Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 22:41:53 -0800
Subject: an acticle for ValleyPeople
From: "Kevin Savetz" <savetz@northcoast.com>
To: Mary Eisenhart <Mary.Eisenhart@yoyow.com>
Mime-version: 1.0
X-Priority: 3

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
Keep accurate time on your PC with help from the Net
by Kevin Savetz

Every moment that you're staring at your computer screen, that clock is
staring back. Sometimes it's in the taskbar (if you use Windows) or it's in
the menu bar (on the Mac). If you have a screensaver, maybe a quaint analog
clock floats around your screen to pass the time.

Besides simply being informative, your computer's clock plays important
roles in how the system functions. For instance, every file on your hard
drive is stamped with the time it was created and the time it was last
changed. When you send e-mail, your messages are stamped with the time. To
your computer, time is of the essence.

So doesn't it make sense to make sure that clock is accurate? Sure, you
could set your computer's clock by looking at the position of the sun,
glancing at your watch, or calling the Time Lady. None of those are
guaranteed to give you the correct time. Keeping your computer on time is
easy to do with the Internet and a Network Time Protocol client... and a
little help from an atomic clock.

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is an age-old Internet protocol used to
synchronize the time on one computer with another computer. Scattered around
the Internet are NTP servers, computers that tell the correct time to anyone
who wants it. In fact, some NTP servers are attached to atomic clocks. By
pointing an NTP client to one of those servers, it's simple to assure that
your computer's clock is absolutely correct -- give or take a millisecond or
two due to network latency.

All you need to do is download and install an NTP client. There are several
of them out there, but for my money, the two best are AtomTime98 (for
Windows) and Vryema (for the Mac.)

AtomTime98 is a 32-bit Windows application. It fetches the current time from
an atomic clock server in Boulder, Colorado.  It compares that time to the
your PC's clock. You can then opt to synch your computer's clock with the
NTP server. AtomTime is shareware, $10. and available from
http://www.atomtime.com. Vryema works much the same way: it quietly checks
with an atomic NTP server and corrects your Mac's clock. Vryema is free
software. It is available from
http://www.lava.net/~kirill/software/vremya.html

You can use your NTP client to set your computer's time just once, and it
will be accurate for a while, but chances are that its clock keeps time a
little fast or a little slow. It's just as easy to keep your computer's
clock in sync by updating the time regularly. You can set AtomTime to synch
your PC's to the time server every 12 hours (or more often if you're a
little too serious about your clock's accuracy.) If you use a Mac, you might
put Vryema in your Startup Items folder to synch the Mac's clock each time
it boots. If you happen to manage a whole fleet of computers -- for
instance, a computer lab -- installing an NTP client on all of them can make
your job a little easier.

More information about NTP is available at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/

As long as you're killing time (ha), you might want to check out these
related web sites:

   The Directorate of Time, located at the U.S. Naval Observatory in
Washington, DC, which tells about the upcoming "leap second" on December 31,
1998 and offers interesting info about atomic and other highly accurate
clocks. It's at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/time.html

   Internet Resources regarding horology (the science of timekeeping):
http://www.horology.com/horology/

   Finally, for something completely different (and yet still timely)
Shakespeare's Sonnet XII:
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/Poetry/sonnet.XII.html


--
Kevin Savetz  <savetz@northcoast.com>  http://www.savetz.com