Sunday, September 10, 2006

Adjust Date and Time

On a whim, we were discussing changing our web-logs to use alternative date formats. Specifically, the Orthodox Old Calendar which dates from the creation of the world in 5509 BC and has the new year at September 1st, so today would be August 28th, 7514. So far, no luck. I can't even find where on my own computer to switch the date format. When I installed the OS, it had options for Islamic and Jewish calendar systems, but the time/date dialogue now doesn't seem to offer it. It shouldn't be that hard, it's just the Julian calendar with a few years added on the date. Hmm. As soon as I figure out how to enable that, it shouldn't be too hard to write in support for God's own dating system. Oh well. I will keep you posted.

UPDATE: I found where I can switch between Gregorian, Hebrew, Islamic, and Jalali calendars on my desktop. Now I just need to find the documentation for writing my own extension to create a proper calendar [I heard there's Julian support somewhere]. And also do the same automatically here. Just for kicks.

EDIT: because of archiving, I may just make it supplemental dating rather than replacing the date.

2 comments:

Eric said...

I'm not sure how to do it for the OS, but a simple Javascript function should do the trick. You could add the function anywhere in the page you wanted.

Assuming you are using linux, search through the gcc documentation. You will probably find a header file with date/time functions. Some might be able to actually set the OS date and time. If there are some, you could write a program to do that.

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

I just realized I'd have to change the way archiving is done if I do this. This change will have to be more than just cosmetic. In other words, not workable on blogger. Alas.

For my own computer, I'm using KDE and I'll just be happy to change what the clock program displays rather than changing the OS internals, and that should be do-able with a little Python applied in the right place. This change is simply cosmetic. Should be implementable.

Hmm.