[svlug] need an uptime birthday script

[Tom Digby]

Robert Hajime Lanning wrote:

> You could run a script once a day, that parses out the "days" field 
> (when it is there,) and emails when divisible by 365.
> 
> That would be the easiest.

But what about leap years?

Some other people suggested triggering it every 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 
seconds.  Changing that to use the average length of a Gregorian 
calendar year (365 97/400 days) might be the easiest way to go.  You'll 
need to be careful that the division by 400 doesn't truncate the 
fractional day to zero, but that can be worked around by doing the 
arithmetic yourself on a calculator and just putting the total number of 
seconds per average year in your code.

That may be better than fetching the year and checking for divisibility 
by 4 because you avoid the y2100 (etc.) problem.

It'll trigger about six hours later by the clock/calendar every year 
(with the correct date being reset every leap year), but it'll be at 
pretty much the same point in Earth's orbit every time.

To be even better, you could use the actual number of seconds it takes 
Earth to make one circuit of the sun.  Get that from the Naval 
Observatory or some such.  Of course you then have to decide whether to 
worry about precession of the equinoxes.  But that's probably beyond the 
scope of this project.


-- 
                      Tom Digby
                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/
                      http://www.plergb.com/