At one point yesterday, for a minute or two, the top of the countdown box in my blog’s sidebar at right briefly looked like this:
I quickly fixed it, and was amused when I realized what the problem was. I had accidentally entered the date of Monday’s Rockies-Giants game at Coors Field — which my Dad and I have tickets to — as “8/24/09” instead of “8/24/2009.” As a result, the countdown script was counting the number of days until August 24, 1909, which, because of leap years, would indeed be negative 36,522 days “after” August 21, 2009. Heh. Who’d have thunk it: the Y2K bug, still going strong almost a decade after the 1900s ended!
On an unrelated note… who’s excited for football season to start?!? Only 13 12 days left!! WOOOOO!!!!!
Pingback: Twitted by brendanloy
Stupid Twitterbots.
Five days if you went to the right Division II school.
Football!!!! Football football football football football!!!!
Dum, dah dah dah dah dah dah dee dee dum, da doo
(dum) (dum) (dum dum dum dum)….
That isn’t the Y2K Bug. That’s your brain bug. The software allows you to enter dates with either two or four digit years. If you choose not to specify the century, you ASS|U|ME the first two digits supplied by the software are the same as those you chose to omit. That software can’t read your mind. It has to have some criteria by which to impute your intent. In some contexts, I’ve used the “sliding century” to permit entry of two-digit years, taking the current year as a base plus a constant, and taking the sum mod 100. The result is often described as the “pivot”; any YY greater than or equal to that number is assumed to be in the past, but a YY less than the pivot is in the future. Software designed to show countdowns to future dates arguably ought to use an offset like 95 (aka -5) to compute the pivot at the point of data entry, but the current countdown displays “-2 days” for the preseason poll, so showing negative countdowns appears to be a feature, not a bug.
Some programs solve the EBKAC problem by requiring the user to enter a full YYYY every time; others convert a YY to the default YYYY and display it so that you can see whether it made the same assumption as you did. Either way, it’s using what you told it, not making a mistake with unambiguous data.
A true Y2K Bug would be software that could not internally handle 4-digit years, or otherwise fail to handle the rollover such as from 1999 to 2000. An infamous example of this occurred on Al Gore’s Presidential campaign website on “January 1, 19100”. Given that the campaign was for an election held in Y2K itself, it should have been a firing offense for whoever coded it that way.
Well, that OpenID thing didn’t work quite like I thought it did. That “rpx” thingy was me.
Hmm, not sure what’s up with OpenID/RPX. Odd.
I realize this isn’t strictly speaking the Y2K bug. It just amused me and reminded me of the bug. I was being a bit silly in this post.
Wow that was an entirely over the top pedantic comment for what was a light hearted funny post.