And What About the Internet Date and Time?

[Peter M. Brigham, MD]

On Aug 18, 2011, at 4:03 PM, Gregory Lypny wrote:

> Hello again everyone,
> 
> Okay, please don’t hate me.  I'm still trying to nail down a reasonably accurate system-independent date and time stamp to use in my student client app that will submit and retrieve data from my Mac.  I will post a modest enhancement to Stephan Barncard’s excellent returnNISTime function shortly.
> 
> My question is, How does LiveCode know the local computer’s time zone when we ask for the date in the Internet Date format?  My guess is that the computer’s owner has to have set it.  And if the person is on the move, it may be incorrect even if it was set at their primary location.  Yes?

AFAIK, It doesn't matter. You can just fetch the universal (GMT) time and convert it to seconds. This will be independent of the time zone the user sets. If someone in Australia submits data one second after someone in New York, the timestamp will be 1313704257 in the first case and 1313704258 in the second case. Ignore the time zone altogether. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I just tested this, changing my time zone in my system settings in between trials, and indeed, the two results were within 30 seconds.)

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig