It was the sh_tstorm that never really was: The dreaded Y2K bug.  Just because a computer may not be capable of telling the year 2000 from 1900 because some bright spark decided to only use two digits to record the date instead of the proper four, people assumed the world would suddenly end.  Power plants would shut down.  Chaos would rule the streets.  And if you didn’t stock up on portable generators and 15 years of toilet paper you were going to die a horrible death.

Of course that didn’t happen.

Mostly because people realized, der, it was actually a fairly easy thing to fix.  So each and every software company (that were still in operation anyway) fixed their products, and that was that.  No one wanted egg on their faces, so everyone got their butts in gear to solve the problems.

But also there was this great backup called the flexibility of humanity.  If something doesn’t work, you simple do something else until it does again.  Or you just keep doing something else.  And either way, life goes on.

Which was great.  Y2K turned out to be the Fake-ocalypse.  Apart from a lot of embarrassed stockpilers with thousands of tins of beans, life went on smoothly.

Of course, what society didn’t see coming was 2010.

What happened on our fabulous New Year?  Well for starters, about 30 million German bank cards stopped working because the “high-tech” computer chip inside of the cards couldn’t fathom 2010 being a valid year.  A fix to transaction machines and ATMs is, of course, being quickly worked on and deployed.  In the mean time however there are some folks who simply can’t live off of their card anymore.  Oops.

Also in the wonderful world of banking, some Australians are having similar woes because of a bug causing all 2010 dates to actually be seen as 2016, often rendering a purchase past the expiration date of a credit card, for example.

Likewise, this same 2010-to-2016 bug is hitting a lot of Windows smartphones, causing these Windows Mobile users to have some rather weird dates on their texts and such.

And then there’s the rather humiliating bug in Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Manager, which, horribly, was programmed to reject any definition updates dated later than December 31, 2009 11:59pm as “out of date”.  Yikes!  Of course, again, a fix is being worked on.

Apache SpamAssassin was also in the list of 2010 Woes and Dohs!  In this spam filter is a rule which states that any year past 2009 was grossly in the future (whooooo, we’re in the future) and nailed it as spam.  It being the year 2010 of course caused all sorts of problems.  Strangely enough, the bug was actually identified and reported in 2008 and fixed in the repositories.  However for reasons that remain untold, those fixes weren’t backported to 3.2 users.  Until now.

No doubt all sorts of other interesting bad programming bugs relating to the year 2010 will crop up.  And will be fixed when needed.  Because frankly, that’s life.  Sometimes things break.  Sometimes for darn stupid reasons.  But then they get fixed or replaced.  It happens in computer software.  It happens in everything else ever manufactured too.

It’s not often though that you can blame the problem on New Year.

Happy New Year 2010!