On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 04:06:37PM -0600, Brandon Wiley wrote: > Perhaps he does not understand the way that links should be generated. If > he understands then I can't see why he wouldn't be generating the links. > It's really easy. The key index insertion/retrieval tool I wrote had flags > to insert/request yesterday or tomorrow as well as today, so it's > certainly possible.
Well, perhaps we will find out why not, perhaps he is not a programmer and required more functionality than was provided by the tools available, or perhaps the way he creates his freesite is not condusive to use of such tools. > > Give me just one example of where it would be significantly more > > difficult to "compute" with the old style versus the new style... > > Today is January 1st, 2003. You want yesterday's entry. With the new > format, no matter what day of what month of what year it is, you subtract > 86400 from today's entry and you get yesterday's entry. Firstly, you must subtract 86400 IN HEX which is a more difficult proposition for someone doing this manually. Secondly, with respect to having to know days that cross month boundaries, you are just shifting the problem. If people naturally though about days in terms of how many seconds it has been since the epoch, then yes this would be easier, but they don't. Given that I know that today's date might be the 30st of November 2001, your mechanism requires me to translate that to seconds since the epoch (thus knowing all about how many days are in each month, all about leap-years etc), which is just as much, if not significantly more of a pain in the ass than figuring out how many days there are in November. Freesite authors are TELLING us that they prefer the latter. > > Yes, but with the old mechanism a human could do it in their head which > > is even better. > > Most people will need to look at a calendar whenever calculating days that > cross month boundaries. Few people know off the top of their head how many > days are in April and ever fewer know how many days are in February this > particular year. No, but most people do know yesterday's date, and tomorrow's date. Again, you are trying to persuade me that freesite authors shouldn't be bothered by the new scheme, yet we know that they are. Subtracting numbers in hex might be second nature to you, but it clearly isn't to CofE. > > What about 2 days ago, 5 days ago etc... > > 2*86400, 5*86400. So for that you could have a tag like <-5DAYS> or > <+5DAYS> or whatever. Oh great, so now we need to define a whole language to get back to the functionality that we had to begin with. > > How many complaints did we receive from freesite authors about the old > > mechanism? How many did we receive about the new mechanism? I rest my > > case. > > I think they probably need to have the format explained to them and > perhaps whatever tools the use should be extended to do what they want > them to do with less hassle. I know that the new DBR thing was explained to CofE, who is clearly not stupid, and he still decided it was too much trouble. Tools might solve the problem, but it would be better if we didn't need them in the first place as was clearly the case with 0.3. Ian. -- Ian Clarke ian at freenetproject.org Founder & Coordinator, The Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/ Chief Technology Officer, Uprizer Inc. http://www.uprizer.com/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20011127/016b2532/attachment.pgp>
