RE: [MacPerl-Toolbox] Q on Toolbox access from Perl

["Walter Torres" <walter@tscinternet.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vicki Brown [mailto:vlb@cfcl.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 25, 1999 6:28 PM
> To: Walter Torres
> Subject: [MacPerl-Toolbox] RE: [MacPerl] Q on Toolbox access from Perl
>
>
> At 21:07 -0600 2/24/99, Walter Torres wrote:
> > My Mac died some time ago.
> >
> > My office makes me use NT.
>
> Our collective sympathy to you.

Thank you, thank you.
But I have the last laugh!

I have:
  - a functioning Apple Menu Bar across the top of my monitor.
    ( The "Start Bar" is hidden )
  - The "recycle Bin" Is in the lower right corner
  - The Main Drive is in upper right
  - The Floppy is under that
  - The CD is under that
  - MS IE 4 is hidden
  - Network Neighborhood is hidden
  - The fonts are in Geneva

Overall, it looks like a Mac, right down to the sounds it makes! :)

The NT always wanted to be a Mac, so now it "feels" better.

It drives the folks at the office crazy!


> > I am creating a few scripts and I want them to be able to run on UNIX,
> > Win32 and Mac, thus my posts of late.
> >
> > On the Mac, the Time Control Panel lets you set the Time Zone
> > you are in.
>
> Well, no, actually, it lets you pick a city in your time zone and then it
> does some appropriate stuff (probably GMT offsets) under the covers.  I
> don't think it's actually doing _Time Zone_ stuff.

Yep. I just went and looked at my kids 630. Time offset, "city in Time
Zone", but no Zone Name.

:(



> We had a big discussion about Time Zones in Sept 98 months back
> (I instigated it :-)

Cool.

  <snip>


> Looking back through the discussion at that time, the upshot was
>   1) There is no Toolbox call - the Mac doesn't do "time zones"

mmm, oh well.


>   2) you can calculate offset from GMT (in hours, so Pacific
>      Coast of USA is -8000) but to actually handle _time zones_
>      requires a lookup table (and a very carefully crafted lookup
>      table at that).

Yes, very carefully! I have the official table. It isn't pretty!


>      Many Unix systems have these (in /etc/zoneinfo
>      and the current timezone is stored in the $TZ environment
>      variable).

The UNIX I have access to use...

   - US/Eastern Standard Time
   - American/Eastern Standard Time

one or the other.


>   3) The only person who really cared was me :-)

In the words of Luke Skywalker: "I care."


> > Do you happen to know what Toolbox call is needed to access
> > that info, and if there is a corresponding Perl MODule to
> > access that info?
>
> The question is, do you want the time offset in relation to GMT (which you
> can calculate) or do you want the time zone (which is hard) or do you just
> want access to the "Cities vs. offset" table that the Mac uses in the Map
> control panel?

Yes, well, that's it isn't it.


> (p.s. Is there a reason you keep capitalizing the first three
>       letters of Module? :-)

So I can get questions like this! ;)

Anyway, the upshot is that we can not get the Zone Name from the Mac itself.
Which means if we want the name, we have to use a lookup list.

I have a few: the official list, a more concise list (from Time::Zone from
CPAN) and one other from someone else.

I was hoping to get around the lookup list. I think I have a method, but it
is not automatic. I will know more in a few days. I will share it with you
if you like.

Thanks for the review and the info.


Walter

PS: How can I join the Toolbox list?