Leap year birthday bug
fix offered
By Paul Krill
February 22, 2008
The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies, which
describes itself as the world's largest
Internet birthday club,
has released
free software to correct the "invalid birth
date" bug that can impact those born on
February 29.
Persons born on that date, which only shows
up on the calendar once every four years,
can encounter this
bug whenever
they enter their birth date on a Web site
registration screen, the Honor Society said.
The software also can be used in
automated birth date response systems that
usually ignore people born on
February 29,
according to the society.
"I think the main [impact of the software]
will be that when we get a birthday, it will
sort of be treated like
everybody else's
birthday," said Peter Brouwer, a society
representative who was himself born on
February 29.
He wrote the software as a
six-line Perl program.
Intended for Web designers, the software
determines if any year is a leap year and
can be used for birth date
verification.
The code is posted on the organization's Web
site. The society was formed in 1997 and
has more
than 6,000 members
worldwide.
|
