Re: [NTLK] Newton X Press - book oddities

All I know is that the numbers for the creation date, modification
date and publish date (the first two being part of the package
header, not the book Part) as stored on disk, from Newton Press are
minute counts, not second counts. The odd thing is that the Newton
treats them as minutes as well - perhaps if the value is below a
cutoff, the newton recognizes that the value is in an odd format and
handles it differently than if it were in seconds like it should be.
I'll have to experiment with putting larger, obviously second count
values into the packages and see how the newton reacts.

Come to think of it, I wonder if BookMaker handles date stamps
correctly.

J. Tyler Nichols

On May 28, 2006, at 6:24 AM, Eric W. Brown wrote:

>> 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.
>
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> wikiwikinewt/
>

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Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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