ClockWork

Hi,

triggered by the recent discussions on the topic of the system clock in some cases not being up to date I wrote a small command line tool named “ClockWork” that is happy to sit in !Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks and upon booting will indicate if the system clock seems odd.

What it does is this:
1. Read the last boot time
2. Read the system clock
3. If the system clock is behind the last boot time show an error box indicating that (presenting both times) with the option to accept the current time
4. If the system clock is well in the future (default is 28 days) show an error box indicating that wit the default option to accept the current time
5. If the user accepts in case of numbers 3 or 4, or the system clock is in good shape (i.e. neither of the above happens) ClockWork will store the current system time as boot time for the next use.

Since I wanted that small tool to be self-contained there are two tricks:
1. ClockWork simply stores the last boot time as its own file time stamp
2. If you want the “long not booted” note off or with a range different from 28 days you simply rename ClockWork to indicate the time

You can find ClockWork on https://gag.de/software/clockwork.html – it is freeware.

At some point I will include the source code too – I just rather wait for the odd feedback in case it suggests enhancements.

Cheers Herbert (publisher of GAG-News since by now over 30 years)

Note: This was a good timing since I just recently looked into working with RISC OS time stamps using C for the C programming series in GAG-News :-)

working with RISC OS time stamps using C

Yeah, it’s not exactly obvious how to bash a five byte time into something that can be used with C.

I note that CLib jumps through hoops to do it. ;)

These days, just bosch it into a uint64_t.

Try this code to convert them 5 byte into a number (instead of t_Centiseconds you can probably use unit64_t too):

typedef unsigned long long t_Centiseconds;

t_Centiseconds Centiseconds;
char Timestamp⁵;
int i;

Centiseconds = 0;
for (i=4;i>=0;i—) { Centiseconds = (Centiseconds<<8) + (t_Centiseconds)(Timestamp[i]); }