Re: [misterhouse-users] Status line clock now shows server time, not local time

[Steve S. <st...@sw...>]

Bruce,
   I sent it to you directly as well, becuase I made more changes after I
already emailed the list twice.... I didn't want to overburden the list.
   Also, I believe your assumtion of how it is done is incorrect. I did not
change the rate of refresh on the status line - this still only refreshes
every minute or two (whatever the default is). For IE browsers (I believe
Audreys use a different clock than jclock2), this is the process I'm using:

1 - MH, using Perl, prints the current surver date/time into the HTML
source, within a script tag
2 - After the page downloads (may be a second or two after MH prints the
time), the browser samples the local time.
3 - During the page load events, the number of second difference is
calculated between MH and local computer
4 - Every 1000 ms (1 second) javascript grabs the current time from the
local computer, and calculates what the server time is by using the offset
that was grabbed in step 3.

This should accurately dsplay the server tme to within a couple seconds.
Since step 1 and step 2 are happening on two different computers, and one
has to complete before the other can begin, we are not gathering both time
samples at the exact same time. Because of this, the javascript
representation of the server's time will be slightly off. The difference
will varry based on how long it takes the page to load. (e.g.: if it takes
1.5 seconds for the the page to load to the browser, including all graphics,
then the local representation of the server's time will be 15 seconds
behind). I don't see any easy way to compensate for this, but I think it's
still better than displaying a totaly different time to each visiter.
Of course, this only really matters if you have your MH web interface
publically accessible... as it is assumed that each computer on your home
network is within the same time zone. :-D

Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Winter" <br...@mi...>
To: <mis...@li...>
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 8:03 PM
Subject: RE: [misterhouse-users] Status line clock now shows server time,
not local time


> Steve, I don't think your attached file made it to the list.  Feel free to
> send to me directly (I got your other changes).
>
> I doubt we will want to make this the default, as the overhead of doing a
> http request for each Audrey every second is probably not worth it for
many.