Thanks to all those who replied - ‘the internet date’ was the answer I needed, since I then didn’t have to get out of my LiveCode comfort zone to do the calculation. I’m thinking of time-stamping some interactions that are going to go through a program I’m running on LiveCode Server. Right now I have it running on DreamHost, whose servers presumably stay in one place, but I wanted an invariant time stamp not depending on the location of the server or of any particular user, so I saw UTC as the way to go.
My issue was that I didn’t know of a command that I could run on the server, or a url to a public time server, that would just give me UTC in its simplest form without leaving LiveCode - probably very lazy of me, but I want to keep things as simple as I can. I have now written a little homegrown routine that uses ‘the internet date’ which seems to work fine. Thanks again Graham > On 20 Feb 2016, at 19:09, Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami <bra...@hindu.org> wrote: > > On February 20, 2016 at 6:50:55 AM, Earthednet-wp > (proth...@earthednet.org<mailto:proth...@earthednet.org>) wrote: > This will of course put the time as perceived by the server where in the > world my copy of LCS happens to be hosted. Given that this is arbitrary from > the point of view of a user of the server, it would be easier for me if I > could show the time as UTC, or what us Brits used to call Greenwich Mean Time. > > I may be missing thing, but unless your server is a nomad, it is always > exactly X numbers away from UTC... sothen what is the issue? > > Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious and don't grasp your problem: > > UTC is UTC wherever you are. If I query for UTC in Hawaii, or California or > London, we get the same value...So all you need is a small API script on the > server to return UTC to you... and typically you have control over the time > setting on your "box" so if you want the server to return UTC...you have to > be sure (unix/linux) tzdata(cmd line app) is installed.. run that and you > will be prompted to set your time zone. set "GST-0" and you are good to go. > > This assumes of course that's what you want...it may not be... I prefer, e.g. > that the server return the time of the place where it lives (otherwise I get > crazy confused)... this is, as you say, arbitrary, since we have users all > over the planet in all time zones... but though I am in Hawaii, I like the > server in California to be on California time... as this is how we think out > here in the middle of the Pacific...CA is three hours ahead, Texas is 4, > Chicago 5, NY 6 etc.. (depends on DLS) if I want my LCS on the server to > return UTC, then I just add the offset to PST (+8) since he lives in > Californai and is not moving around. > > https://codeghar.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/manage-time-in-ubuntu-through-command-line/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets > > if you do not have control of the server box/instance then you only have the > option to add the offset to GMT to the server time... a simple "add" in your > script... Through the years, in my experience, default installations of web > server OS's often have some odd time default, and you only discover this one > day when you see weird time stamps.. so you have to go in and correct it. > This is getting better with cloud computing, but in the old days the > "instance" on a box was initiated by loading an image from a CD, and the > service selling you the web services didn't even bother to check that the > image had some wrong TZ for the location where it was being installed. > > BR > _______________________________________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription > preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
