Friday December 31 4:40 PM ET Y2K Bug Disrupts French Forecasters PARIS (AP) - The Y2K bug was a fly in the ointment for the French national weather service's Internet site, officials said Friday.

The date on a page displaying Saturday's weather map read 01/01/19100.

``It's really a very minor problem,'' said Phillippe Courpier, assistant director general of Meteo-France.

A search of the World Wide Web found more than a dozen sites with similar date errors, caused by software that simply counted from ``99'' to ``100'' and tacked the number on to ``19''.

Programmers at the weather service had been searching for Y2K-related problems in forecasting and communications systems for the past year. But they had apparently missed one caption on one page of the Internet site.

``It affected only one template on the whole site, in a small caption, and it won't affect our forecasting services,'' Courpier said.

He said programmers were not immediately planning to fix the template because the problem was minor.

The page concerned is at www.meteo.fr/temps/europe/modele/sous-panneaux.html.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19991231/tc/y2k_france_weather_1.html

BTW: I ran into this problem with the way that Java calculates dates (I hate that language implementation) while responsible for Millennium testing for my projects at a large financial multinational. The Java GetDate() method returns the number of years from 1900. You have to actually add the 100 years to number 1900 where these folks must have appended the (numToStr) string 100 to the string 19.

-- Paul (paul@fakehome.com), December 31, 1999

Answers

Two "time and date" sites experience unexpected Y2K gliches

"One site, swissinfo.net, gave the date as January 1, 19100 in cities including Auckland and Hong Kong."

Cool, they already went to five digits so they'll be compliant for the year 10,000!

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 31, 1999.

I heard they used this same method of remediation for the Social Security System...

"You will be eligible to begin collecting benefits in the year 19100."

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 31, 1999.