Wikipedia says "ISO 8601:2004 established a reference calendar date of 20 May 1875 (the date the Metre Convention was signed), later omitted from ISO 8601-1:2019." I was curious what "reference calendar date" is supposed to mean.
Thanks to links in the SE thread, I found the relevant actual text in ISO 8601:2000 (I don't know how different it might be, if at all, in the 2004 document):
> The Gregorian calendar provides a reference system consisting of a, potentially infinite, series of contiguous calendar years. Consecutive calendar years are identified by sequentially assigned year numbers. A reference point is used which assigns the year number 1875 to the calendar year in which the “Convention du mètre” was signed at Paris.
This last sentence is simply an obtuse way to say "this year right now, as I [jomar] write this -- we call this 2025". Apparently the ISO committee did not want to refer to what was going on around 1 AD or felt that the missing 0 between 1 BC and 1 AD would lead to confusion or something, so instead used the birth year of the metre to state the bleeding obvious.
Nobody actually knows what year Jesus was born, so setting "1 AD = Jesus' first full year of life" wouldn't be accurate. It's more or less the same puzzle as COBOL's alleged default.
The current year numbering is because a monk called Dionysius Exiguus thought the existing system of numbering the years since Emperor Diocletian was stupid as Diocletian persecuted Christians. Dionysius decided the year in which he invented his calendar was 525 years since the birth of Jesus and created the Anno Domini system.
Dionysius didn't really explain why he thought Jesus was born 525 years ago (in December of 1 BC). Many historiographers have tried to understand his logic. Thankfully, unlike COBOL programmers, Dionysius documented his reasoning for picking 1 BC as the reference year, so we only have to argue about whether he was correct.
I'm another one who's had two colonoscopies. Try to schedule it for the morning so that most of the fasting time will be while you're asleep. The prep is not a lot of fun, but it's only about half a day and it's very much not as bad as gastroenteritis or anything else that'll give you a good bout of diarrhoea.
As noted above, what used to be a cool little Wellington-based company got bought by some offshore conglomerate. Lenz himself left about five years ago.
Probably the older email address is still the primary one for the GitHub account.
GitHub took it upon themselves to change email addresses and author names when merging via the UI buttons like "Squash and Merge" in 2018 and then again in 2019. See <https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368> for the tedious details.
Essentially the post-2019 behaviour seems to be that where possible with "Squash and Merge" they will set noreply@github as the committer so that they can sign the merged commit themselves, and set author name & email to what they have recorded for the GH account involved (and the signature is then a record that GH have verified that account's involvement).
Personally I think it is shocking that they ignore the name and email address that the actual author of the commit has selected. This is both a violation of the author's intentions -- for example, you may set work and personal email addresses in different repositories as discussed here, but GitHub will rewrite them all to the same thing when other people press "Squash and Merge" on your pull requests -- and potentially a doxxing security risk.
I have considered re-reporting this to GitHub via the newer community discussions or via support again, but given the extent to which they've ignored all such reports over the last five years it is hard to find the motivation to do so.
Thank you for the explanation and link. I'll have to look into that some more.
It's definitely very dissapointing that GitHub will just change the commit metadata like that. I'm not strongly tied to GitHub right now so I might end up looking somewhere else for similar services.
That is a nice trick. I've had my main email address in .config/git/config, added an override in ./.git/config for projects that need it, and checked who I am from time to time with
Handy, but is it really easier to type? Or as pleasantly reminiscent of one of the first Unix commands you ever learnt, back in the days when they actually really were multiuser machines? :-)
> One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).
This is the primary reason why I have only ever used my own personal account for work stored at GitHub. If a company is expecting its employees to use a separate work GH account, one assumes that company is planning to pay for all those accounts for its employees.
Having said that, given that many people do use separate GitHub accounts for their separate private and work personas, and many organisations seemingly expect their employees to do so, perhaps GitHub could consider revising this Terms of Service restriction to better reflect reality.
There have also been times when I would like to have access to a second GitHub account for testing purposes. (In particular, for testing GH behaviour when the accounts corresponding to PR commits, PR creator, and PR merger all differ -- see for example <https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368>.)
For how many decades is this going to be a reasonable argument?
In 100 years, will it still be reasonable for the USA to say "we built the thing, so it is appropriate for us to continue to be the default country in domain names. The rest of you must use your ccTLDs, but we remain special."
In 200 years?
