
Currently it is possible to select per-user the measurement units (metric/imperial) shown on the website, would it be possible to have the date format be a similar selectable feature in "account details"?
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Kaksi kysymystä:Vaajakoski on sitten vedetty takaisin tarkastusjonoon odottamaan kätkön siirtoa paikkaan missä kätköilijät eivät liikenteen seassa pomppiessaan ole aiheuttamassa vaaraa liikenteelle. Ei lisää saman tyyppisiä 0 km kätköjä, kiitos.1) Mielestäni on melkoista hölmöilyä laittaa kätkö jossa on jo paljon findeja takaisin hyväksyntäjonoon, eikö ole mitään mahdollisuutta pakottaa kätköä vaikka disabloiduksi?
2) Onko jatkossa tarkoitus, että minkäänlaisissa vaarallisissa paikoissa olevia kätköjä ei enää hyväksytä -- tähän saakka virallisina pitämissäni guidelineissä poikkeuksia on tehty vain rautateiden lähellä olevien kätköjen suhteen? Mikäli kyseessä on uusi virallinen hyväksyntälinja, voisiko asian todellakin saada ohjeistukseen ettei tarvitse mennä tällaiseen pelleilyyn? Mikäli kyseessä on Captain Morganin oma idea, voisiko tämänkin saada selvästi sanottua?
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When I was reporting a cache as needing maintenance, I mistakenly initially entered a second "found" log. When I corrected this by changing the log type, the attribute "needs maintenance" did not get set for the cache, nor did I get the warning one usually gets about logging "needs maintenance". The log did get save normally, though.
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Good for "them" if they did, there are very few things I find as annoying as having a sound file endlessly squeaking away while I'm reading a web page. Only animated images come close...I think they did away with the ability to add sound to the pages quite some time ago but I could be wrong. -
In spite of having selected kilometers as my distance unit, travelbug travel history is still shown in miles. Would it be possible to fix this to be the same unit as is used everywhere else?
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We will probably be visiting New England some time in the autumn, and I'm looking for good digital topo maps of the region. As the trip will be at most a couple of weeks, I would prefer not to buy software which will probably be obsolete by the next time we visit.
Here in Finland, the cheapest (free!) way to get high-quality digital topo maps for use in a PDA or such equipment is to access the National Land Survey website "Citizen's MapSite" using a piece of python software called fetch_map which extracts the map squares, removes the watermarks, and combines the small image squares into a larger calibrated map which can then be loaded into your equipment with OziExplorer or similar software.
Is there a similar piece of software to extract info from the USGS TopoZone or other similar online maps?
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Kuinka yhteensopiva tällaisen eventin järjestäminen on kapineen goalin kanssa?Icon Ho tulee alkukesästä Suomeen. Järjestän eventin sen kunniaksi - eli käytännössä sen ja sen sisältämien kolikoiden loggaamiseksi. Eventtipaikka tulee jonnekkin hyvien kulkuyhteyksien varrelle Tampereen - Helsingin välille. Sen jälkeen Icon Ho jatkaa matkaansa eteenpäin ja poistunee Suomesta.I am not fond of large events, so please keep my visits to small groups. -
Since there is a ready almost-working feature on the website, why not use it?This seems overly complicated. Why not just post something like "I found it 45' NE from GZ".If it seems really off, you should contact the owner by email about it.
In this case, we were clambering on a terrain 4 cliffside through which a 6-lane highway is cut about 20 meters down. The calculated point of the mystery seems to erroneously point down between the lanes, and I want to make sure that the people looking for it start on the correct side of the highway. Otherwise they'll have to climb down and walk quite a way to get around to the other side! Also, the cliffside is riddled with nooks and crannies, and then there's the undergrowth on the hillside, so looking for a "small" cache is pretty bad, specially given the terrain rating.
If the cache owner had updated the point appropriately based on earlier logs, there would be no reason to post this info, but it seems he's not terribly active these days -- so I'm mostly trying to help other cachers with my log.
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When you log a find for mystery where the end point seems to be a bit off, you of course can't include the correct end point with your log. Until now, I've assumed you could log a small "delta" (difference) value as the location. Turns out this mostly works, but now I ended up logging a cache where the difference was N0°0.003' and E0°0.017' (around 25 meters off in these corners of the woods). On the website this was displayed as:
Being a programmer I can sorta figure out where this comes from, but of course 0°0.003' is not 3E-05° since we are talking base-60 stuff here. A fix for the website so that it is able to display the difference as it was entered would be fine.N 3E-05° 00.000 E 000° 00.017 -
Try out Decimal Primes -- it depends on your background if it's extremely hard or trivial for you.
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Just did six caches the other day, doubling my total! I can't imagine some of these people that do a dozen or more in one day, trying to keep notes in the field, and decipher them when they get home!
So, how do YOU do it? Just a good memory, or a notebook? Anyone else use a voice recorder?
We either log them as we find them using my Nokia 7710, or then just jot down small notes on the cache printouts we normally use.
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When you log a find for mystery where the end point seems to be a bit off, you of course can't include the correct end point with your log. Until now, I've assumed you could log a small "delta" (difference) value as the location. Turns out this mostly works, but now I ended up logging a cache where the difference was N0°0.003' and E0°0.017' (around 25 meters off in these corners of the woods). On the website this was displayed as:
N 3E-05° 00.000 E 000° 00.017Being a programmer I can sorta figure out where this comes from, but of course 0°0.003' is not 3E-05° since we are talking base-60 stuff here. Just being able to display the difference as it was entered would be fine.
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I agree with ExTechOp - it would be nice to have the date format as a user adjustable parameter, or to have a default format which could not be misunderstood, like 05-Apr-2003 - hardly misreadable as 04-May-2003
Using the ISO 8601 standard convention of yyyy-mm-dd would have an advantage of not having to remember english month names -- many languages use quite similar (latin-derived) names, but for example finnish does not.
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I'm sure this has been requested several times before, but here it is again: make the date format an user-adjustable parameter like the local timezone and the miles/kilometers setting are. Living in Finland, we normally use day-month-year, and in other parts of the globe year-month-day is also very popular. The US system of using month-day-year can be very confusing for people from other parts of the world unless one stops to think about it.
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Mihinkäs Spåralogi kätkön kuittaus katosi listalta?
Deletoin sen pois hölmöilynä, ei tuo "Juu" ole missään tapauksessa riittävä log entry.
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Tuo 'viime yönä Otaniemessä' lienee käypä esimerkki siitä että kätkön piilottajalla ei ole lupaa purkin sijoittamiselle ja sitten sitä vielä käytetään vaikkapa vain tupakan välittämiseen. (Olen itse piipunpolttaja enkä varmasti tuosta pahastu, mutta tiedän että maailma on näiltäkin osin viime vuosina muuttunut vainoharhaiseksi, mielestäni.)
Kun geocaching.com ohjeet selkeästi sanovat ettei laiteta alkoholia, tupakkatuotteita, asetarpeita tai lääkkeitä/huumeita kätköihin, onko asiassa yhtään sen enempää miettimistä? Uhmaikä on useimmilla aikuisilla ihmisillä ohi ja he pystyvät noudattamaan tällaisia yksinkertaisia sääntöjä
Drop log edit: system requires a comment be added
in Website
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I mistakenly logged a travel bug drop on a wrong date, and found that to be able to change the log date, the system also requires that you have to add a comment. That's a bit silly, as you can't create a drop log with comments in the first place!