To hundle Debian's FTP Server timpstamp easier.
If you don't need this, do as below.

$ probe /usr/bin/wget -q -O - -t 1 %URL%TIMESTAMP | date --file - +%s
Index: mirmon-1.38/mirmon
===================================================================
--- mirmon-1.38.orig/mirmon	2009-12-31 20:30:54.000000000 +0900
+++ mirmon-1.38/mirmon	2009-12-31 20:31:03.000000000 +0900
@@ -1168,7 +1168,17 @@
     return err $url, 'no time' unless defined $time ;
     return err $url, "empty"   if $time =~ /^\s*$/  ;
 
-    $time = ( split ' ', $time ) [ 0 ] ;
+# Debian repository mirrors' timestamp is like "Thu Sep  6 08:00:01 UTC 2007",
+# so we need to hack this.
+
+    my $inputtime = ( split ' ', $time ) [ 0 ] ;
+
+    if ( $inputtime !~ /^[0-9]*$/ )
+      { $time = `date --date "$time" +%s` ;
+        $time =~ s/\n// ;
+      }
+    else
+      { $time = ( split ' ', $time ) [ 0 ] ; }
 
     if ( $time !~ /^\d+$/ )
       { $time = htmlquote $time ;
