Working with MS's Integer8/LargeInteger in Java? - java

I am working with AD via LDAP (using Spring LDAP) and I ran into a odd problem while working with Integer8/LargeInteger being used as timestamps which are outlined here. Namely, my attempts to write to fields of that type have resulted in...
Malformed 'field name here' attribute value
I've tried putting Longs and Strings in hopes that the underlying implementation would do any needed conversions but no luck. Here is how I am doing my math...
/* AD Keeps track of time in 100 NS intervals (UTC) since Jan 1st 1601 */
long winEpocMS = new GregorianCalendar(1601, Calendar.JANUARY, 1).getTimeInMillis();
long nowMS = System.currentTimeMillis();
long winTime100NS = (nowMS - winEpocMS) * 10000;
Is there a easy/elegant way to pack this data correctly? Are there any Java libs prebuilt to handle reading/writing these rather odd time values?
Bonus points to anyone that can explain why we need a 64bit timestamp at the 100NS resolution.

Ok here's the breakdown...
/* time since Jan 1st 1601 00:00:00 UTC */
final long WIN_EPOC_MS = 11644473600000L;
final long now_ms = System.currentTimeMillis();
final long now_win_ns = (now_ms + WIN_EPOC_MS) * 10000L;
The reverse should be obvious from the above code. If you want to double check the convertions use w32tm. For example, the following shows that we have the right convertion time to the Unix epoc (note that I am in CST)
w32tm /ntte 116444736000000000
134774 00:00:00.0000000 - 12/31/1969
06:00:00 PM (local time)
Finally, when working with AD make sure the field accepts any value. Some fields take "-1" to mean "now" and "0" may have special meaning. Also, in some cases it seems to matter if the time attribute modification is bundled with other attribute modifications (such as pwdLastSet and unicodePwd).
One last note, I would avoid GregorianCalendar unless you know you have your timezones right (it's easy to mess up).

I not know any Java library that handle the time with that Microsoft-specific format (100 nanosecond intervals since 1601). I think this ways is correct.
You can define winEpocMS as a constant and use:
long winTime100NS = (System.currentTimeMillis() - winEpocMS) * 10000L;
Why we need 64bit timestamp is simple. With 32bit you got 2^32 values (roughly 4,000,000,000), enough to handle seconds since 1970 until 2038 (know as the 2000-year effect on Unix). If you need microseconds or 100 nanoseconds precision, you use bigger values that have to be managed as 64 bit numbers. Java uses milliseconds since 1970 to represent dates and requires long type that is a signed 64 bit number.

Related

How to get current time in nano seconds in java?

I do lots of research but did not find any good answer.
I wanted to get the current date and time in a nanosecond.
I found that System.nanoTime() will provide nanoseconds, but that is and system elapsed time. means it will provide a time when system up. I need to use the current date and time in a nanosecond.
I need this for avoiding duplicate of points in InfluxDB, see How does InfluxDB handle duplicate points? So when I use millisecond I am facing issues of data union. So need deciding to go with nanosecond but the problem is while generated nano the second using System.nanoTime() did not contain current date and time data. and it give me JVM uptime which is useless for me.
In theory, it is possible to get the current time to "better than microsecond" accuracy as follows:
Clock clock = Clock.systemDefaultZone();
Instant instant = clock.instant(); // or Instant.now();
long seconds = instant.getEpochSecond();
long nano = instant.getNano();
// epoch nanoseconds = seconds * 10E9 + nano
The problems:
The systemDefaultZone() call gives the "best available clock" for the platform. The JVM spec says that this may have better than millisecond precision, but this is not guaranteed. So the nano value may have no better than millisecond precision.
The values of seconds and nano depend on the accuracy of the local hardware clock. On many systems, keeping the local clock synced to a "real" time is difficult. Often, sub-millisecond accuracy is challenging, and apparent nanosecond accuracy is an illusion.
Even you have previously managed to sync the hardware clock with a "real" time source to nanosecond accuracy, the overheads and variability in the making the above calls to acquire the epoch nanosecond time would swamp the hardware clock's nanosecond accuracy. Things like memory cache variability, how busy the main memory bus is, etc. And of course the hardware clock may have drifted since it was last synced externally.
In practice, on most systems, nano-second accuracy is unachievable, so you need avoid designs / algorithms that depend on this.
Finally, Thanks for Mr. Franz Wilhelmstötter
I found one solution. using http://jenetics.io/ and
Class call NanoClock.java is converting and doing the same trick that Stephen C suggested. I want to share this because it will useful for others as well. I am not able to confirm that is given precise nano time, but this trick works for me. #Ole V.V. Thanks again for your help.
You get the best accuracy and precision Java can give you from Instant.now(). Whether this is enough to solve your problem, I dare not tell. Certainly on a normal computer there is no way to get nanosecond accuracy.
You may need to play some tricks with adding an artificial nanosecond in case Instant.now() returns the same value twice.
Or simple use the trick mentioned in your link:
Introduce an arbitrary new tag to enforce uniqueness.
For the trick of adding an artificial nanosecond you may for example use something like the following:
public class TimeProvider {
Instant last = Instant.now().minusSeconds(1);
Instant getUniqueInstant() {
Instant result = Instant.now();
if (! result.isAfter(last)) {
result = last.plusNanos(1);
}
last = result;
return result;
}
}
When I draw times in rapid succession from this class on my computer, I get results like below. It would seem from the output (the way I interpret it):
My JVM cannot get higher precision than microseconds (6 decimals on the seconds) from the system clock.
An artificial nanosecond is added now and then to keep the instants unique.
.
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617616001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617617Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617618Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617618001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617619Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617619001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617620Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617620001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617621Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617621001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617622Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617623Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617623001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617624Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617624001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617625Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617625001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617626Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617626001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617627Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617627001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617628Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617631Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617634Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617635Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617636Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617636001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617637Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617637001Z
2018-08-29T15:18:35.617638Z

