Day: June 21, 2005

Does anyone know why otherwise-sane Windows boxes—four separate installs of 2000 and XP across machines from different vendors—would advance their clocks by up to 30 seconds every 4-5 minutes? This doesn’t happen all of the time, only when they’re running builds; when the boxes are idle their clocks don’t diverge from NTP by more than a fraction of a second each day. It’s really starting to tick me off, since Tinderbox relies on its build providers having accurate time and complains loudly when someone’s out of sync. (While I was composing this post I received five e-mail notifications of unsynchronized updates.)

None of the Linux or Solaris tinderbox builders under similar load have this problem, so it’s got to be a problem with Windows itself. Maybe there’s a magic registry incantation to fix it… anyone? Please?

I’ve just updated the Robots Exclusion Profile on the brand-spanking-new microformats.org site. (I didn’t even need to move it myself, because a nice guy by the name of Ryan King converted it to Wikipedia for me… thanks Ryan!) There’s nothing earth-shattering about the revision, just some clarifications on precedence with respect to other microformats.

I’ve also started a mostly-private-use microformat for the <cite/> element, which Joe Clark has explained as being meant to mark up titles (of books, films, plays, television programs, court cases, possibly even ships) and words and phrases quoted for themselves. (The microformat extends Clark’s definition to include names.) I’ve been using the classes for a long time, probably starting back in November 2002, but only now can I actually specify what it is they mean.

Oh, and unrelated to microformats: On Sunday I marked ten years at my job. It’s been with four different incarnations of the company, mind you—Cableshare, Interactive Channel Technologies, Liberate, and now TVWorks—but I’ve been in the same office with the same people and the same manager (who hired me in the first place) for the entire time so I think it counts.