I'm just sort of amazed that people felt it was worth that much apparent expense and infrastructure to have synchronized public clocks. One central clock tower with a bell would tell people what time it is.
Peter Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps" is based on his personal speculation that it was the late 19th C preoccupation with simultaneity that inspired the theory of relativity. Whether that's true or not, he discusses the systems in the book.
"When I came back to the United States I started poking around old Swiss, British, German, and American patents and industrial records, and it turns out that there was an enormous industry in coordinated clocks in the late 19th century. Suddenly the famous metaphor with which Einstein begins his 1905 paper began to look not so peculiar. Einstein asks us to interrogate what we mean by simultaneity. He says, imagine a train comes into a station where you are standing. If the hour hand of your watch just touches 7:00 as the train pulls in front of your nose, then you would say that the train’s arrival and your watch showing 7:00 were simultaneous. But what does it mean to say that your clock ticks 7:00 at just the moment that a train arrives at a distant station? Einstein goes on to develop a technique for saying what it would mean to coordinate clocks, and explains that this is what simultaneity is. This quasi-operational definition of simultaneity becomes the foundation of his theory and leads to his startling conclusions that simultaneity depends on frame of reference, that therefore length measurements are different in different frames of reference, and to all of the other famous and amazing results of relativity theory. Suddenly I could see that Einstein’s seemingly abstract metaphor about trains and stations was actually both entirely metaphorical and yet altogether literal. Far from being the only person worried about the meaning of simultaneity—a lighthouse keeper in splendid isolation--there was a vast industry of people worrying about what it meant to say that a train was arriving at a distant train station. And they were determining simultaneity by sending electrical signals down telegraph lines to distant stations in ways very much like the way Einstein was describing in that fateful paper."
(This is also where the NYC Times Square ball drop on New Year's Eve comes from)
Technically, you had a farther and faster reach with an optical system than you did with a church bell. But at this scale the error difference wasn't that large.
Given the noise level in the city, a bell would only cover a few blocks.
Also, this solves a different problem: having accurate clocks. Unless you want to station an attentant under each clock to reset it when the bell rings. The assumption is that there's a lot of drift in the clocks of that time so frequent re-syncs are necessary.
Mechanical clocks need regular (probably daily) winding, and drift by quite a bit per day - as much as a few minutes.
The hordes of people you'd need to employ to maintain such a system might well have been expensive enough to make an installation like this the more economical option. And, given that pocket watches were a very expensive luxury item at the time, having lots of publicly visible clocks might have been a public service that could be justified on grounds such as enabling smoother commerce.
I read and liked your post. I like you love python but have to deal daily with Java at work and have the same kind of thinking. With the age, I guess that what matters is the result and not with what it has been built. Of course I like experimenting with new technologies but I have abandoned to spend energy and time in church battles because in the end you realize that you can very often answer a problem with your usual tools in computer science at the moment.
Anyway I liked your java_launcher trick and would like to benefit from it if it is freely available of course.
However I could not find it in the teamten repository ?
Thanks for letting me know.
That's cool! I'll check it out. I've had one or two other standard themes suggested to me, and I think it could be another killer feature to help make these easier to create.
I am maintaining Gmvault (http://www.gmvault.org) and unfortunately I have the same issue. I get frustrated because I spend most of the time supporting users. It is good but I have plenty of ideas that I would like to implement in subsequent versions and I do not progress.
I would like to attract developers to help me. Which channel is the best in your opinion to do that ?
I use Github so the source is available and the open issues are also public there.
Where would you advertise the need for help to be sure to find some somebody ?
This is nice but miss a way to order tasks and groups (using priority for example). Would be also nice to relate groups to each others with a link (arrow something) to organise your project diagram.
Finally the print doesn't work. If you cannot print to provide an overview of all the tasks of the project then this tool is less useful for me as I would like to bring my task split to a meeting room without an internet connection for example. It would be nice to print only a sub selection as well (only the selected groups).
Anyway I like the zoom an unzoom functionality that provide a quick way to have an overview of the tasks.
I totally agree with you. What is the lesson here ?
You need indexes to speed up queries in any structured data storage. Uh, great but I am worried about the glipho backend then. All this to get a bit of advertising.