Text cannot be parsed to a Duration in java8

I am trying to parse a text to duration as follow:
final Duration duration = TimeUtil.parseDuration("1.0:00:00");
But I get the following error,
Text cannot be parsed to a Duration
so can anyone tells me where my problem is?
If you are using protocol buffers' TimeUtil you specify a duration with seconds separated from nanoseconds by a period. The value may be lead by a minus sign, if the duration is negative (so that adding the duration to a time would move into the past relative to the time). The string must end in "s".
You can see the pretty simple parse and toString of a protocol buffer's duration in the public git[hub] repo's TimeUtil.
Given the type of duration, I'm guessing they're used for calculations on date-times that are internally represented as signed 64 bit nano seconds since unix epoch.
In other words it looks like these are valid durations:
"1s" // one second forward
"1.0s" // one second forward
"1.01s" // one second, 10,000,000 nano seconds forward
"-1.01s" // one second, 10,000,000 nano seconds backward
"60s" // one minute forward
"-86400s" // yesterday (one day backward)
// [assuming no daylight saving changes or leap seconds happened]
The Protocol Buffers' TimeUtil.parseDuration would not give you the error message you say you got, and is not at all like Duration.parse, which is more clearly documented and might give that kind of error message.
If guessed API:
parseDuration(String duration) takes as parameters:
duration - "3h" or "2mn" or "7s" or null.
Taken from java.lang.Object ninja.utils.TimeUtil API. It returns the number of seconds.
Then "1.0:00:00" is obviously not to be parsed.

How to convert NSDate to integer to pass PHP date() as unix timestamp?

I'm an objective-c beginner and I was assigned to create an iPhone app for our client. I have some background with Java but almost no experience in this objective-c and this is my first time to developping a complete application...
Anyway, I'm currently stack at several problems. One of those problem is that I need to send an integer value for PHP's date function from my iOS app. I've been searching around for the solution, but all of them are dealing with opposite ways (int to NSDate), not NSDate to integer value.
I tried solutions like answered here
but it's obvious it returns double, not an integer...
Or this
but this couldn't get the System time.
I know I could get current system's NSDate with:
NSDate *theDay = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:[[NSTimeZone systemTimeZone] secondsFromGMT]];
But I could not figure out how to convert this to an integer (or long) value.
I just need to get the same value as we can get in Java with System.currentTimeMillis().
Also, this is my first time to ask questions here in stackoverflow. So please let me know if there's anything I should do/not to do when posting questions here, etc.
Thank you.
To get the current date, you should use this:
NSDate *theDate = [NSDate date];
To get it in seconds since January 1st, 1970, as a double, you would use:
NSTimeInterval seconds = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970];
To get it in ms, simply multiply the previous value by 1000 and let the compiler cast it into an integer without needing any additional code:
long long milliseconds = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000;
And as #HotLicks points out, while System.currentTimeMillis() is in GMT, if you need the local time, you could use:
long long milliseconds = ([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970]
+ [[NSTimeZone defaultTimeZone] secondsFromGMT]) * 1000;
(I think that most web services will want GMT though.)

