So, $CURRENT_EMPLOYER uses what I believe to be a modified version of AIM, integrated loosely with Lotus Notes, called Sametime for internal communication. This application allows you to save chat transcripts, and proposes a default filename of the format:
User Name.[M]M[D]DYYYY.[H]HMM {A,P}M.txt
Aside from the variable length of the file names and the internal spaces (which make dealing with them in ksh under U/WIN kind of a pain), this has one catastrophically big problem. To whit, was I chatting up your mom on November 2 or on January 12:
Your Mom.1122003.112 PM.txt
Yeah, exactly. You can't know. (Sure, look at the mtime on the file, which is what my Perl script to clean up this directory periodically so that it's actually useful will do in questionable circumstances, but stuff like Notepad, and even gvim–which is what double-clicking .txt gets you on my XP laptop from work–whack the mtime, so that's not exactly bullet-proof.)
It blows me away that you'd take the time to generate a date, but have it be in such a completely useless format. Morons.
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