Mon Jan 3 19:45:07 PST 2000 — It’s the first weekday after Y2K, and we’ve seen a number of minor cosmetic issues here and elsewhere on the Internet. Typical ones include dates displayed as year ‘100, or as 19100.
Here at Sonic.net, we’ve replaced the shell news reader ‘tin’ with a new version to address a problem where it was offering all groups as new upon startup, which meant you had to say ‘N’ to all groups to get into the program. The new version is 1.4.1, and is a release version that adds some nice new features as well. If you’re interested in continuing to run the old version, you can run ‘tin.old -q’ to get quiet mode so that it won’t offer you new groups. This will mean that you would get notification of legitimate new groups however, so we recommend just running the new version as ‘tin’.
Elm was listing some dates incorrectly, and we’ve updated to a newer version. The new version supports metamail better, and has a number of other new features. However, it does not include closely tied PGP integration, so you’ll need to filter any PGP mail to the command ‘pgp -fm’ if you use PGP. We actually recommend moving away from elm toward mutt, as it’s under much more active development, is faster, and supports larger mailboxes much better.
Our ‘Count.cgi’ counter program was displaying the year as ‘100’ instead of ’00’ for web pages where customers were using the counter to display the current date. We’ve patched the Count.cgi program to resolve this.
Our email invoicing program thought that the year was 2001 instead of 2000 and sent invoices to about 2% of our customers for 12 months longer than their usual billing period. This only affected customers billed by email, not credit card, so no charges were actually made. The software has been fixed, and new invoices have been sent to the affected users already, along with an email note of explanation.
Please keep us posted if you see any other odd behavior that you suspect may be related to the date change. Posting to news:sonic.help would be great. -Dane, Eli and Kelsey