February 21st, 2006
Date Format - Vimshottari Dasha
Dear Blog Readers,
A lot of users of my birth chart application get confused when they see the date format in DD-MM-YY for the Vimshottari Dasha dates, where I display only the last two digits of the year as opposed to displaying the entire string - e.g. 1996 is displayed as 96 and 2004 is displayed as 04. I have been following this convention right from day one as I wanted to save some precious screen real estate. Please take a look at this image and you can see the problem for yourself.
I had assumed people would not get confused and would interpret the date according to what they have entered, but clearly, I was wrong. There was a gentleman who tried to generate a birth chart of a person born in 1896, and his complaint about displaying “96″ and “04″ was legitimate.
I will fix this problem as soon as possible, hopefully in the next one or two days because I have to make sure that the display is good both for the image and the applet.
Sharmaji, suggest that you use the so-called military format (dd-mmm-yyyy) for absolute clarity on what a date is. For instance, 08-JUN-2006.
Even the USIS uses this in their visa-stamping (without the -s), which is an amazing thing considering how crazy the US guys are about their mm/dd/yyyy format.
In Windows, this is called the Short Date. Use it all the time in apps that I develop.