meeting-scheduling software

[cellio]

I just used MeetingMaker to schedule a weekly meeting. It requires that you specify an end date -- or you can just check "ongoing". Doing the latter causes it to fill in an end date of 12/31/2039. (Which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering. My recurring meeting is on Tuesday, so one could argue that it should have set the end date differently.)

It quickly reported the two dates this year that some attendee isn't available. This made me wonder whether it was, in fact, searching a sparse calendar all the way through 2039, in which case it gets points for speed but maybe not for appropriateness, or whether it has some built-in limit for how far ahead it will search for conflicts.

By the way, the odds are very good that the room in which my 34-year recurring meeting occurs will cease to be available later this year.

Comments

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

With a very simple change, the Unix universe can end in 2105 instead of 2038. (Make "time_t" an UNsigned integer.)

What's more, if you implement that simple change, then at the fateful time on the fateful day in 2105, it will suddenly become 1 January 1970.

[cellio]

I'll bet people will ignore the problem until late in 2037 and then make exactly that fix -- but at high contractor costs because they waited. Some people didn't learn from Y2K.

Apropos of nothing, the prayer book my synagogue uses for the high holy days has a Y5.8K problem. The current year is 5765, so they'll probably propegate a new version before it becomes relevant. (The liturgy for Rosh Hashana, the new year, includes a place where you insert the date (in Hebrew). They helpfully filled in the first two digits.)