Evan's Home Page

Site Search:

For more details on this decision and its aftermath, see the Voters Telecommunications Watch Net Censorship Focus page.

Interestingly, and with a touch of irony, the recently-released Starr Report would probably itself have run afoul of the CDA if it had become law, making it illegal to put it on the Internet without barring access to minors!

Welcome to my home page!
Here are some of my favorite Web resources:

• The Starting Points for Internet Exploration document (courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois) is an excellent way to begin surfing the Internet.
• The AT&T Message Center. Allows AT&T WorldNet users Web-based access to their e-mail from any machine that has access to the WWW. (Requires pre-registration.)
• AltaVista™ Finance. Perfect place to keep track of the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ so you can stay on top of that pesky stock market. Also see Yahoo! Finance and CNNfn.
• The AltaVista™ Search Page. An excellent tool for searching for Usenet articles by keyword. Also see the Deja News™ and REFERENCE.COM Search pages for similar capabilities.
• Interested in Internet performance statistics (useful when you suspect a router crashed somewhere)? In addition to the Internet Traffic Report at the top of my page, there's also the MIDS Internet Weather Report (IWR). I'm noting these as possible resources to check on how Y2K affects Internet connectivity starting on Dec. 31, 1999.
• Microsoft Corporation, for MS Windows and other Microsoft product support and some nice stuff you can download.
• For the latest weather reports and information:
  • University of Illinois Current Weather for the latest weather information and satellite weather maps of the U.S.
  • The WeatherNex USA Weather page. Access to dozens of weather forecasts, warnings, satellite photos, etc.
• The Web Interface to Whois. General Internet directory service.
• A couple of good Internet dictionaries:
  • The Computing Dictionary - a huge collection of computing definitions. Seems to have everything!
  • The Glossary of Internet Terms. Contains a short but fairly complete list of the most common technical acronyms.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation contains some useful archives and is another source of Congressional and other political information.
• The World Wide Web OpenFAQs will answer most general questions about the Web.

Note: Well, it's finally happened. While I was very (pleasantly) surprised by the near lack of impact of the initial rollover, a large number of "small" failures have already begun (see Y2K Information Links below). Fortunately, we still have the power and telecommunications infrastructures (including the Internet) intact with which to handle them. We'll see...

I have a strong interest in technical and project management methods to handle the potential computer chaos that could have been caused a year before the turn of the century (which officially begins in 2001) by the inadvertent two-digit-date bug introduced into code written years ago when storage was expensive and two digit years were all you needed anyway - I worked two shifts during Y2K rollover watching for possible problems and may eventually be working to help fix any future rollover-triggered messes, like it or not, so I'm interested. Calculations of differences between years getting messed up (e.g. 2000 - 1999 = 1, but 00 - 99 = -99), sorts going awry (2000 comes after 1999, but "00" comes BEFORE "99" in a two-digit-year sort, PCs booting up in the actual year 2000 but displaying a system date of 1984 due to BIOS defects - that sort of thing.

For an excellent overview of this situation see The Year 2000 (Y2K) Computer Problem, written by a computer programmer and (more technical) the Year 2000 Management Briefing, courtesy of Interactive Training Technologies.

Y2K Rollover Monitoring Links

It's getting close to the wire, so it's time to line up the facilities for monitoring the actual real-time effects of the Y2K rollover - whatever those turn out to be.

Event monitoring sites:

• Zone 2000 (also contains time zone information). You need to first sign up and be registered as a volunteer to submit Y2K reports from your own time zone - then you become eligible to read other volunteers' reports as they come in at Y2K rollover time. There's no charge or other obligation.
• The Grassroots Y2K Information Coordination Center (GICC), another volunteer Y2K reporting effort.
• The ONElist™ Y2K-Rollover-Watch mailing list (moderated list with free registration required). The moderators will be confirming reports submitted to this list before posting them.
• International Y2K Cooperation Center (United Nations site).
• The Emergency Response & Research Institute Year2000(Y2K) Resource Page.
• New Zealand Ministry for Emergency Management National Y2K/Millennium Event Emergency Incident Monitoring System.
• The Australian Year 2000 National Coordination Centre.
• Y2K News Network.
• The CNN.com Year 2000 site.
• Reuters: Millennium Status (their emergency backup site is here).
• IBM Year 2000 Alerts (IBM product issues reported during the Dec. 28, 1999 through Jan. 5, 2000 time period)
• The CERT® Coordination Center's Year 2000 Status Reports.
• Pages that point to lists of real-time-Y2K-rollover monitoring sites:
  • Gadwall Group - Real-Time Y2K Event News Sites.
  • DavisLogic, Inc.'s Y2K Watch.
  • The Disaster Center Year 2000 Page.

