Java: CME Log Date Decoder

At work we recently, as in the past two years, updated our CD-ROM application from being a 16-bit Toolbook program to purely Java based. Along with this massive change many features were updated and revised. One such feature is the CME (Continuing Medical Education) credit tracking system. Before the update, CME was tracked in a text file on the hard drive by date. Each article viewed in the program would have it's own line in this text file and a Gregorian date would be prominently displayed for that article.

Now with the upgrade to Java things have changed. No longer is a date available to the naked eye when reviewing the logs. While each article still does have a date attached, this date is in milliseconds. And to make things slightly more complicated these are milliseconds since January 1st, 1970. Why that date was chosen I do not know.

So for our Customer Service department this poses a bit of a dilemma. They are charged with receiving these CME logs in paper format and having to determine what date to assign the CME credit. Only recently has this problem come to light, and to combat it I created a small program to automatically calculate the Gregorian date from the given millisecond variable.

The CME Log Date Decoder program is a modified version of the Password of the Day program. It will take as input the time in milliseconds, which will be a string variable as far as the program is concerned. This variable first needs to be saved into an array of strings, one bucket for each character, then converted into an array of integers. As integers each array bucket is put through an algorithm and then summed together and added to a Calendar date of 1/1/1970 in order to obtain the correct CME log date in Gregorian format. This is then displayed to the user. The program requires almost zero memory so the calculations take less than a second to perform.