Download Days 1.1 here.
Version 1.1 has a bug fix. Certain dates resulted in calculations giving more than 31 days in the months/days view. Thanks to Jorgen Wallgren for identifying this for me.
Known bugs
This program was inspired by the 'Clock of Doom' program written for HP100/200LX by Lord Jonin some years ago. For a given date and time, the program calculated the number of days,hours,minutes and seconds, as well as the overall number of seconds since/until an event. It was possible to define and select about 30 events, using an ini text file.
The only annoyance I had with this program (and fully admitted by the author) was its inability to handle leap years correctly.
I recently came upon an algorithm which handles leap years correctly and saw this program as a useful project to get me back into some simple PC-based programming after 10 years of mainly UNIX programming.
The current version is text based, and provides the same functionality as the original 'Clock of Doom' program, namely an ability to define and select a number of target dates, and also view information relative to the selected date for this year, last year and next year as well as the target date year.
Time since/to is displayed as seconds, minutes/seconds, hours/minues/seconds, days/hours/minutes/seconds ...
The primary purpose of this program is entertainment.
Unzip the files days.exe and days.ini into the same directory.
To run the program, just type days.
To quit the program, hit ESC.
To cycle through the Target Year, This Year, Last Year, Next Year Menu, use the SPACE key.
To select the target date from your list, use the arrow keys. Note that when a new date is selected, TARGET YEAR is also automatically selected.
An example INI file with a few interesting dates is included. This is an ASCII file with hopefully obvious parameters. Each record has one line and there should only be as many lines in the file as there are records. Also, the file reading is not particularly error sensitive at this point in time, so errors in the INI file may crash the program.
The structure is as follows
NN|DD/MM/YYYY|HH:MM:SS|TTTTTTTT|Description
NN=Record number (must be two digits)
DD=2 digit date
MM=2 digit month
YYYY=4 digit year (note this prog should be Y2K OK)
HH=2 digit hour
MM=2 digit minute
SS=2 digit second
TTTTTTTT=8 character description of record to appear in menu
Description=longer description of record to appear at top of screen
There is a limit of 36 records for this program. Any more and only the first 36 will be read in. More than 36 records will not crash the program.
I hope to incorporate a graphical interface and view into the next version of this program, which will be released when time permits.
To the best of my ability I have programmed this program to be accurate and crash proof. However, the author makes no ultimate guarentees to the accuracy of the data and its application, nor to the effect of running the program.
This program is copyrighted freeware. I am providing it for free as a way of saying thanks to all those who have provided other programs for free, and those who have provided useful tips and help on coding on the HP200LX.
Feel free to distribute the program, but only as a complete package with this file and the example ini file.
All of the above to david.bird@dsto.defence.gov.au or dbird@physics.adelaide.edu.au. This program may be found at http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~dbird/days.htm.