The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[999_Springs]

At the bottom of this webpage it says "All times are GMT" and the forum clock seems to be 13 minutes faster than GMT. Why?

edit: I posted this at 9:01 p.m..

[999_Springs]

13 minutes faster than GMT

And now it is 272 minutes slower. This is very weird.

[gsf]

13 minutes faster than GMT

And now it is 272 minutes slower. This is very weird.

first, the forum may display different times depending on whether you are logged in or not
when logged in it uses the time zone set in your profile
when logged off it uses the default time zone GMT - 8 hours
which is approx west coast USA modulo daylight savings time

but the real problem, (re)hash in the patterns game thread, is that the forum clock
(the clock of the server hosting the forum) is ~ 4hours 30min off, with a terrible drift
the drift is determined the the patterns game referee (a program running on an independent host)
approximately every 10 patterns game entries

to convert current forum timestamps to USA EDT my date conversion routines are set to GMT - 12hours 30minutes
in the past few months I've seen it range from -12h15m .. -12h30m
to verify -- this was posted 2008-08-31+16:44:58-0000

[gsf]

here's the time computation on my previous post
for the default GMT - 8 hours the forum time stamp is
Sun Aug 31, 2008 4:13 am, or using the standard numerif time zone designation
Sun Aug 31, 2008 4:13 am -0800 which is (in gmt/zulu/uct) 2008-08-31+12:13:00-0000
but the actual zulu time of the post (+/- 10 sec to cut+paste+submit) was 2008-08-31+16:44:58-0000

Code: Select all

2008-08-31+12:13:00-0000 forum
2008-08-31+16:44:58-0000 actual


so at this moment the forum clock is ~4h31m slow
default forum times don't display seconds, so the skew estimate could be up to 2 min off

it would be nice if the forum admin would run ntp (or an os/vendor equivalent) to keep its host clock in sync

[999_Springs]

GMT - 12hours 30minutes

Does that even exist? All I can see available in Profile is GMT -12, -11, -10, -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3.5, -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +3.5, +4, +4.5, +5, +5.5, +6, +6.5, +7, +8, +9, +9.5, +10, +11, +12 and +13 hours.

Is there anyone here who can reset the forum clock?

And when did the swift change from faster to ridiculously slower occur?

[gsf]

GMT - 12hours 30minutes

Does that even exist? All I can see available in Profile is GMT -12, -11, -10, -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3.5, -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +3.5, +4, +4.5, +5, +5.5, +6, +6.5, +7, +8, +9, +9.5, +10, +11, +12 and +13 hours.

Is there anyone here who can reset the forum clock?

And when did the swift change from faster to ridiculously slower occur?

-1231 only exists in the presence of improperly administered system clocks

btw, its very easy to have an improperly administered system clock
the patterns game referee was recently moved to a new desktop system
that was off by ~10m -- luckily I caught that before grousing about the forum clock
[ edit ] my own revisionist history
Pat caught the 10min referee skew, which prompted the referee re-coding to periodically update the forum clock skew

[daj95376]

It's possible that further corruption of the clock occurred here:

http://forum.enjoysudoku.com/viewtopic.php?t=6266

[Pat]

the forum clock has been slowing in recent months

my great worry is that this may indicate a Server problem
(a dying battery?)

right now it is slow by
4:34:20

[gsf]

the forum clock has been slowing in recent months

my great worry is that this may indicate a Server problem
(a dying battery?)

right now it is slow by
4:34:20

its slowing by ~ 5 min per day

[999_Springs]

I have just discovered - the forum clock is working again! It's only 2 or 3 minutes off!

Well, now we have a new problem. The forum calendar is a whole day slow!