Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 17
          "April 28, 1998 -  612 days to go."  WRP73
                         
    (c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in
its entirety.  You may optionally quote an individual article but you should
include this header down to the tearline.  I do not grant permission to a
commercial publisher to reprint this in print media.

As seen in
   USENET:comp.software.year-2000
   http://www.elmbronze.demon.co.uk/year2000/
   http://www.kiyoinc.com/HHResCo.html

--------------------tearline -----------------------------
Please fax or email copies of this to your geek pals, especially those
idiots who keep sending you lightbulb, blonde, or Bill Gates jokes,
and urban legends like the Arizona rocket car story.

If you have a Y2K webpage, feel free to host the Weather Reports.

Did you miss Geek Out?
Project Dumbass needs you.

In this issue:

1.  Post Jobs-Rossotti wants you.
2.  DC Atrocities
3.  FAQs
4.  Y2K story
5.  CCCC

------- Sunday Mega High Tech Job issue --

Hit the jobsearch engine hung off of http://www.washingtonpost.com.  April 26, 
included yet another mega-job issue.  It was terrific.  The Feb 8th mega issue
was 48 tabloid pages (half size); this one was 72 tabloid pages.  Anyone still
think this is hype?

I honestly didn't page through all of it. ...too many pages.  Also there were 
another half dozen full pages of programmer wanteds in the regular job section.

Sure, still a bunch of PeeCeeWeeNee ads, lots of Unix, but S/390, COBOL, 
Assembler, MVS, CICS, and Y2K was scattered through out the Post.  

The pick of the Week.  Big-Chuckie Rossotti's IRS is paying 25% recruiting 
bonuses.  The ad makes the New Carrollton slave pens sound like 4 star European 
hotel.  Here's what they say:
-------- All from Chuckie's ad----------

COBOL, ASSEMBLER. or C programming Language

Salary $55,969 to $85,978, May be eligible for up to 25% recruitment bonus
 
New, modern, state of the art facility in Lanham, Maryland

Excellent retirement plan

Wide choice of health & life insurance benefits

Child care center

Planned fitness center

Flexible work schedules

Convenient to public transportation

Committed to employee development

Free parking
----------------
It's a huge ad, very patriotic, 85K salary? That's not bad money.  What do you 
say Frank, ready to go back?

------- More DC atrocities ------

Here's a clipping for you to consider.
------- begin Virtual Xerox ------
On 14th St., Good Deed Was Fatal
Members of Gang Charged in Slaying

By Avis Thomas-Lester
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 25, 1998; Page B01 

Warren Helm, an aspiring clergyman, was not the sort who turned a
blind eye to others' troubles. He would stop to help a stranger, if need
be. And in the end, it got him killed.

Helm, 28, a theology student at Virginia Union University in
Richmond, was beaten, stomped and stabbed March 15 after
intervening when he saw several members of a Northwest
Washington street gang attacking a homeless man.

Helm and three friends were riding in a car on 14th Street NW just
before 3 a.m. that Sunday when they saw eight assailants savagely
beating the man, according to police.

"Somebody who was in the car told me [that] Warren said, 'We've got
to stop and help that man,' " said Shelia Graves, Helm's mother. "He
said, 'We can't just let this happen.' . . . That was just like Warren."

Within minutes, Helm lay bloodied and dying on the pavement. So
far, four men have been charged with murder in the attack and are
being held without bail. D.C. police homicide detectives have
obtained arrest warrants for two other suspects. The investigation is
continuing, authorities said, and more arrests are possible. It was,
prosecutor Anthony Asuncion said, "everybody's worst urban
nightmare come true."

According to authorities, two rival gangs made up of Salvadoran
immigrants -- one gang called Mara R, the other Mara S -- got into an
altercation inside the Diversite Club, a nightspot in the 1500 block of
14th Street NW.

"It started with a loud argument and escalated into a fight," said one
law enforcement source. A bouncer who was trying to break up the
melee was hit on the head with a bottle, prompting two security
guards to stop the music in the club and order the gang members to
leave, police said.

