OT: Alternative clock display

Here is one that gives you the actual time instead of parroting your computer's clock:

[ ]

I use SocketWatch...

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

"Terry Pinnell" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

The script uses your own PC's clock - you can set it at any time you want.

--
Thanks, Frank.
(remove \'q\' and \'invalid\' when replying by email)

I had one (didn't need it so I uninstalled it) that would measure the round trip time to a time server, divide by two, and compensate. The round trip time was typically in the tens of msec.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

...How about a full-featured SNTPv4 time setting utility:

fully free, allows a large selection of NTP servers, keeps track of your PC's errors, sets the time to within milliseconds, tells you how far off your setting is (my wife's is usually within 50ms after a sync), ...

Almost as good as the real OS time-sync utilities :-).

John Perry

Hello Guy,

Just tried and it was two seconds late versus WWVB. I don't think accurate time can be sent via the web.

Regards, Joerg

Interesting. Any chance that there is a proxy or firewall between you and the web? I could easily believe a sizable fraction of a second because of the internet, but 2 seconds seems too high. Even bouncing off a geosynchronous satellite only adds a qurter of a second or so.

Here is an interesting survey of over 175,000 hosts NTP servers. [

].

10% of the hosts were off by more than 20ms, 1% by more than 1s, and a few are off by up to a full year (!).

I seriously doubt that tycho.usno.navy.mil is off by even a 1ms...)

I think you will find it can; google for ntp!

--

John Devereux

[...]

NIST has link to info on firewalls on their time server page:

Mike Monett

Hello Spehro,

It you don't need fractions of a second in accuracy it could work. But when I looked at round trip to some servers outside California I found that the times jumped up and down rather erratically. Up to 200msec.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Frank,

Well, it does have to sit in buffers for any realtime stuff. I used to listen to Deutsche Welle radio on the web occasionally. Not in the last

6 months though because it kept cutting out despite several seconds of local buffering. And this was 64kbps or so over my >1Mbps connection. Shortwave doesn't have that problem, neither for radio nor for the time signal. Yes, the path lengths change but they do that much slower than the web.

Also, all it takes to make it unreliable is some hacker who spoofs traffic and brings part of the web to a crawl. T'has happened.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Guy,

Yes, hardware. But disabling that would be the same as leaving your door unlocked when going to work. A neighbor supposedly did that and regrets it badly now.

Yes, usually I see between 10msec and 200msec. But what good does it do if you have to disable a firewall to take advantage of a web based time signal?

Regards, Joerg

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:vXnpe.25572$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com...

The network itself is pretty fast, it has to be -> if it were slow all the data/traffic had to sit/wait in large fifo buffers. That would not make sense.

If you notice a delay, it is often the server not responding fast enough, or just too much traffic at certain nodes and data being thrown away. The upper layers of the protocols will retry, but then things slow down immensely.

Yet I'm always surprised when a simple ping gives a nice list of respond times of tens of milliseconds, and even more surprised when Google spits a full screen almost *before* I have even touched the enter key... as if they knew what I was going to ask ;)

--
Thanks, Frank.
(remove \'q\' and \'invalid\' when replying by email)

<

I thought that too, but such delays really can't explain why [

] would be two seconds off. If you look at the traffic, once the page is loaded it sends a handful of bytes once per second, regular as clockwork. It's hard to come to any conclusion other than tycho.usno.navy.mil sending late or whatever Joerg is using to detect WWVB being early. (The latter is remotely plausable if he is using one of those low- cost "atomic clocks", impossible if he is listening to it.)

If you're running Windows 2000 (and probably XP), there is an NTP client built into the OS (called W32time, IIRC). All you need to do is enable it and point it at a server.

--
Tim Hubberstey, P.Eng. . . . . . Hardware/Software Consulting Engineer
Marmot Engineering . . . . . . .  VHDL, ASICs, FPGAs, embedded systems
Vancouver, BC, Canada  . . . . . . . . . . . http://www.marmot-eng.com

All I can find on my Win2K system is w32time.dll

How do you use it?

Socketwatch queries multiple servers. It's presently showing 11 active servers.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I think I'll just stick with SocketWatch, it's working just fine, cost $10, and requires no mental capacity on my part. (Plus it has a neat "countdown" feature for setting your watch.)

Presently reporting....

cuckoo.nevada.edu - ***ACTIVE SERVER*** ntp.ucsd.edu - OK rolex.peachnet.edu - OK ntp3.cs.wisc.edu - OK ntp1.cs.wisc.edu - OK

(I have it set to maintain 5 servers minimum.)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I do once-per-hour updates. Last correction (typical) was -55msec.

(And I don't do "build processes" :-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.