[FFML] Old archives question

[Thom Woosley]

It depends on which era the errors come from.  If they're from the original
FFML, the errors are because of a faulty program which was supposed to set
the system clock and frequently failed to connect to the atomic clock and
decided to set the time to 0 seconds when this happened.

If so, you can blame the lazy idiot in charge of the FFML at the time, who
knew about the error and never bothered to fix it.(1)

If it comes from another era, one thing to recall is that timestamps in
email are stored as plain text, and not as seconds since Jan 1st 1970.  No
script to import the files could have introduced this error.  It would have
been introduced by the mailing list software, which would be based on
system time, which would show 1970 if something like the error described
above occurred.


(1) I hope you can guess who the lazy idiot is, if you haven't already.

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Ignacio Moreno <kinai2k7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am a network technician. If you receive the data, I already did my work.
> 😜
> El 27/9/2015 18:42, "Rens Houben" <shadur at systemec.nl> escribió:
>
> > In other news for Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 05:53:11PM +0200, Ignacio Moreno
> > has been seen typing:
> > > I am not an expert in archive or mailing lists, but I think that it's
> > > clearly an error. Probably the program couldn't read or misread a
> > variable
> > > and, when trying to interpret it, it give a nonsense date.
> >
> > All unices internally measure time as seconds-since-Epoch, which is
> > categorized as midnight on Jan 1st 1970. Presumably, whatever script was
> > used to import the email data into archives couldn't quite make out the
> > timestamp on those mails and defaulted to zero.
> >
> > > Greetings.
> >
> > > Kinai.
> >
> > My $0.02 as a systems administrator that's had to parse some /weird/
> > errors from time to time...
> >
> > --
> > Rens Houben                           |    opinions are mine
> > Resident linux guru and sysadmin      | if my employers have one
> > Systemec Internet Services.           |they'll tell you themselves
> > PGP key at http://proteus.systemec.nl/~shadur/shadur.key.asc
> >          .-------Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List--------.
> >          |   Administrators - ffml-admins at chez-vrolet.net   |
> >          |   Unsubscribing - ffml-request at chez-vrolet.net   |
> >          |         Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject         |
> >          `----- FAQ http://chez-vrolet.net/ffml/faq.txt ----'
> >
> >
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