Picture courtesy to this blog.
I’m going technical today.
Remember the Y2K bug? The one where the date of 1st January 2000 appears to be translated by the computer as 1-1-1900? It happened because of the memory limitation where computer programmers previously only specify the range of date to be up until year 1999. They don’t expect their system to be available until year 2000.
Or so they thought.
Now, this problem might repeat itself on the year 2038. While not jumping into the calculation (you can read more of it on Wikipedia), basically it happened due to the memory limitation of 32-bit. The 32-bit memory calculated the time up until 19th January 2038, then it will reset the value to be a negative number. Picture below explains how it goes (courtesy of Wikipedia – click the picture to see the picture animation):
Solution? Upgrade your system to use 64-bit so that this kind of data can be calculated correctly. That’s the way to do it. This will effect quite a whole lot of applications that is date-sensitive; INCLUDING blogs, forums, and Web 2.0.
If you’re running your own self-hosted WordPress or any websites that capitalize PHP technology, try to run this piece of codes to see if your system is affected. Although most of web hosting is now using 64-bit Linux, well — you’ll never know. I am not sure if this will affect the Windows 32-bit system as well or not (maybe not, since the bug itself is called Unix Millenium Bug).
<?php
$date = ’2040-02-01′;
$format = ‘l d F Y H:i’;
$mydate1 = strtotime($date);
echo ‘<p>’, date($format, $mydate1), ‘</p>’;
?>
Code is courtesy of Tech Times newsletter from Sitepoint.com. Cool stuff. I’ve been reading their newsletters and webpages for so long now, and I’ve learned so much about web programming and other stuffs as well when visiting their sites.
So, are you affected? I’m not, luckily 
)
