I thought I would do a detour though and share some thoughts on dealing with timestamps.
Something to take into account dealing with timestamps reported into the system is that I can not really trust that users have their clocks running correctly. And since data can be collected offline and then submitted after the fact I need to compensate for the devices that have really weird time settings (A surprising amount of people run their machines with the clock set to 1970). I would deal with this by simply have the clock as the reporting device thinks it is at the time of submission be included as part of the submission. This will give me a delta for how much all the other included timestamps in that particular submission need to be adjusted. It will not handle the case where the user has changed their clock between the start of the data being collected and the time it was submitted, but hopefully that will be a pretty rare occurrence.
1 comment:
Nice post!
This is really the way, maybe the only way, to do this properly. I've used the same approach on IoT devices where the device clock isn't usually configured at all.
// Mikael
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