Thursday, January 3, 2008

Mysteries of technology

Our campus has entered the Age of Course-Management Software. (That would be what comes after the Age of Mammals, I'm beginning to suspect.) We're using Moodle, which is an open-source tool. That would be cool, if I programmed php. Which I don't. But I've never used WebCT or Blackboard, so I don't have anything to compare it to.

I've been messing around with it over break, and after backing up and restoring my work a number of times, I've got one question:

Why, exactly, is it possible to assign a due date of 1970?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The significance of 1970: I think the system in question uses POSIX time (aka. Unix time), which is defined by the number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC of 1. January 1970 - that date being the so-called "Epoch". Therefore, a zero time value would appear as the 1. January 1970.

Why the zero value is not displayed as something more meaningful, instead of rendering it as the Epoch... looks like a bug.

Kim said...

Oh, interesting. Thanks!