Atomic Time Helper

[eluser]Zack Kitzmiller[/eluser]
I extended the date helper with this code. I needed a more accurate timestamp because our server was giving us some nasty timestamps from time to time.

hope this can be of some use to someone.

Code:

if (! function_exists('atomic_time'))
{
    function atomic_time()
    {
        $time_server = "time-a.nist.gov";
        $fp = @fsockopen( $time_server, 37);
        
        if (! $fp)
        {
            return time();
        }
        else
        {
            fputs($fp, "\n");
            $time_info = fread($fp, 49);
            fclose($fp);
        }

    $atomic_time = (abs(hexdec('7fffffff') - hexdec(bin2hex($time_info)) - hexdec('7fffffff')) - 2208988800);
    return $atomic_time;    
    }
}

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
Why not just synchronize the server time?

[eluser]Zack Kitzmiller[/eluser]
Shared hosting