Pete's Log: Soccer, dark mode and altering more of the past
Entry #2026, (Meta, Sports and Athletics)(posted when I was 43 years old.)
Soccer got rained out last Thursday, and we were unsure if the lights would even be on this week, but they were! So Bert, Andrew, Duc and I braved the cold for some 2v2. After recently getting as many as a dozen people playing, it was entertaining and hard work to play 2v2. I'm sore today. We asked about the lights and were told this week was the last week they'd be on. Afterwards, Bert, Andrew and I hit up Imperial Oak as is tradition. We discussed how to keep soccer going and are considering weekend games and indoor games as options. I looked into one indoor space nearby and a quarter field is $200 per hour! So not sure how likely that is to happen unless we get a lot of people to commit.
I also learned that several core members of our soccer group have already gotten their Covid booster shots. So now I'm looking at making an appointment for my booster sometime soon.
I took a vacation day today since there are a number of winterizing tasks I want to get done around the house and that seemed easier to do without a toddler around. Currently feeling pretty lazy (and sore) though, so I'm goofing around for a bit first.
A few days ago I added a simplistic dark mode to esgeroth.org based on the css prefers-color-scheme media selector. Both my phone and desktop are set to dark mode, so this is now the default way I see esgeroth.org. I actually really like how it looks on my phone, but on my desktop I prefer the light mode look. There are still a number of colors that need updating and then I should probably run it through a contrast checker, so maybe I'll get it tweaked to where I like it on desktop. Or maybe I'll add a toggle button to change the mode and override prefers-color-scheme. Or who knows. I should really go work on my house todo list.
But first, more timestamp sillyness. Please forgive my obsession, but I don't think I can let this rest until I complete this rabbit hole. I've been reading way more old Pete's Log entries lately than is probably healthy, but that's where I'm at.
To summarize: I have modified the timestamps of log entries 1346 through 1381 (dating from September 2003 to July 2005) and subtracted 5 or 6 hours depending on if it was DST or not. My mental gymnastics to justify this change follow.
While doing my prep work for adding time zone support in early 2007, I noted the following: "Entries up until the middle of 2003 are stored in straight-up EST (UTC-5:00), whereas entries since then are stored in CST/CDT (UTC-6:00/UTC-5:00). These all need to be converted to GMT timestamps."
Some time in the past week I discovered this wasn't entirely accurate. I stumbled across a post from January of 2005, in which I noted that PHP and MySQL were configured in UTC. Having time zones fresh in my head, I realized this contradicted my post from 2007 and had to investigate. So Wednesday night I read through all my posts between leaving South Bend and moving to Munich almost four years later. In the batch of entries I modified last week I found two entries that explicitly mentioned a time, and in both cases the time mentioned was accurate after I made the change. In this batch I found no explicit mention of time, so I had to find other hints to help figure this out.
The first hint is that there were an abnormally large number of entries with timestamps between 3 and 7 am, and I do not recall being particularly nocturnal while living in Maryland. This seemed suspicious enough that I graphed out the time for them and looking at the graph it feels much more plausible that these are UTC timestamps and not CST/CDT timestamps.
But I also found that entries starting in 2006 do seem to have accurate timestamps. For example, the pictures in this silly entry predate me stripping metadata from photos and they have embedded timestamps that match the log entry. Of course, the camera could have stored the timestamps in UTC, but I found a manual online for the camera and it doesn't seem to have time zone support, so that seems unlikely.
So since I'm an email hoarder, I began digging into old emails for clues. What I discovered is we migrated our colocated server that esgeroth.org is hosted on to new hardware in September of 2005. And so my working theory is that our first server that we used from September 2003 to September 2005 had MySQL configured to UTC (as noted in the log entry above) and the next server we upgraded to was configured to local time, i.e. CST/CDT. And so when I implemented time zones in 2007 and checked what time zone MySQL was configured to, I had forgotten my UTC note from 2005 and assumed that the CST/CDT configuration that I found applied all the way back to September 2003 when we first started our colocated adventure.
I checked the old code for how entries were added prior to time zone support and it did in fact simply use the MySQL now() function to populate the date column, so the entry date would simply have been the timestamp in whatever timezone MySQL was configured to at the time. So I am pretty certain that all entries entered during rev 1 of our colocated hardware were entered in UTC and then later incorrectly adjusted to UTC as if they had been CST/CDT.
While looking through old emails, I found an email reply from Rich to log entry 1380 (since they were emailed to subscribers back in those days). The timestamp of that log entry was 14:56 EDT, while the timestamp of Rich's email was 13:05 EST the same day. So the timeline doesn't work out unless the log entry was actually timestamped in UTC.
So while it feels weird to again be altering log entries that old, I feel a high enough degree of confidence that this modification is correct. And hopefully now I am done. Here's what the above graph looks like for the entries in question after updating their timestamps. I think it looks much more plausible now:
And for good measure, here is the time of day graph for all entries, seen pre- and post-modification, respectively.