Time zone information:

• International Time Table by Country/City
• When year 2000 starts around the world
• Zone 2000
• My Arrival of Y2K In Different Time Zones page (JavaScript-enabled browsers only). See what times of the day (relative to your own time zone) the year 2000 will arrive.

Internet traffic information sites:

• Internet Traffic Report
• MIDS Internet Weather Report (IWR)

• An attempt to come up with some Year 2000 [compliancy] Definitions (from e-nonymous). (What the heck - this page needs some humor, even if it's of the gallows variety...)
• There have been a number of "minor" Y2K incidents since rollover. Here are some listings:
  • Year 2000 Ticker News.
  • Bug bite 2000.
  • Just for fun - Y2K Screenshots of Web pages that misdisplayed the year 2000 (e.g. "100", "19100", "192000") shortly after rollover.
• The Year 2000 Incidents, Year 2000 Bug Bytes and List of Y2K failures - Here is proof pages. These are summaries of Y2K-related and Y2K-similar occurrences that had already happened prior to the Y2K rollover.
• The CIA's (yes, that CIA) assessment of global preparedness for Y2K (clickable world map).
• The CERT® Coordination Center's Year 2000 Information page.
• The Y2K-Breakthrough Home Page. A well-written site with both sobering discussions of possible Y2K consequences and positive suggestions of what to do about Y2K.
• American Red Cross - Y2K Preparedness. Good summary of how to personally prepare for anticipated Y2K effects.
• Transforming Y2K, a site largely dedicated to psychological/spiritual preparation for Y2K.
• The Year 2000 Information Center. Probably the original Y2K page. Contains the "official" Year 2000 FAQ.
• The moderated Usenet newsgroup comp.software.year-2000.tech, devoted to Y2K technical issues. (The original comp.software.year-2000 is still there, but has gotten "noisy" since its inception - with a few notable exceptions, it's getting increasingly difficult to find useful information there.)
• The Unofficial Smallish Comp.Software.Year-2000 FAQ.
• Cory Hamasaki's Home Page (HHResearch Co.). Y2K from the IBM "big iron" point of view. Also see Cory's DC Y2K Weather Reports (mirrored nicely at the Mac @ Muse site).
• The PCTechnologies - Y2000 Survival Guide. Very comprehensive collection of Y2K links and documentation of already-happened Y2K-related or Y2K-similar incidents.
• The Pocket Gateway to Year 2000.
• The List of Potential Y2K Problem Dates. List of critical dates that might trigger Y2K-related problems when fed to programs. Another such document is Ravel Software's Dangerous Dates White Paper.
• Xephon's Year 2000 toolkit. A collection of Y2K-related technical papers covering various platforms.
• IBM Document GC28-1251, The Year 2000 and 2-Digit Dates: Guide (IBM BookManager® BookServer version). Excellent technical reference on the Y2K subject.
• The IBM Year 2000 Page. In particular, see Setting up a Year 2000 S/390 Test System (scan through the list of items on the left sidebar) to get an idea of what the mainframe people have to do to achieve Y2K compliancy on those "big iron" systems. (And you thought you just had to set the system clock ahead to 1/1/2000 to see what happened... ;-) )
• The AT&T Year 2000 Home Page.
• The Year 2000 Synergistic Mitigation and Contingency Preparation article. One of the sanest practical suggestions I've seen on making wide-scale Y2K preparations, written by the late Harlan Smith. In a nutshell, the idea is to put all efforts into creating an austere but functional infrastructure from which full recovery from Y2K can take place.
• Y2K & YOU - Helping Local Governments Cope with the Year 2000 Problem. Introduces a U.S. national campaign to alert local government officials to Y2K problems.
• The Y2K Cinderella Home Page, a repository of Y2K-related references and information.
• The Sun Year 2000 Home Page.
• The Microsoft Year 2000 Portal Page for getting Microsoft products into Y2K readiness.
• The SAS Year 2000 Compliance and SAS Year 2000 Discussion Forum pages.
• See Patrick O'Beirne's excellent spreadsheet FAQ and PC FAQ pages for tips on preparing PCs and PC software for Y2K. Another very good reference of this type is MITRE Corp.'s Desktop PC Resolution page.
• Karl Feilder's The Five Layers of the Year 2000 Problem (applicable to PCs - requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it).
• The FMS Technical Papers - Access, VB, Office, and the Year 2000. Nice concise treatment of Y2K programming errors in Microsoft desktop application software. Also see What is the Year 2000 Problem and How Does It Affect VB? for a good discussion of Y2K's impact on Microsoft Visual Basic application code.
• The "Year 2000 Problem" on PC Systems. A very good overview of PC BIOS Y2K problems, testing and fixes. Also see MITRE Corp.'s Time and Date on Your Personal Computer.
• A script checker for locating potential Y2K bugs in UNIX scripts.
• The PcCheck Home Page. This site serves as a resource for PC-related Y2K software.
• The PC Year 2000 Alliance. A new move by PC manufacturers to help their products' users become Y2K compliant.
• Y2K Short Date Format Issues. On your Windows PC, should you set a four-digit or two-digit year as the default "short date format"? It depends on your applications - most require the four digit year, but a few require strictly two digits. This page lists the applications requiring each type of format.
• The U.S. Federal Government General Services Adminstration (GSA) Year 2000 Information Directory. Also see the Small Business Administration's Small Business Help for the Year 2000.
• The U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem - now includes the Senate's report Investigating the Impact of the Year 2000 Problem.
• The New Jersey State Government - Year 2000 page.
• SEC Interpretation: Disclosure of Year 2000 Issues. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is starting to turn up the heat under public companies to get them to disclose the extent of their Y2K preparations. To see specific company disclosures, see Dr. Ed Yardeni's Y2K Corporate Disclosure page.
• Millennium Tragedy in Urbanville. A fictitious post-Y2K report of the aftermath of Year 2000 computer problems in a British city.
• The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Year 2000 page. Contains a recently-released report on electricity distribution Y2K readiness. Also check out their FTP site (most documents there are .pdf format, requiring the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them). In particular, see their NERC Year 2000 Contingency Planning Guide, Version 1.0 (dated Oct. 23, 1998) - a few months old but contains a very fascinating estimation of the likelihoods of various types of Y2K-related electricity distribution interruptions. (They're initial risk factor assumptions by NERC, which of course are all too commonplace when dealing with Y2K, but still interesting.)
  
