Thread by @cthiebaud

Happy New Year!

Well, my new year started "couci-couça" / "così così" / "so-so" / "so und so".

🤔

Last night, shortly after midnight, I had a glance at my hobby site covid.aequologica.net.

💣

Ach ! Patatras ! Badaboum ! The graph was empty ! Ganz leer !

1/n

Immediately I understood that something with the time/date handling had to be wrong somewhere. A modest personal variation on the infamous "Year 2000 problem", the "year 2021 problem".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000…

I was not at home (do not worry, I was safe), so I had to wait until ~2am in the night to be back to my Mac to try to fix the issue.

The hours before had been happily spent in the company of Moët & Chandon 🍾, then a quite nice Crozes-Hermitage 🍷, then back to bubbles ...

... with a Louis Roederer 🍾.

There is little doubt that this kind of company does not promote a healthy debugging.

Nonetheless, I insisted on fixing the problem as soon as possible.

The culprit was found relatively quickly, and, given my mental conditions, I decided not to try to produce a decent fix, but only to comment the offending piece of code.

😎

But after having commented a couple of lines that looked absolutely innocuous, horrible and incomprehensible exceptions started to be raised all over the place.

😱

My drunkenness, though relatively benign, made me behave in the worst of manners : as I was totally unable to figure out what was happening with the code, I felt outrageously humiliated, and wanted to prove the whole world that I was perfectly capable of doing this f...ing fix.

After some time, the duration of which I do not remember well, I had to surrender : some remnants of feeble consciousness helped me to craft a "we are on maintenance" display in place of the void graph, and I went to bed feeling excruciatingly guilty.

I woke up this morning, more or less clear, and I fixed the thing.

Continued: 2 days after …

I woke up this morning, utterly clear; I had a glance at my hobby site covid.aequologica.net. Guess what ?

Not straight 💣, but 🤔.

Though we were already the 3rd of January, the latest data (from Johns Hopkins) was from last year 31th of December.

Did the infamous "year 2021 problem" strike again ?

I consume covid-19 data through a kind-of broker site, that parses the Johns Hopkins University original and ugly CVS to a nicer and more usable JSON.

And …

… 💣.

Line 15 of the broker's script, below a self-accusing "HACK" comment, a blatantly hard-coded "2020" :

😂

I take some pride in having covid.aequologica.net continuing to be close to normal under these adverse conditions.

Even if pushing the 'start date' variable to the extreme left resulted in a graph whose interpretation is better to be left to fervid Philip K. Dick readers.

The good citizen I am duly reported to issue to the broker, and swiftly engineered and deployed to production a counter-hack that allows covid.aequologica.net to report correct 2021 data, even when pushing start date to its minimum.

That's all. For today.