o/~ Tonight we're gonna party like it's (time_t) 1e9! o/~
It occurred to me with all of this hoolava about it coming up to 1234567890 in Unix time (Unix time counts the number of non-leap seconds since 1969 ended, in GMT). The last party I had celebrating a roll-over on the Unix clock was for 1e9, which means 1x10⁹ or 1,000,000,000 in
E-notation. In the programming language C, you tell the "compiler" (another program that interprets the programs you write and turns them into a language the computer can use) that a number is of a particular type by putting it before it in parentheses. For Unix's time type, the appropriate name is
time_t. So "Time T One E Nine" is quite an accurate way of referring to that particular point in time.
Jokes rarely survive such dissection, but that's not the point of my post. The point in time was:
Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001
Two days before 9/11! So yet another reason for it to feel like it was the dawning of a new age. 10 digit numbers in Unix and two days before the US administration killed its own to garner support for otherwise unpopular draconian laws, like the Patriot Act.