Members of Mara S apparently left the club and the neighborhood,
police said. But members of Mara R allegedly gathered outside the
club and got into an altercation with a homeless man standing at a bus
stop. Police said that eight of them jumped the man as he pleaded to
be left alone and that several motorists passed by without stopping to
help.

Helm, of Vienna, was home from school for a week on spring break.
Police said he and his three friends got out of the car on 14th Street
and yelled for the attackers to stop. The eight gang members were
then joined by several other men, and they turned on Helm and his
friends, police said. They chased them back to the car. Helm's friends
made it into the vehicle, police said, but Helm did not.

Some of the gang members grabbed Helm and began to beat him as
others descended on the car, breaking a window with a concrete
block and pelting the vehicle with kicks and punches. One of the men
in the car suffered a cut to his hand when a gang member slashed him
with a sharp object, authorities said.

Fearing for their lives, Helm's friends drove away, leaving him
behind, police said. They returned later, but it was too late.

Alone, with the gang members at his heels, Helm ran along 14th
Street, stopping to bang on the windows of passing cars, pleading for
help. "People saw him and kept driving," said one law enforcement
source. "They refused to stop and help him. They just left him alone to
face that mob."

Helm ran several blocks before approaching a car that was blocking
his path, apparently thinking it belonged to a motorist who wanted to
help, police said. What he didn't know was the men in the car were
gang members who had driven ahead to cut him off.

In the 1800 block of 14th Street, the men in the car, joined by the
gang members on foot, waylaid Helm. Somebody punched him,
police said. Somebody knocked him down. Somebody stomped him.
Then someone pulled a knife and stabbed him. Then someone else
stabbed him. They kept kicking and punching and stabbing until three
people in a car stopped and diverted their attention, authorities said.

One of the men in that car, a nurse, was kicked in the throat as he
tried to help Helm, according to police. A woman in the car called
police on her cell phone. On a police recording of the 911 call, the
woman is heard pleading with authorities to hurry as she yelled at the
the attackers, "You're sick!"

As police cars approached with sirens blaring, the nurse tried to stop
Helm's bleeding. "I can't breathe. I can't breathe," Helm kept saying,
according to police.

Helm "was transported to Howard University Hospital . . . with
life-saving efforts in progress," Detective Eric W. Gainey wrote in a
court document. "All life-savings efforts proved unsuccessful."

The gang members ran away. Police said two men, Carlos Alberto
Robles-Benavides, 20, of the 1400 block of W Street NW, and Jose
Benitez, 27, of Wheaton, were arrested after an officer saw them
walking nearby in bloody clothing.

Shortly after the attack, some of the gang members allegedly went to
an illegal gambling house, where they showed off a bloody knife. The
next day, some of them allegedly bragged about the slaying at a
nearby pool hall.

A week later, a third suspect, Santos Bonilla, 25, was arrested at his
home in Northwest Washington. A fourth suspect, Oscar Villatoro, 19,
of the 2400 block of 16th Street NW, was arrested Wednesday in
front of the apartment building where he lives. The two suspects for
whom police have obtained arrest warrants are Walter Velasquez, 24,
and Douglas Ventura, 20, both of Northwest Washington.

At a recent preliminary hearing for three of the suspects, prosecutor
Asuncion told a D.C. Superior Court judge: "I deal with death and
dying on a daily basis. And yet, even as homicides go, this case stands
out for its viciousness and savagery. . . . [Helm] did what very few
would have done under those circumstances, come to the rescue of
another human being."

Members of First Baptist Church of Merrifield, in Falls Church, were
stunned on that Sunday morning when the minister announced Helm's
death. Many had known him as a youth volunteer and caring friend.
Two weeks later, the church overflowed as hundreds of people paid
their last respects to him.

"I just couldn't believe it," said Lofton Harris, 64, a mentor and
longtime friend of Helm's family. "I kept thinking they have got to
have the wrong guy. This couldn't have happened to Warren. He's a
wonderful young man. He had so much to contribute."

A few years ago, after working a series of jobs, Helm decided to
study theology, his mother said.

