• Mood: cranky
• Music: Anna Nalick - Breathe (2 AM), Yahoo! Music Exclusive

LiveJournal timestamps, recent comment logs, and namby-pamby aesthetics

6 hours ago banazir: Signed up for Nanowrimo 2005 (link)
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5 days ago scottharmon: Network Issues (link)
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1 week ago jereeza: Methinks I'm running a theme here... (link)

OK, somebody tell me why they have to do this instead of giving a nice absolute GMT yyyy:mm:dd:hh:mm:ss date or a relative dddd:hhhh:mm date. Don't tell me that just because this thing goes back to "months" and "years" ago that dddd isn't enough: LJ's max future date is 2037, so that won't wash.

Sometimes namby-pamby aesthetics irritate me.

Context: tmehlinger is upgrading Fingolfin's RAID to a 400Gb mirrored setup by my request, and we ran into a bit of a snafu with partitioning and copying of /home (the old 200Gb home drive) and /kdd/fingolfin/data/scratch (the old 160Gb scratch drive). Consequently, he had to recopy, which I asked him to do this evening. Well, leave it to me to forget what time of day it is and put backups off - he started copying and blew away my URLs file with the last six days of changes to my "LJ comments log". You see, I've been saving the line that goes:

Journal entries: 952 Comments: Posted: 8,809 - Received: 10,566


for about a year now, on the off chance that I might want to collect some user stats and analyze my own history. Well, I don't take this line at the same time (say, midnight) every day), and in fact I don't remember to take it each day. (cron is 1337, banazir is not.) Anyway, if LJ's recent comments would just work properly, I could recover this. That includes logging enough comments per day, as my friends leave more than 50 comments a day sometimes.

On a related note, can one get LJ to display absolute dates or timezone-correct dates on comments, using any method that is simple (read: LJ dummy-friendly) and consistent (read: not style-dependent or otherwise changing all the fracking time)? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to timezones, other than that they are within about 24 hours of the correct time. Is the default time zone that of the style author for each LJ or something? Do we have to do something to set our own timezones so that LJ will display dates in our own timezone with the proper differential (e.g., adjusting for Daylight Savings Time)?

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Banazir