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The Countdown [STILL] Continues

Posted on December 9, 2008November 18, 2010 by Michael

Ok.. I’m fairly certain that in 25 days this thing is just going to say “The Recorder has not made a daily call in 1000 days.” But what if it doesn’t? Gotta keep counting down the days just in case.

As a coder I would say that it’s more likely for it to choke at a more ‘binary-based’ number, like 1024. OR to really think it through, maybe at the maximum value of a integer. We know that it didn’t stop at 127 or 255, so it’s more than an 8-bit value. A 16-bit SHORT INT would max out at 32767. But it’s rare for a coder to use a short, I always use ints. Obviously, I didn’t write the code, but first of all we know this is Unix based. It could be C, C++, or maybe Java. Either way, most likely the value for the number of days is calculated fresh every day from the date of the last phone call sync to today.  This is how I would do it…

The method would be to convert each date into some kind of time interval, which might be the number of days since a certain reference date – say Jan 1, 1970.  It also could be the number of seconds since 00:00 on that reference date, but lets assume its the number of days. There’s usually a function or framework that does that.  Calculating the number days since the last call is a simple subtraction of the reference time interval of the last call from today’s. Most likely the resultant value is placed in an INT and then the text for the message is converted using a function that creates a formatted string, something like a printf.

The possible values for an int are -2147483647 to 2147483647.  That’s 2 billion days! or 6 million years. I’m only willing to count down to 1000 days.

6 thoughts on “The Countdown [STILL] Continues”

  1. Shashi says:
    December 9, 2008 at 8:52 am

    I think the world needs an iPhone app that will allow us to set up recording from our phones. It was a lot of work to leave my office and walk in to the living room to double check whether we had the season pass for Leverage. I know I CAN do that from a pc but I'd rather do it from my phone. Anytime anyplace…

  2. Michael Smith says:
    December 9, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Well. you can do it from a PC for a Series 2 Tivo. That "old" HD tivo is still a series 1 and doesn't have remote scheduling. We're in a dark era of TiVo right now while we wait for there to be a new DirecTV TiVo. In the mean time we'll be forced to get a DirecTV DVR – which won't be a TiVo and will suck.

  3. go4johnny says:
    December 22, 2008 at 3:05 am

    i think ecker has you beat. he hasn't connected in several years. i'll have to get a day count from him.

  4. go4johnny says:
    December 22, 2008 at 3:08 am

    oh btw, i set my iphone browser to the directv mobile page for the remote scheduler. i save it as a web app and boom, there you go. i think it only works on their newer non-tivo units.

    1. Michael Smith says:
      December 22, 2008 at 9:46 am

      Thanks for the tip. Hey, get Ecker to take a photo of his screen and email it to me. Mine hasn't connected in almost 3 years. I think he bought his a while before I bought mine.

  5. Pingback: Michael T. Smith - Diffusion » DirecTV HD TiVo Countdown Surprise

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