Harris said Helm was attracted to the ministry in his search for
answers about life. "He was always seeking, searching," Harris said.
"He was the kind of young man who wanted to find the truth. He was
seeking the will of God for his life."

Helm's mother, director of human resources for the D.C. public
schools, said that if her only child had to die, it was fitting that he died
trying to aid someone.

"It was part of his nature to help people," Graves said.

¸ Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
------- end Virtual Xerox ------

Led by a drug-loving ex-con, the collapse of DC into barbarism continues...
savages swarm into the streets and kill innocent people.  Please, if you are 
traveling through the area, avoid the District at night, stay in Maryland or 
Virginia.  Visit Leesburg, Annapolis, any place but the district.   Armed FBI
agents, working in their offices, have been shot by crazed, revenge seeking
goons.

Those who think paul milne is nuts, reread the above story.  Calling those scum 
animals is an insult to a cow, pig, rat, or fox.

------- Abstracts ---------------
This question comes up weekly if not daily.

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998 11:18:34, Pellman1@worldnet.att.net (Greg) wrote:

> First of all, let me preface this post by saying "Yes, I am a Lamer who 
> doesn't know squat about COBOL, or computer programming in general.  
> Second, I am a person who will be stocking up on Tuna Fish, Can's of 
> Vegetables, Chef-Boy-ar-dee and all the other non-persihable stuff when 
> 2000 rolls around.  Third, my money will be out of the stock market and 
> buried somewhere safe when Y2K rolls around.
> 	My Question is this:  Since it will obviously be impossible to 
> detect and correct xx billion lines of code prior to Y2K, why not replace 
> the current ancient, dinosaurs, pieces of shit computers that people are 
> worried about (Mainframes??) with new MicroComputers.  I hear Intel, 
> Cyrix and AMD make really powerful chips :)..........Am I out in left 
> field???  It seems replacement is more practical than correction.  Please 
> advise

Yes, the chips are powerful but that isn't the issue.  The core business logic
is the issue.  By the time the core business logic is rebuilt on a pee cee, 
it will be 2025 or so.  It is much, much faster to fix the business logic on 
the current platform.

As much as I prefer date expansion, windowing using a parameter file is the 
way to go.  There is no good solution when you window; the cost, benefit,
flexibility, readability, maintainability trade off is a local business
decision.  When you implement the parameter file, include spare date slots, 
not all systems, files, fields, will pivot on the same date.  Also include a 
dictionary of the modules that read the parameter as well as a trace file that
logs the parameter file access.

The module would declare the name of the date parameter that it needs and the 
date pivot function would perform the pivot and if it is the first call, it 
would log the parameter file access.  If you really want to get 'software 
engineering' about it, you'd build a module dictionary and require that 
modules identify themselves too.  This could all be done in a couple pages of 
a compiler language.   Authenticate everything, log all accesses, and you're 
home free.

Think about it for a couple days, then put your head down and start patching 
code like a berserker, put the lamentations of the vemem out of your mind.

As for the piece of shit comment, take at look at the current issue of Byte 
Magazine, a usually clueless and confused rag; in this issue, Byte discusses 
the incredible performance and reliability of mainframes... and they 
understate it.  The companies that abandon that kind of dependability are 
setting themselves up for problems.  

cory hamasaki

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998 22:19:40, Jo Anne Slaven <slaven@rogerswave.ca> wrote:

> Jo Anne Slaven wrote:
> 
> > Being an accountant who has worked with many mainframe and PC accounting
> > systems, I can tell you that when a new fiscal year starts, the system
> > has to know what the last day of the fiscal year will be. For a fiscal
> > year beginning on, say, April 1, 1999, there will be 12 monthly
> > accounting periods it will have to recognize. April 30, 1999 up to March
> > 31, 2000.
> > 
> > In my mind, I can see the computer thinking that the months are out of
> > order just as soon as fiscal 1999 is closed and fiscal 2000 is opened
> > up. Then what happens? Will it show Jan 1 00 as the first day of the
> > fiscal year by accident? Or will the software simply decide that the
> > whole thing is just too ridiculous for words, and shut down completely?
>  
> > As you should be able to tell from my comments above, budgeting probably
> > won't be the important issue here. Getting the system to recognize the
> > fiscal year will be the issue.
> 
> I realize that it's tacky to follow up to my own post, but if what I've
> said above is the case, there are only 8 1/2 months to fix it.
> 
> Jo Anne

Makes sense, FY98, FY99 is not issue.  As you point out it's the actual date 
of the end of the period.  If FY99 ends in September 1999, no obvious problem.

