Re: [NTLK] Date issues, who is responsible? Some background, and why the Newton died.

From: Tony Morrow <gizmo1482_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon Jan 05 2009 - 10:56:42 EST

On Jan 5, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Andrei Chichak wrote:

> L.W. Brown wrote:
>
> The Newton uses two formats for dates, number of minutes since
> January 1,
> 1904 and the number of seconds since 1993. It appears that the
> problem lies
> with the functions dealing with the date in seconds, the date
> functions that
> deal with years, months, and days have plenty of space left. It
> looks like
> the value is stored in a 29 bit value. All hell should break loose
> at second
> 2**29 which would be January 5, 2010 at 18:48:31.

Hmmm, this has got me thinking. While the 2010 fix Avi wrote does
create issues right now, after January 5, 2010 it may work as
describe in the readme. I think the biggest problem with the 2010 fix
is that its an extension. During boot the Newton probably can't
handle the date being greater then January 5. When the fix is finally
loaded, then things work themselves out. The only problem is the date
is wrong (in my case July 8, 2012 at 3:00 pm) and you have to go and
reset that yourself.

I did some superficial testing with the 2010 fix to see if it cause
any issues with Dates. I installed the fix, restarted the Newton,
reset my date to January 7, 2010 and created several meetings that
repeated every day. Some I set to start in December 2009 and others
after January 5, 2010. I then reset the newton. While the system date
was wrong after the reset the events I added still retained the
correct information.

While Avi's fix is still alpha and has a few bugs (some bigger then
others), it does manage to fix the seconds issue in the limited
testing I've done. If there are not updates to the 2010 fix this year
then my recommendation would be to install the patch in January 2010
and live with the fact that every time we reset our Newtons we have
to set the date.

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Received on Mon Jan 5 11:03:34 2009

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