Network Time Protocol

Technology
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NTP, draft v0.0.1:

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5 days until Daylight Saving. I was worried we weren’t going to make it this year.

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Being new to New York City, the fact that this happening this weekend feels wrong because it’s very obviously still winter here. I’m used to it being much more spring-like by the time we spring ahead.

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The seasons have moved ahead from where they used to be. Every season starts and ends a month or two later than it used to.

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So Boeing messed up their clocks on the Starliner, I wonder what kind of garbage software they wrote? @SkeleRym should get on it :slight_smile:

"…the capsule needed to figure out what time it was. … the way this is done is by “reaching down into” the rocket and pulling timing data out. However, during this process, the spacecraft grabbed the wrong coefficient. “We started the clock at the wrong time,” Chilton said. “The spacecraft thought she was later in the mission and started to behave that way. … (The clock was off by 11 hours.)”

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This doesn’t surprise me at all. Boeing hires garbage programmers, so you’re bound to get garbage software. I don’t know what that says about me because I got hired there out of college, but at least I recognized it for how bad it was and got out as soon as I could.

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We’ve talked about this many times. Places that hire experts in any field tend to either have all amazing talent or all low talent. If a place with low talent people is lucky enough to hire a good person, they’ll soon quit for greener pastures. If a place with good people accidentally hires a low skill, they’ll soon fire them. It’s rare to find a well mixed place. Sometimes if a company is so big you can have bad teams and good teams, but I have rarely seen a mix on the same team.

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time.gov has been updated.

There’s a lot more info now, which is cool, but you really have to look to find “the time is x”.

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I enjoy the new design of time.gov

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Great bonus day, everyone. See you again in 1,460.

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There is a type of radio astronomy called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. It takes advantage of the fact that if you observe from two telescopes siimultaenously x distance apart, you can get the resolution of a single telescope x distance across.

So astronomers like to do this with telescopes as far apart as possible. Other-side-of-the-earth apart. But how do you observe simultaneously with telescopes thousands of miles away from each other? Sync them with atomic clocks, and reconcile the observations after the fact.

A report from 1970 on the 1969 (!) collaboration between US and Soviet radio astronomers, featuring Americans flying into the USSR with atomic clocks hooked up to car batteries for emergency backup power:
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/Kellermann/FirstUS-USSRVLBIObservations.pdf

the Customs man (customer, as Kogan called him) wanted to see what was inside. We handed him some official looking papers of explanation, and opened the box. He took a quick look, saw a few glowing lights, looked with astonishment at the clock ticking loudly, and said o.k. We quickly left before he could change his mind.

At Pulkova, we synchronized the NRAO clock to the Sweden clock, attached the Russian batteries in case of power failure, and left it to run at Pulkova. We had the batteries supplied with the Swedish clock recharged, and set off for the air-port to fly to Crimea. In order to preserve the nickel-cadmium batteries supplied with the Swedish clock, we also carried two 6-volt car batteries and an inverter to supply 230 V AC.This combination gave us a battery capacity which was good for about 25 hours, more than enough(we thought) for a two and half hour plane trip.The whole load weighed about 200 pounds and it took some explaining to get it on the airplane.

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32

A setback in our work to save the daylight:

DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it “[…] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,” according to the Samoa Observer.

So, uh… that sounds pretty good to me?

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I don’t understand. They set the clocks ahead in the fall? We set them back in the fall. We should be moving to DST and staying there. Standard time is what should be eliminated.

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I knew it was in the Pacific. I greatly underestimated how far South it is.

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A New Yorker profile of the inventor of NTP!

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It appears NTP is making the rounds again

1 Like
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2038 might be a wild ride.

http://blog.pkh.me/p/35-investigating-why-steam-started-picking-a-random-font.html