Friday the 13th, a time to celebrate!
Here in the heart of the NM engine room, or the dev-den as we like to call it, we love to celebrate the most pointless of events, and this week sees the Unix timestamp (the number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1st 1970) reach 1234567890!
This fantastic event will occur on Friday 13th 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC, it’s not a particularly significant time or date but it’s interesting and fun nonetheless. As we love to celebrate things like this we have knocked up a Ruby script that will update a Twitter account, letting you know exactly how far off this historic milestone we are, so you can celebrate with us!
Follow @utcwatch to get in on the action (or visit www.coolepochcountdown.com to watch the event unravel in real-time). Also check out Wikipedia if you’d like to know more about the Unix timestamp.
Thanks to Flickr user totalAldo for the image.
Edward wrote this on 12.02.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, Interesting, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Strategy box
On February 12th, 2009 at 3:20 pm, Will McInnes responded:
So let me get this right. It’s two-hourly updates via Twitter of how far we are from the Unix thingymajig?
Was that difficult?!!
On February 12th, 2009 at 3:28 pm, Edward responded:
No, not difficult at all acctually.
There is a library for Ruby that helps you send updates and get data out of Twitter using their API.
http://twitter.rubyforge.org/
:D
On February 12th, 2009 at 11:00 pm, suskind responded:
Hey, to celebrate I made this
http://pdvel.com/happy1234567890/
On February 13th, 2009 at 6:48 pm, M responded:
Edward, I worry about you.
M
On February 13th, 2009 at 7:00 pm, João responded:
I did a MIDlet for cellphone users that want to go out and party tonight! It just shows the timestamp! Downloadable at:
http://tinyurl.com/coolepoch
and midlet directly downloadable at
http://tinyurl.com/coolepochd
On February 13th, 2009 at 8:37 pm, Pablo Q. responded:
Send a twitt just on time with this:
http://snipt.org/wmk