Happy New Year! 2009

Jan 1, 2009

The transition into a new year is a difficult one for a programmer. When the year ends, dates don’t continue on, they restart. It’s like driving on a race track, but the track doesn’t loop. So when you complete a lap, you have to drive all the way back to the beginning (moving from month 12 to month 1). This can be a big issue for developers, especially when we have to take into account Leap Years and even Leap Seconds. With more programming languages including Date&Time classes it is sometimes easier, but there are still issues.

For example, last night (New Years Day) at around 1am, Twitterific for the iPhone wouldn’t load any tweets made before 12:00am. Or this past week, Intelliscreen would only load weather up to the 31st of December. Even the 30gb Zunes had an issue with the leap year. They came out in November of 2006, giving them more than 2 years of working experience and they didn’t see this bug coming.

So developers, make sure you test for New Year’s bugs. And consumers, if you programs didn’t crash, thank your developers.

Happy New Year, World!

On an additional note, here are my preliminary New Years Resolutions (list of projects to release):

Graduate Project (announcement coming soon)
Native iPhone Remember the Milk application
Icecast Log Parser (with Google Chart API)

2 Comments

Icecast, iPhone, Twitter, Zune

2 Comments

Mark Kobulnick • Jul 12, 2010 @8:45 am

Leap years are a pain. I had to write a Crystal Report when I started this job. As per our contract, we are entitled to “Bonus Vacation Days” based on years of service. For my “Years of Service” formula I used 365.25 as my denominator. One day the Payroll dept contacts me with a discrepancy. One employee received 1 less day of bonus vacation time. When I expanded the result to 4 decimal places, the years of service came to 19.9971. When I changed my denominator to 365.20, the years of service came out to 20.0000. Here’s the formula:

dateTimeVar d1 := {EMPLOYEE.ADJ_HIRE_DATE};

dateTimeVar d2 := {?EndPayPeriod};

NumberVar d3 := 0.0;

Numbervar Difference := datediff(“d”, d1, d2 );

d3 := (Difference/365.20000);
Mark Kobulnick • Jul 12, 2010 @12:31 pm

By the way, I changed the code to

Numbervar Difference := datediff(“yyyy”, d1, d2)

Much more efficient.

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