The Y2KXI Bug

I don’t know whether I’m alone, but I’ve had two separate problems with computer systems which didn’t survive the transition from 2010 to 2011, making me wonder if there’s a more generic “Y2KXI” bug, like the famous Y2K bug, only more subtle…

On New Year’s Eve, my X10 home automation stuff was all working. On the 1st, the lights failed to come on at the appropriate time. After a bit of investigation, I checked the clocks in the two timer/controller units, both of which now showed a date in 2012. Clocks reset to the right time, things returned to normal.

Then last week I had a problem where I discovered my PDA was corrupting appointment times, converting the vast majority of my appointments to an all-day slot a day after the original date. This was clearly happening a few minutes to a few hours after synchronisation, and the original appointments in Outlook on the laptop were OK. At first I blamed the iPad (well you would, wouldn’t you), or maybe a component of Office 2010, which I have now partially installed on my PCs, but some testing confirmed that the problem was occurring even when neither of these had had a chance to affect the data. I then realised that QuickAgenda, which I had installed to show my diary on my PDA’s home screen was running very slowly, almost as if it was processing something…

Gotcha! With QuickAgenda removed not only has the corrupt appointment problem gone, but I’m also finding synchronisation much quicker and less prone to duplicate appointments. However, this wasn’t a problem in 2010.

Has anyone else noticed this?