Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Word 2010 keyboard shortcut to paste text only without formatting

When you paste using the right-click, you can select paste text only (which allows you to paste text using the formatting of the document that you are pasting into). Could there be a keyboard shortcut for this? Apparently yes, but it's not a simple keyboard shortcut, and there wasn't even an option before Word 2010.

The sequence is to use Ctrl-V to paste, which will paste using the undesired formatting of the text that you copied from. Then Word puts up that annoying tiny icon that blocks the text that you just pasted. Normally you would just hit ESC to make that thing go away so that you could work. At this point, push the Ctrl key and then let up on it, then press "t". The formatting of what wss just pasted reverts to the local formatting. Then click ESC.

Here's a link that explains this:

http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/word-2010-keyboard-shortcut-to-paste-unformatted-text/

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Converting TAI time

For some reason, our flight system is using "TIA". This is a French time, called either "Temps Atomique International" or International Atomic Time. It seems to be a version of UTC without leap seconds.

Here a link that supports this description of TIA. It describes TIA as 35 seconds behind UTC, but a different link seems to indicate that this has jumped another second recently. Interestingly, TIA is 19 seconds *ahead* of something called GPS time:
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/C5BBF6AC7036CDAA8625733000668351

This link relates it all to Unix time, which is what I really care about. Apparently there's some problem?
http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html

Here's an online display of UTC and TAI. This one claims a difference of 33 seconds which must be quite old:
http://www.csgnetwork.com/timetaidispcalc.html

Here's an IDL program for converting to TAI. It has a table that relates times within ranges to the leap second differences. It goes up to July 2012:
http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/down/tai_utc.pro

It turns out that the epoch for TIA begins on January 1, 1958 (compare this to Unix time epoch of January 1, 1970):
http://books.google.com/books?id=pFO6VB_czRYC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=tai+time+epoch&source=bl&ots=wzgSlLC2SI&sig=t-yM2y6CvwdxcIAJqREDo88uRTA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=92aKUfK-LM7xqAHZ_4CgAg&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=tai%20time%20epoch&f=false

The Wikipedia page for TAI covers this, although densely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

Here's a page from a guy that has tried to resolve unix time and TAI. He discusses several problems and their solutions:
http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/unix-leap-seconds.html

This page on timescales is just nice:
http://stjarnhimlen.se/comp/time.html

So, it looks like I need to use seconds from epoch, but compensate for the leap seconds.