4 ms·
Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a Git repo
- nneonneo 7y agoETOR probably stands for Estimated Time of Restoration, i.e. the time at which the power will probably go back on again. A quick search of ETOR led me to https://www.torontohydro.com/how-we-restore-power https://www.torontohydro.com/how-we-restore-power, which explains how ETORs are calculated and even has a nice video on it.
- whalesalad 7y agoUnix time stamps are generally considered to be UTC, but fair to ask of them to clarify. Everyone does their own thing with date time.
- deathanatos 7y agoUnix timestamps are a duration¹; they're not in any particular timezone. They're "the number of seconds since midnight 1 Jan 1970, UTC" — but while I've used "UTC" there, you can also equally define it as the number of seconds since 19:00 on 31 Dec 1969 in America/New_York. It's the epoch itself that requires a timezone, not the duration since the epoch. ¹iiiish. Let's forget leap seconds exist.
- sitkack 7y agoThey are time, they just don't encode a place. All Unix boxes should have a nearly identical timestamp, independent of where it is.
- curryst 7y agoI've never thought of it this way, but they're technically correct, imo. A Unix timestamp doesn't specify a time, it specifies an offset from another time. It makes sense logically, the calculation is `current_time - epoch_time`, and the result of subtracting two times is a duration. They are however, easily converted into a time: `epoch_time + unix_timestamp`, and logically a time plus a duration produces a time. If a timestamp is a time, that logic all breaks. Like `epoch_time + today` doesn't really make any sense.
- JoeSmithson 7y agoInteresting fact - it was not midnight in Greenwich at the Unix epoch because the UK Government coincidently ran an experiment with staying on British Summer Time the whole year round from 1968 to 1971. This lead to one of the hardest to track down bugs I ever encountered (ultimately came down to LocalTime(0, "London") coming out as 01:00 when 00:00 was expected)
- bastih 7y agoI love when reality pokes holes into clean code and perfectly reasonable assumptions made.
- thrilleratplay 7y agoThank you for this. It is a random bit of trivia that may save the day for someone when debugging in future.
- simonw 7y agoThe San Francisco Chronicle used the data I scraped in their own visualization here, combining it with wind data: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/wind-outage-map/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/wind-outage-map/
- akeating 7y agoNice. I used this a dozen times over the outage period. Thank you for your work!
- thrilleratplay 7y agoAre there any data centers in these areas? It would be interesting to tie this information to site outages to see who has proper fail over.
- flipetty 7y agoI had problems with git blocking because I was accessing git too much, can you share how to do the same with some tool like proxycrawl?