Re: [NTLK] Newton X Press - book oddities

> In the document Newton Formats 1.1, one is told that dates are stored
> in a 4 byte, unsigned integer number on disk. This number is the
> number of seconds since the midnight Jan 4th, 1904. They LIE!!!! This
> number is the number of MINUTES since jan 4th 1904. This one was
> rather confusing at first as all of the common tools for dealing with
> timestamps of this sort expect a value in seconds :-/

AFAIR the spec is actually correct with regard to seconds versus
minutes; it's Newton Press that's wrong here. All those other tools
(and I believe MessagePads, too) expect the value in seconds because
that's what it's really supposed to be.

That was actually one of the "real world gotchas" that was in the
Newton Book project I assigned in class at BU -- a case where one of
the most popular pieces of software using the spec actually goofs up
and forgets a factor of sixty. It's just a bug in Newton Press.

For parsing the books and giving something approximating the correct
date we look for the Newton Press creator credit blurb and (if
present) adjust the time appropriately.

-- 
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/