MeanMrMustard's Musings

Gifted And Talented

I was at Emma's school Wednesday morning to help with the Science Fair. That in itself was interesting, but I probably won't be blogging about it.

As I was sitting in the orientation for coaches, I glanced up at the television. Each classroom has one. When it's not being used for other purposes, it displays an analog clock, and below that, the day and date. Useful.

So I look at it. Under the clock, it's displaying the date info:


Okay. This is one of the classic Y2K errors. Operating system provides the year as "years since 1900". Perl script programmer thinks he can treat this number as a string, and yes, '19'.$year worked great; for Y2K, we'll just change that to '20'.$year. Only the correct answer, friends, is 1900+$year.

But it's been five years since the Y2K rollover, and they haven't fixed this?

posted by MeanMrMustard @ 11:05 AM