  
• Embedded systems links:
  • The Electric Utilities and Year 2000 page. Includes an interesting - and disturbing - projection of the next few years as influenced by Y2K.
  • The Society for Information Management (SIM) Year 2000 Working Group Best Practices Conference (free registration required). Topic 11 contains excellent discussions of network and embedded processor Y2K issues.
  • The Silicon Investors Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem. Contains a number of very interesting articles on Y2K as it affects embedded systems.
  • Year 2000 Embedded Systems Vendors, Associations and Manufacturers.
  • Mark Frautschi's Embedded Systems and the Year 2000 Problem. Frequently-updated and very technical paper on embedded systems. In particular, pay careful attention to the descriptions of systems with pre-set default "epoch" dates that could fail some time after Jan. 1, 2000.
  • Paula Gordon's White Papers. This is a must read, written by an academic authority who has extensively studied the possible effects of embedded systems experiencing Y2K failures.
  • Embedded Systems, Clocks, and Year 2000. Another very comprehensive embedded systems link, designed to help the average non-techie understand the Y2K issues with these types of systems.
  
  
• Time Bomb 2000 (formerly titled Fallback) attempts to predict the upcoming effects of Y2K on everyday life.
• The Internet and the Millennium Problem (2000) Charter. Published as a work-in-progress by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), this is the most comprehensive (long) document on Y2K's possible effects on the Internet (and TCP/IP networks in general) I've seen yet.
• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Y2K Program Office.
• The FCC Year 2000 Homepage.
• The National Crisis Response Institute page (mostly dedicated to Year 2000 information).
• Year 2000 Bookmarks. A very complete collection of Y2K links. Also see Yahoo Full Coverage - Year 2000 Problem.
• The PC "Time Dilation" Problem, also known as the Crouch-Echlin Effect (recently updated), describing a little-known and apparently infrequent (research is still incomplete) problem with some 286, 386, 486 and even Pentium processors - the clock jumping ahead (sometimes backwards) on power-up and COM ports becoming inactive when the PC's date is set to the year 2000.
• The Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Y2K Working Group home page. Some interesting and informative Y2K-related information.
• The Year 2000 Paul Revere Community Alert on Y2k Threat to Core Infrastructures (Roleigh Martin's page).
• The NU Year 2000 Site. Interesting Y2K site with a spiritual and philosophical emphasis. Worth a look. In particular, check out the Y2K Movement Analysis & Recommendations essay - lengthy but worthwhile reading.

• My Arrival of Y2K In Different Time Zones page (JavaScript-enabled browsers only). See what times of the day (relative to your own time zone) the year 2000 will arrive.
• My Firefighting Tools for the Post-Y2K Crash page. Might as well start stocking up on supplies - software and otherwise.
• My Y2K Technical Firefighting page, for techies who are tackling live Y2K problems head-on.
• The Y2K Unix Script Scanners, my home-grown answer to non-Y2K-compliant date commands in Unix shell scripts.

If you have a Java compatible browser, you can get a "live" Year 2000 countdown by running my Year 2000 Countdown applet. The applet's source code is here.

Back to top of page.

Comments about this Web site? Please sign my Guest Book