| Y2K's kin are still out there... I work with an electronic health records system. Recently they delivered a patch to customers because on Nov 8th 2023 around 0100 in the morning their time field internally would exceed its number of characters allowed. This was weird to hear about nowadays but I was still not surprised. They botched the patch and it was not a good time when it happened. A big chunk of their older code based systems use an epoch of Mar 1,1980, another newer code chunk uses Mar 1, 1992 as their epoch. And I've been told their newest platform uses yet another epoch, or calculates times in such a way to not be concerned. So while their patch increased the field size for the seconds counter, it has done so a few times only fixing the fields that use the epoch about to be hit, rather than all of them. In top of that, after the counter grew by a digit on Nov 8th,2023, they then realized, much to many hospital customer displeasure, that not all their code the displayed medical documentation/results, often sorted by most recent, accounted for the field size correctly, requiring two more patches last week. Math with time is hard, and even harder to know what systems have moved forward with enough future thought to still not have these surprises sitting in wait deep in their codebase. |