The only non-pathetic option is for the United States to transition to using its .us ccTLD for governmental and military domains in particular, with .edu and probably some others not far behind. The only question is how gradual the process is, and when it starts.
Country calling codes date from the 60s and yet the US (and Canada?) are still +1.
The real answer is that it’s way too much work to change now for essentially no benefit, so it will probably continue indefinitely unless a new system supplants the current internet.
> That's silly; registering new domain names and putting redirects in place is much simpler than changing a freakin' country code.
Cool, here's a $50,000 firm fixed contract for you to go fix all the hardcoded .gov references in every single federal website, knowing how many of them will fail to handle redirects gracefully.
Here’s the reasonable argument: US citizens are now used to .gov domain names being solely used by US government entities. They won’t change it, nor should they, as forcing domain name changes will simply add confusion for Americans.
Just because you don’t like that the US government has first mover advantage isn’t a good reason to change this.
I don't really think this is much of an issue. It's not like the change would happen immediately. Each .gov website is likely run by different agencies, so they wouldn't end up switching all at the same time.
It's a pretty simple matter to register a corresponding .gov.us domain for each existing .gov domain. Then each .gov domain owner would have to configure their web server properly, and can phase in a redirect from the old .gov to the new .gov.us.
Prior to this happening, the .gov site could have a big banner across the top of the page informing visitors of the change. This could remain for as long as seems reasonable before changing, even multiple years.
> Just because you don’t like that the US government has first mover advantage isn’t a good reason to change this.
As an American, I think the current setup with .gov (and .mil) is super weird. The fact that there are so many US government websites that are under .com, .org, and even .us, is weird too. The US shouldn't hold any kind of privileged place when it comes to TLDs; it's clearer for everyone concerned -- including Americans -- to put all these under .gov.us.
MS still hasn't gotten all of their users to transition to outlook.com in order to be rid of hotmail.com, which they bought in 1997.
Do you have the US Government doing it quicker? The only way it ever occurs is if they effectively CNAME .gov to .gov.us to run them both side-by-side.
Why do you think other government/country want to use an English abbreviation for their government entities ? Even for Latin language that use a similar word "gouv" (french), "gob" (spanish) or "guv" (romanian) would be more natural.
Various government departments of those countries use domains under .gouv.fr, .gob.es, .gov.ro respectively. The argument is that fairness and clarity would suggest that the US likewise use .gov.us or some other convention of their choice under .us.
Export $BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING as described in the Apple web page pointed to by the nag message, or change your shell to your own version of Bash.
Zlib-ng doesn't contain the same code, but it appears that their equivalent inflate() when used with their inflateGetHeader() implementation was affected by a similar problem: https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/pull/1328
Also similarly, most client code will be unaffected because `state->head` will be NULL, because they (most client code) won't have used inflateGetHeader() at all.
Prior to 1.2.13 released a few days ago, neither of these commits was contained in a zlib release. The CVE exists in the state of the code prior to that first commit, and is fairly obvious when you read the explanation in the commit message. The first commit fixed the CVE but introduced a silly null pointer deference, which was quickly fixed by the second commit and never appeared in a release.
Studying the code it's easy to convince yourself that the CVE description is correct and client code that does not use inflateGetHeader() is entirely immune to the CVE. Searching GitHub suggests that use of this function is uncommon, and certainly it's not used by any of the client code that I checked for potential vulnerability to this CVE. So all the client code that I checked was unaffected by this CVE.
Hence IMHO this particular CVE is not really a big deal, because very little client software uses the somewhat obscure inflateGetHeader() API function. I suspect this is why the zlib maintainers didn't seem to be in a particular hurry to get this release out, after the CVE was made public in at least August or early September and they had already fixed it in early August. (Me, I became aware of it in early September, so the vulnerability was publicly disclosed at least by then.)
Thanks to links in the SE thread, I found the relevant actual text in ISO 8601:2000 (I don't know how different it might be, if at all, in the 2004 document):
> The Gregorian calendar provides a reference system consisting of a, potentially infinite, series of contiguous calendar years. Consecutive calendar years are identified by sequentially assigned year numbers. A reference point is used which assigns the year number 1875 to the calendar year in which the “Convention du mètre” was signed at Paris.
This last sentence is simply an obtuse way to say "this year right now, as I [jomar] write this -- we call this 2025". Apparently the ISO committee did not want to refer to what was going on around 1 AD or felt that the missing 0 between 1 BC and 1 AD would lead to confusion or something, so instead used the birth year of the metre to state the bleeding obvious.