Municipal Court plans Y2K testing

This holiday weekend will be a labor of nervous data entry in Las Vegas Municipal Court as office staffers conduct a final Y2K compliance test on computer programs.

Customer service won't be affected because the testing will occur after the court closes Friday and before it re-opens Tuesday morning after the holiday weekend.

"Essentially, we should identify any bugs and get them taken care of this four-day weekend," said court administrator Mike Haveman.

The test is crucial to ensure important criminal and civil case data is not somehow lost when court dates must be set for 2000.

So far, the departments that have scheduled cases into 2000 have written them down to be certain they are not lost if a Y2K problem occurs on Jan. 1.

Y2K problems are related to some computer technology's inability to recognize dates as four fields of entry. The computer might only be programmed to understand the last two numbers of a year, and thus the 00 could confuse the program to think it is 1900.

That was the case with the court's Legacy computer system. However, the city's Information Technologies department fixed the codes, and an initial test of the program six weeks ago proved positive.

"We went through it, and it looked pretty good," Zammito said. "But that was just the software."

This weekend, court staff will be asked to input thousands of records to run on the fixed system. Many canceled vacation plans to assist in the massive data input.

By Sunday night the court expects all of the information to have been entered. At that point a final Y2K test will be done using the records.

Among the things staffers will test are whether they can print out files, set calendars, check records and accept financial payments at the counter.

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