Time

Look, an actual website which uses Swatch Internet time! If you haven't heard of Swatch Internet Time, it was Swatch's bizarre marketing ploy from 1998 to unify time on the Internet by promoting a time system which was baffling to everyone the world over equally. With an @-sign so that everyone know's it's all Internet-y.  A sensible approach to i18n for time is included in the HTML5/Web Apps 1.0 draft. I'll talk more about this spec soon.

In other news,  my desktop box has a dmesg entry stating that it inserted a leap second last night. Leap seconds are the extra seconds that get wedged in on the occasional 30th of June or 31st of December to correct UTC for the gravitational deceleration of the Earth. However, there was no leap second scheduled for last night. I have investigated a little bit but not deduced the cause. Apparently leap seconds are configured by ntpd using the kernel linux/timex.h API. NTP servers pass out announcements about leap seconds. Either my kernel or ntpd has its knickers in a twist or a low-stratum NTP server I've trusted has erroneously issued a leap second. Obviously this is pretty much immaterial but for some reason it really frustrates me.