Reviews: Y2K checklist, palmtop Sim City
If your Y2K bugs have been squashed and the champagne is already on ice, you won't need Conor Sexton's checklist. If, however, you're in doubt or denial, the hard-headed, practical advice he offers could, like a bracing dose of cod liver oil, do you the world of good.
He stresses that mainframe or server applications can be fixed in a quite straightforward, if very tedious, manner, using old-fashioned programming and testing methods. His chapter on the types of dates used in legacy programs and the different ways of fixing them (primarily date expansion, fixed and sliding windows and bridge programs) is excellent.
It is the client side of the equation, however, which Sexton argues has been somewhat neglected to date. If your network has a large number of client PCs, there is a need to deliver standard PC operating systems to all client PCs from a central, fully-tested image (a "gold build").
The book is full of sensible advice and even the most efficient IT department may find food for thought (or re-testing). Sexton's short, eclectic Y2K resource list is of practical interest and his short history of the Western calendar is of interest just for itself.
Tom Moriarty
Sim City for Psion 5, Purple Software, £50
IT'S a neat idea to take the original Sim City game and move it to the Psion 5. Even 10 years on, there is still enough in this original version of the city-building simulation to put most handheld games to shame. That it now works on a pocket computer, when many people remember leaving desktop PCs running it overnight, is a clear milestone of how far computer power has come.
As the chat-show hosts would say just before introducing it, Sim City needs no introduction as the classic simulation. The aim is to build a metropolis, developing land for housing, industry and commerce, and supplying the citizens with power, transport, policing and fire-fighting while keeping them happy by not spending so much that taxes have to go up.
This Psion version is great fun. It runs acceptably quickly, and laying out the elements of the city is as easy with the Psion stylus as with a mouse. It has always been a compelling game and having it on a computer that starts up in one second flat means it is brilliantly easy to duck in for a look at how the city is coming along.
The biggest problem is not the game's fault, but Psion's. The detail of tiny helicopters flying along or the microscopic radar mast at the airport is more than the Psion screen can cope with. The squint factor apart, this is just the thing to make a long flight (or a long seminar) pass quickly.
Fiachra O Marcaigh