Parse binary response

I am trying to build a sample application which will show a proof of concept for synchronizing the time with an RFC 868 compliant time server.
So far, using the Java Socket API, I am able to connect and query the server and do get the response from the server, but it is not in human readable format.
The response I get is: �)6 I think the response is coming in binary format (not sure though). RFC 868 says that Send the time as a 32 bit binary number.
My questions are:
How do I parse this response?
Apart from this approach of mine, I'd like to know if there is any other recommended approach which I should take to achieve this.
Thanks in advance.
1) How do I parse this response?
Check out the source code of TimeTCPClient from Apache Commons Net library:
public long getTime() throws IOException {
DataInputStream input;
input = new DataInputStream(_input_);
return (input.readInt() & 0xffffffffL);
}
public Date getDate() throws IOException {
return new Date((getTime() - SECONDS_1900_TO_1970)*1000L);
}
2) Apart from this approach of mine, I'd like to know if there is any other recommended approach which I should take to achieve this.
Use Apache Commons Net Library, check out the API of TimeTCPClient.
Apache Commons Net home page, hope this helps.
As stated in the RFC this is the seconds since 1900-01-01T00:00:00. For Java convert it to a Long,change the base date to 1970-01-01T00:00:00, and multiply by 1000 to get the date. Then you can create a new Date using this value.
Wrap your socket input stream to a DataInputStream and read an into rfsOffset (I used a constant). Then you can do something like:
int rfcOffset = -752253627; // Fri Apr 06 11:00:32 EDT 2012
// Current offsets will be negative convert to long positive value
long offsetSecs = rfcOffset + 4294967296L;
System.out.println(offsetSecs);
// Adjust time base from 1900 to 1970 and convert to millis
long offsetMillis = ( offsetSecs - 2208988800L)* 1000L;
System.out.println(offsetMillis);
Date rfcDate = new Date(offsetMillis);
System.out.println(rfcDate.toString());
Note: this only works until 2036 and time will be off by some number of milliseconds.
EDIT: RFC 868 is an old protocol and is no longer considered a good time source for synchronization. A good time source will us NTP and will return the correct second. It may be off a few milliseconds, but is normally accurate withing 10 milliseconds. Many hardware clocks drift significantly, and I have seen significant drift from systems with inaccurate clocks (even with NTP running(). NTP will correct a drifting clock, but needs a few minutes to determine the required shift.
EDIT2: While RFC 868 is old, it may be good enough to set the time on a cell phone to the nearest second without requiring a background process. This shouldn't be necessary if your cell phone can sync to a signal sent by your provider.

Protocol Buffer: How to define Date type?

I'm trynig to write a proto file that has a Date field which is not defined as a type into Protocol buffer.
I have read the following post but I couldn't figure out a proper solution that suits me :
What the best ways to use decimals and datetimes with protocol buffers?.
I'm trying to convert the proto file to a java .
My answer in the linked post relates mainly to protobuf-net; however, since you are coming at this from java I would recommend: keep it simple.
For dates, I would suggest just using the time (perhaps milliseconds) into an epoch (1 Jan 1970 is traditional). For times, just the size in that same unit (milliseconds etc). For decimal, maybe use fixed point simply by scaling - so maybe treat 1.05 as the long 1050 and assert always exactly 3dp (hence fixed point).
This is simple and pragmatic, and covers most common scenarios without making things complicated.
I'm not sold on this idea, but I'm really not sold on the idea of storing dates (which aren't instants in time) as a timestamp, so here's my suggestion.
Convert your date into a human-readable integer (e.g. 2014-11-3 becomes 20141103) and store this integer value. It contains exactly the data you need, is simple to create and parse, and takes up minimal space. Additionally, it is ordered and has a one-to-one mapping of dates to valid values (granted, invalid numbers are possible, such as 20149999, but these are easy to detect). In contrast, there are approximately 86400 valid timestamps that represent each day.
NB: There is a discussion on DBA SE criticizing this method of date storage, but in that context a specialized date type exists, which obviously isn't the case here.

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