[Previous Article | Next Article | Index of Articles]

This article first appeared in the April 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.

Countdown to TEOTWAWKI

A few weeks ago, I let my hacker friend Greg drag me out to one of those computer bazaars that are held every so often at the fairgrounds. Usually I avoid them because the tables packed with computer gadgets are bad for my wallet. But, Greg persisted, and Xena was a rerun, so my last desperate excuse vanished.

During the long hike from the parking lot to the front door of the building we walked by an elderly gentleman wearing a bright blue hat with "Countdown to TEOTWAWKI" written on it. Below the writing was a little LCD display counting down the seconds to the end of the year.

We passed two more such hats on the way to the door. Of course, Greg wanted one.

In case you haven't been paying enough attention to the radical fringes of the Y2K frenzy, perhaps I should tell you that TEOTWAWKI stands for "the end of the world as we know it." The far right-wing gun-loving, government-hating, survivalist types have decided that Y2K is another thread in the tangled conspiracy being woven by "them" to take over the world. Of course, there are several different theories as to who "they" actually are, ranging from resurgent communists and the New World Order to the anti-Christ (www.mt.net/~watcher/y2kpage.html).

Greg just wanted the hat because it looked like cool geekware.

We bought our way into the packed crowd and started working our way down the overflowing aisles looking for the hats. It turned out the hat lost a lot of coolness because of its $29.95 price. Greg isn't really that dedicated to geek fashion after all.

This goes to show that while right-wingers sit out on the fringes waiting for "them" to strike, good old fashioned capitalists are using Y2K to rake in the money. Besides the hat salesmen, hundreds of consulting firms are specializing in raking over the ashes of old COBOL and FORTRAN programs to look for problems, and dozens of companies are marketing software to check out your personal computers and software. Perhaps the unemployment numbers won't look so good next January after all these entrepreneurs need somewhere else to go.

The press is a willing collaborator. Since they don't have Monica to kick around any more, they need another crisis, and Y2K seems timely. The scare stories are likely to become all too common as the year wears on. We may yet find out how much Geraldo knows about C++ object types.

Apple jumped into this frenzy with a big splash. During the Super Bowl they rolled out Hal, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Looking back from the year 2001, he (it?) assures us that Macintoshes had no Y2K problems. Some of us who remember the movie think Hal may not be a reliable spokesman. Perhaps Compaq should counter during the World Series with astronaut Dave Bowman's point of view. (Apple's ad is on the web at www.apple.com/hotnews/features/hal.html).

Shortly after the Super Bowl, a small Canadian company, Pedagoguery Software (www.peda.com), publishers of a Y2K problem detection utility for the Macintosh called Year 2000 Software Audit issued a press release trying to fan the flames. Their press release says, in part "Files containing dates can cause serious problems for applications written using the date routines supplied by the MacOS. The supplied 'StringToDate' routine currently interprets '89' as 1989; next year, it will interpret "89" as 2089."

Surprisingly, the press release was picked up by a wide variety of news outlets. But almost invariably their spin was that perhaps the Macintosh isn't so Y2K compliant after all.

The truth lies somewhere in between.

The behavior of StringToDate has been documented for years in that Bible of Macintosh programming called Inside Macintosh, or IM, for short. IM is a huge multivolume collection of documentation for every programming routine built into the Macintosh. According to IM, the behavior of StringToDate is a compromise between a full Y2K compliance and the real world, where older programs and lazy programmers sometimes used two digit years.

Here's how it works, according to Volume I, Chapter 5 of IM.

StringToDate is a routine that takes a string, like mm/dd/yy and tries to convert it to a full date in Macintosh format. The problem is what to do with the "yy" part. It contains three reasonable assumptions. If the present year is in the 1990's and yy is less than 10, it assumes yy should really be 20yy. If the present year is between 2000 and 2010 and yy is bigger than 90, it assumes yy should expand to 19yy. All other cases are handled by assuming the yy should be expanded into the century at the time the expansion takes place.

For example, this year, 4/15/89 is assumed to be April 15, 1989. But, next year, 4/15/89 will be assumed to be April 15, 2089.

Lacking any other information, these assumptions seem logical, and they will be right most of the time. Of course, there are cases where the wrong year will be assumed. But, there's no easy way to fix lazy programming which is many years old.

The bottom line is that the Macintosh hardware and operating system are Y2K compliant, as Apple claims. But, programmers outside of Apple may have written applications which are not compliant.

To help determine whether your programs are compliant, there's a plethora of Macintosh Y2K information on the Web. Apple's Y2K site is a good place to start (www.apple.com/about/year2000/). The Macnologist (www.macnologist.com) site has fairly long and growing list of issues with different programs. The Complete Conflict Compendium (www.mac-conflicts.com) and MacFixIt (www.macfixit.com) are also excellent sources. I find MacFixIt to be especially convenient because they have a Sherlock plug-in for Mac OS 8.5.

Potpourri

A few months back Microsoft Office was being attacked for security problems because sometimes information from deleted files appeared at the ends of documents. Microsoft quickly released a patch to remove such information
(www.microsoft.com/macoffice/productinfo/98dl/combinedupdate.htm).

Lately, they're getting attacked again because their Word documents contain information about the author which does not appear from within Word, but can be read with a text editor, such as BBEdit or Alpha. Such information includes complete names of authors, complete paths to files on the hard drive and the unique Ethernet hardware addresses of the machines used to work on a document.

Apparently, through the wonders of Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), different Microsoft programs are sharing information with each other. People have reported finding information about web sites they recently visited using Internet Explorer hidden within Word documents. Even passwords for mail accounts have apparently been found. Some of the examples are quite interesting (www.macintouch.com/o98securitysamp.html).

Microsoft has promised another patch to fix these new problems. In the meantime, an independent programmer has produced a program called BillBlocker to remove the extraneous information (www.raingod.com/raingod/resources/Systems/Macintosh/Software/Utilities/BillBlocker.html).

For years the browser wars have been dominated by the big two: Navigator and Explorer. Now, a small German company, Alexander Clauss & iCab Company (www.icab.de) is starting to promote a new browser called iCab. It's in late beta testing right now, and will be about $30 when it is finally released.

Anyone can download the beta version from their web page. It appears to be a solid effort which is fast and small. (The download is under 900K.) iCab is welcome relief from the behemoths we have been using.

Be warned, however, that much of the iCab information is in German, although an English download is available.

Another small German software company, Lismore Software Systems, Ltd (www.lismoresoft.com) is trying to attack the PC emulator market. They've released a program called Blue Label PowerEmulator which is similar to Virtual PC. Anyone can go to their web site and download a demo version or purchase the entire package for $19.95.

Unlike Virtual PC or Real PC, Blue Label PowerEmulator doesn't come with any operating system. They claim you can install most PC operating systems, including MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows or Linux.

I downloaded it and tried to install MS-DOS 6.22, without any luck. But, I haven't given up, because others have reported great success.

Art Software Group

The April 24 meeting of the Art Software Group will feature a presentation by graphic artist Paul Davis and a demonstration of new products from Apple Computer.

The Art Software Group meets at 1:00 in the Natural Science Building at the University of Louisville, 215 Eastern Parkway. For more information see their web site (www.aol.nu).

Louisville Computer Society

The April 27 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will feature a question and answer free-for-all moderated by yours truly, Lee Larson. Bring your computer problems to the meeting, and we'll see if the collective wisdom of the group can solve them.

The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.

[Previous Article | Next Article | Index of Articles]

/home2/lee/www/cgi-bin/textcounterdata/ [TextCounter Fatal Error: Could Not Write to File __lee_macwritings_LCN9904_shtml]