[PD-announce] epochtime

[David Sabine]

Hello all!

I succeeded in building my very first external.  Not without much frustration and help - many thanks to:

Frank B
Thomas G
Ben S
Rua M

I would very much appreciate some feedback - cuz I think I'm king of the world right now and i likely need some 'humble pie'.  You can download the external and try it out from http://www.davesabine.com/media/puredata/epochtime.zip


My own thoughts:

Object is good because: It works reliably and may prove useful as a seed for [random] or to calculate the difference between two dates.

Object is bad because:

1. mktime() for Jan 1 1974 (which is supposed to be EPOCH!) actually produces a few million seconds.  I would expect it to be "0" (genesis, the big bang, the moment of creation) but it actually returns a few million seconds - making me think that "epoch" is actually somewhere around Dec 1, 1969.

2.  This object doesn't take into account Daylight Savings Time.

3. While this object may prove useful for special tasks, it doesn't quite accomplish my inital goal...so I think I'll begin building another external called "difftime" which will hopefully render the results I'm looking for.


Perhaps some suggestions would help me build the second version!  (Or with enough thumbs down, I'll abandon the object).



Regards,
Dave S

p.s.: If somebody would like to tell me how to list this external at the Pure Data Base, the new CVS, or pure-data.org, I'd be happy to do that.
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