 |
No news is good news: A television cameraman visiting the Federal Emergency Management Administration's Regional Operating Center in San Francisco, makes pictures of the preparations for the Y2K rollover. Photo: Courtesy FEMA |
Anticlimactic Auld Lang Syne
"Dang, it was dull."
This assessment of the Year 2000 rollover of computers on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 was e-mailed around the world by Eric Boettcher, director of information systems at the Eastside Journal of Bellevue, Wash., but it could have been uttered by almost any newspaper executive anywhere.
Sitting in their offices awaiting the impending doom, information systems and operations executives were heartened to be reading an e-mail list sponsored by IFRA, the Germany-based international newspaper technology organization. To sum up, "All is OK," was the underlying theme.
Including a few test messages sent out on Thursday, Jan. 30, more than 200 messages rolled across the system, with papers all over the world -- ranging in size from the weekly Journal to the mighty 1,108,000-circulation New York Times -- participating.
Messages began to arrive from papers in New Zealand and Australia as their countries greeted the new year. Dennis Orme of the Wilson and Horton Group (among its properties, the New Zealand Herald, a 250,000-circulation daily in Auckland City), reported in first, at 12:30 a.m. his time. "At this time no system failures have been reported," Orme wrote.
As 12 o'clock progressed around the globe, newspapers checked in, all with generally glowing reports.
But a few mishaps did occur, documented in this roundup from the IFRA Y2K Early Warning System:
There were some problems with voice mail and automatic telephone systems. Many papers reported glitches with Chatterbox, an interactive voice response system from Innovative Systems Design Inc. of Pierrefonds, Quebec. At midnight, some systems stopped working. A simple reboot seemed to clear it up (other Chatterbox customers reported no problems). At the 117,000-circulation News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., problems were reported -- and apparently resolved quickly -- with the Call Express-3 voice mail system from AVT Corp.
The New York-based Associated Press' AdSEND system had a glitch that the news cooperative considered not so much a problem as an "engineering issue." AdSEND, originally written to run on OS/2 (the now-orphaned operating system for Intel Corp. processors from IBM), builds its directories so that all the 1999 ads are at the top of the list, while the 2000 ads are at the bottom of the list. The wire service recommended to customers that they delete all the 1999 ads from the AdSEND box (most customers already having moved the ads to other systems) so that the 2000 ads would sort correctly. In another AP system, GraphicsNet dates also did not transmit correctly; GraphicsNet is run on a system designed to run on Apple Macintosh computers in 1987. Both of the problems will be fixed permanently when the news cooperative replaces that equipment with new Windows NT systems later this year.
There was a report of a problem with dates in the classified pagination system at New York's 308,000-circulation Buffalo News provided by System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento -- the Sunday paper's folios were coming out "Jan. 2, 1900." Further investigation by the paper revealed that it had not updated a composition format properly. Similarly, other SII customers reported problems with Coyote Layout -- SII's latest page layout application -- where two essential stories had been "inexplicably" set to expire at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. (Old SII customers knew that the original SII system -- variously called System/22, System/33 or System/44 -- had no way of setting stories to never delete. The custom in the late '70s was to set the expire of all stories to 12/31/99.) SII confirmed that this might be a problem but reminded customers that it had warned them of the situation (and the fix was easy -- recreate the stories, which merely needed two pieces of data in them).
Similarly, some users of Autologic Information International's Ad Manager found confusion with expiration dates. The Thousand Oaks, Calif. company's advertising management system would allow ads to be marked for deletion on 12/31/99 but also have a "Never expire" flag set. The company said that "no harm was done" but recommended that customers go through and change the expiration dates of the ads.
The 1-million circulation Los Angeles Times reported a non-production problem with its credit card bank used for subscriptions. The problem was fixed quickly.
Yep, Boettcher was right: dull as dishwater.
-- dmc
|
