STL Time Machine Report #18 - Friday 29 May 1998 (1998-05-29)

Today I was looking at the scrolling message board in the lobby
of my building.  It's countdown clock still reports the number of
days remaining from 1998-05-25 for any visitor to see.  

In countdown terms, that's:

156 days until 1998-11-01 (Beta Test begins)
217 days until 1999-01-01 (External Testing begins)
582 days until 2000-01-01 (Rollover)

Off-site Meeting:

Last week I attended an offsite meeting for all systems development.
Our Y2K project director, gave a presentation.  I got a big laugh 
when he asked if anyone in the audience knew how many systems we 
have ("127!" I yelled).  Apparently, no one else reads our Lotus 
Notes Y2K database, and they all thought the real number was way 
high.  

He also asked everyone to stand up that had coded Y2K fixes, then
those that had been involved with testing, et cetera.  I think
over 75 people were standing at the end, and this meeting was
employees only.    

In the Q&A that followed, I asked if we were working with Electric 
Utilities and telecomms, because it wouldn't work too well if we 
were ready and all of Missouri lost electricity and phone service.  
That got some reaction from the other programmers, but our Vice
President took the question very seriously.  

High Level Assembler (Mainframe):

I had an internal e-mail from a contract programmer in another 
department:

"Hi, Arnold.  I hope you have the time to reply.

When investigating the impact of HLASM on our applications, can I 
believe the following is true..."  He then described how he assembled 
29 programs and compared the object "decks" against the IEV90 versions 
with ISPF file compare "...and the only differences I found was in 
the END 'card', except for one which had an extra ESD and TXT card 
in the HLASM version...My question for you is:  This sounds too 
simple.  What loopholes have I overlooked?"

I don't know, it sounds like a pretty good approach to me, but I told 
him he would still need to test everything.  

Another programmer e-mailed me with a question about our old 
assembler date routine.  We fixed it with windowing, but they have 
it statically linked into a program last compiled in 1995.  Was it 
okay back then?  Nope, recompile, relink, and test it.  And I 
recommended converting to dynamic linking.

I need to keep track of the support requests I get that are from
outside my department, just so my project leader doesn't think I'm
goofing off.

Thursday I called my bank, to see if I could find out about their
Y2K efforts.  After some transferring around, I finally talked to
a woman on their team, who promised to mail me some information.
This is a small bank that is probably too closely held to be easily
acquired.  If there's anything interesting, I'll post it here.

All the Group 2 Y2K testers received a nice little digital countdown
clock last week.  I keep mine at home.  582 days remaining.

Previous Time Machine Reports are available at:
http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/tmr.htm

STANDARD DISCLAIMER:  I am NOT an official corporate spokesperson.  
My opinions should not be held against my benevolent employer.

--
Arnold Trembley     
http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/
"Y2K?  Because Centuries Happen!"