Dated Material

Is the Y2K problem really over?

Did you ever notice that old monsters never die? They always resurrect themselves in time for the next sequel (pun, pun)! I will spend my old age watching Freddie XLVII vs. Jason LXI and The Great-Great-Grandson of Dr. Frankenstein on whatever technology replaces super-hyper-Internet HDTV (version 12).

I bet you thought that the Year 2000 crisis was over? Well, not quite. Andrew J. Glass did a piece in the Austin American-Statesman (May 30, 1998) in which he reports President Clinton’s assurance to us that credit and debit cards bearing expiration dates after December 1999 will work just fine.

For example, except for enrollees in a special testing program, American Express customers whose cards expired in May 1998 or earlier received new ones valid only for one year. American Express only began issuing credit cards with later expiration dates in June 1999. “We have just completed our worldwide testing program and we feel very comfortable that we can now support these new extended-issue cards,” said Molly Faust, a company spokeswoman, at the time. Other credit card companies had similar programs.

But what is the result of these special, early-expiration cards? Instead of an even monthly workflow, you suddenly have a large workload increase in one month because of the extra amount of expired short-term cards, followed by a decrease in the following months.

If you were the IT guy in that situation what would you do? Try to train temps for the month? Try to bribe your staff into overtime? Just let things fall behind? Do you think that data quality might suffer no matter what you do?

I tried to find out what American Express planned to do by sending an email to the Web site asking for a PR flack. Instead of getting a meaningful reply, I received an automated response that assumed I was an unhappy customer. I am not a customer and never want to be a customer again — I have talked to too many of their IT people and had really bad experiences with them over the years. But what is the state of affairs inside a company when the first thing it assumes about an email is that it is from an unhappy customer?

The latest version of Microsoft SQL Server released in April 2000 still allows the use of “American-style” dates (mm-dd-yy) instead of requiring the use of ISO 8601 dates (yyyy-mm-dd). The ISO 8601 format is the only legitimate way to represent a date in standard SQL; anything else is a vendor extension. It is also the only legitimate format in many of the current and forthcoming ISO standards.

But people have preprinted forms and traditions in place, blah, blah, blah — so vendors offer assorted display options while using their own internal format for the temporal data types. However, Microsoft SQL Server converts its internal format to American dates by subtracting 1900 from the year. That means that 2001 becomes 101, which leads to some problems. Didn’t we fix this stuff back in 1999 and save the world?

Clean-up operations for Y2K are still showing up in the trade press, but what I find remarkable is that so many shops only patched their old two-digit years with a bit of code that decides into which century to place the year. Is anyone going to track this pivot point and update the patch every year? Why are there no plans to move to a four-digit year in the data?

This strategy reminds me of the old movies in which the heroes bury Dracula with a stake in his heart and then go home. You know that the sequel will begin with someone pulling the stake out of the chest of Dracula’s skeleton, causing flesh to reform around the bones, with a lot of creepy organ music (organ music is a pun) in the background.

In 1999, amid much media coverage, we had the “Melissa” virus outbreak in our emails. Everyone cleaned up their files and upgraded their anti-virus software. Just as we were feeling safe, along came the “I-Love-You” virus in April. Going one better than “Melissa,” the “I-Love-You” virus not only emails itself to people in your address book list, but also deletes certain important files on its way out. This virus hit some places really hard, infecting an estimated 50 percent or more of the systems in Great Britain within two weeks.

I have heard more naive souls actually say that we don’t need to worry about further outbreaks, because surely Microsoft will patch the holes in its email products that let this stuff get through. Wrong. In fact, Microsoft issued a press release telling us that this vulnerability is the price we pay for flexibility and that automatically downloading and executing any old program that shows up in our mailboxes is a “feature” that we users really want. Oh great, I now have a promise that my Windows system will be vulnerable to the next attack (for which no anti-virus program yet exists), because I really like rebuilding entire systems.