Stop me if you heard this one before.... nah, like any old fogger, I'll tell 
the same tired story again...  000197AF, it's on the webpage.  The failure 
happened on December 1, 1979. The software was trying to figure out what the 
last day, hour, minute, second of the month was...  Ah-ha, it said, it's the 
second before 00:01.00 January 1, 197A.

It happened as the first jobstep ended and the SMF and billing was being 
calculated in the early morning of December 1, 1979.

So our new pal, Jo Anne (of Jo Anne's Bed and Back stores?) has solved the 
question of where the New York FY problems have gone.  The nest of problems 
occur 1 year before the first second of 2000.  It's too early.

FY98, FY99, are just names, they don't mean anything.  It's the actual 
bounding datetimes that matter.

Good going, Jo Anne, you win this week's c.s.y2k technical breakthrough award.

..and this proves the value of c.s.y2k over all those other venues.

Amazing, it's so clear now.  Aren't the rest of you embarrassed?

------------- Y2K Man 2, a story -------------------
Y2K + 4, April 19, afternoon.

He had a good pair of boots, a change of clothes, a tarp, a couple
knives, a small cooking kit, and a stainless steel S&W revolver with 100
rounds in two small plastic boxes.  He had cached the AR-15, sealed it
in plastic sewer pipe back in Maryland.  It was a fine weapon but more
than he needed and more than he wanted to carry.

The danger wasn't from shooting and bandits, it was from disease,
infections, lack of medication, and poor sanitation.  At least 30 % of
the population was dependent on technology, regular medication, insulin,
blood pressure pills, heart pills, vasco dilators, anti-psychotics, and
all the other Easter candy of modern phamacopaeia.  Add to them, those
dependent on invasive technology, heart monitors, dialysis, walking
aids, breathing aids and other machine age wonders. Once the power went
out, they didn't last a month.

In addition, new cases were not diagnosed and treated, the doctors and
nurses had their hands full getting food for themselves and caring
for their families, the hidden efficiencies of civilization were
revealed by the increased death rate.

-to be continued...
---------------CCCC -------------------

Y2K is sneaking up on us,  612 days left and the work still hasn't started.  Oh 
sure, here and there a few farsight companies are pressing hard but most are 
still in strong denial.  Sure rates for legacy systems people have doubled but 
that only means that programmers who barely earned $45,000 a year ago are now 
turning down $90,000 jobs.  Any doubters on rates?  If you have a pulse and can 
spell COBOL, Chuckie Rossotti will pay you $85K on a federal, GS job.  With
bonuses!  If that's what the feds are paying, what will a bank or insurance
company pay?  I'm thinking the right number is on the happy side of $100K.

But what do I know... I'm clueless.

(Secret messages >>>--->> I've discussed your resumes w/ Matt and he's putting a
proposal in to his client this week.  Got a couple other teaming efforts going, 
we're looking for clients who are serious about solving their Y2K problem, not 
interested in turning the crank on a remediation mill for doomed organizations. 
I'll be faxing some notes to Adrian.)

And as I expected, Shmuel and DD are twins separated at birth.  Which one will 
be played by Danny DeVito and which by Arnold Schwartsnegger?  Stay tuned to 
c.s.y2k as the Shmuel+DD doublemint twins continue their dance.

Sorry to be late on this DC WRP but I've been busy and just got the system 
working again last night.  I applied a series of Y2K fixes which crippled my 
system.

I have a backlog of DC WRP material including two submissions from readers
so the next one will be out soon.

cory hamasaki  612 days  14,703 hours