Grrr

[plonq]

The more I use this program, the more I hate it.  What kind of morons were in the development team when this fetid piece of crap was shipped?

For a good part of the morning I've been tweaking a large dataset, trying to get this program to recognize the dates in it as, well, dates.  Naturally once its internal logic determines that a field contains a certain kind of data, the drop-down where you can potentially override that is ghosted.  Come to think of it, that drop-down box is always ghosted.

Ah, this appears to be a number of some kind.
Ah, this appears to be some kind of random ascii with "/" characters strewn through it.
Ah, this appears to be quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Hm, more random ascii with "/"s?

Eventually I found that the only date format it seems to understand is m/d/yy format.
That's odd, because it then defaults to yyyy/mm/dd format to display the date -- which is the first date format I tried on it.  It's enough to make one's head explode.



Vacation in 1.5 days.

Comments

[furahi.livejournal.com]

ARGH! I hate American date formats (m/d/yy/), it's so confusing
To me it makes more sense to use d/m/[yy]yy; and for days of the month smaller than 13 both are undistinguishable.
That's why I ususally use yyy/mm/dd, which has the added benefit of being sortable without any additional intelligence, or I ask for the month by name (or abreviation) in programs I make myself...
And then I add a calendar so if people can't figure it out they can at least click =P

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I always do my dates in the format yyyy/mm/dd HH:mm:ss (or sometimes just as a single long string of yyyymmddHHmmss). I've finally got the program recognizing the date portion of this in the yyyy/mm/dd format, but no combination I can try will get it to recognize the time as a time.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Did you try writing the time as "quarter to ten"? ;)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

That might be a little too specific for this stupid program. It can't seem to figure out

1000
1000 AM
10:00
10:00:00
10:00:00 AM


Maybe I'll try "10ish" and see what happens.

[pierrekrahn.livejournal.com]

I've always strongly preferred yyyy/mm/dd.
Mainly for the reason that it's to sort.
But also because it's not confusing in the least bit. I've never seen yyyy/dd/mm (which would be the only other format that could be confused with yyyy/mm/dd)

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Just reading yyyy/dd/mm makes me shiver =P

[plonq.livejournal.com]

It refused to recognize that as a time. I'm going to test a theory tomorrow, though. Right now I'm reading from a flatfile, but tomorrow I'm going to dump the lot into a SQL database and see if it handles it better from there.

[fuzzytoedcollie.livejournal.com]

Been using YYMMDD for a long time (short, to fit the old DOS 8.3 days.) When Y2K rolled around, I just went hex on it, going from 991231 to A00101...
*grin*
Posted at A60803_1804!

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Since I won't live 100 years I've been pondering switching from YYYYMMDD to YYMMDD, but I probably won't =P