The failure of taxi meters here in the change over to 1999 was only a whisper of the problems that can arise from computers glitches caused by reading numbers wrong.

Computerised taxi meters went dead at noon on January 1 in Singapore for two hours as well. Hewlett-Packard external defibrillators, and Invivo's Research Inc.'s Millennia 3500 multiparameter patient monitors displayed the wrong time and date and needed to be reset. Apparently computers in police offices at three Swedish airports failed at midnight on January 1, unable to recognise the year 1999.

Perhaps this year we should lock programmers in a room and endlessly play the Beatles song Revolution 9 on the White Album that repeats "Number 9, Number 9''.

For it appears the number 9, which is the highest digit that can be plugged into a data code, can cause glitches in a computer. By convention programmers have used a series of 9s to indicate "end of file'' or "cease operating''.

The convention makes the dates January 1, 1999, April 9, 1999 and September 9, 1999 difficult for computers to handle. April 9 is the 99th day of the year while September 9 is read as 9-9-99.

Computers choking on numbers is nothing new. In 1996, aluminium smelters at Comalco Ltd.Fs plants in Australia and New Zealand shut down as December 30 was almost over. The computerised controls didn't recognise 1996 as a leap year and when the day 366 arrived the problem occurred. It cost the company $500,000 as several machine parts were damaged in the process and had to be replaced.

Facts you wanted to know: About four trillion pieces of E-mail were sent in the US last year compared to 107 billion pieces of first class mail delivered by the US Postal Service.

Web fad of the week: You can now keep track of your life on the Internet though an on-line calendar. Actually an on-line calendar emphasises the value of the Internet, the original concept of a resource shared by the community.

With an online calendar, members of an organisation can now share a common calendar, adding notes and events to it as they wish. Members can then check on the events or get E-mail reminders automatically through the online schedulers.

I can foresee doctors and other professionals eventually using them. Their patients can then check the schedule to see what times on a particular day are open. At first glance the online calendar is an alternative to having your own network and such programs as Lotus Notes.

ScheduleOnline at www.scheduleonline.com offers this kind of facility. Using the free service, ScheduleOnline lets you have a private calendar listing meetings you are invited to, and tasks you've scheduled.

You can assign three different levels of access to members of the organisation or group. An attendee may view calendars, create their own to do lists and sticky notes, and schedule tasks.

They may not schedule meetings. A scheduler has the power to schedule meetings. An administrator may set up and administer different "departments'' created by allocating members to certain sections.

The other calendars I'm sure will come around to the concept in time. Check out Netscape's NetCenter (www.netcenter.com), Yahoo! (www.calendar.yahoo.com), PlanetAll (www.planetall.com), Appoint.net (www.appoint.net), Dataferret (www.dataferret.com), Remind-U-Mail (calendar.stwing.upenn.edu), and When.com (www.when.com) for alternatives.

Those of us who use free E-mail accounts provided on the Internet through such companies like Hotmail and Yahoo! well know the advantages of having access to E-mail from any machine you choose, and from anywhere in the world without having to dial into your service provider.

Other companies offer free home pages. GeoCities, at www.geocities.com offers 11 MB of space on the company's server. You log in, sign up in a particular community, then get assigned a particular street. You can move from community to community. I'm trying them out to put up photographs so members of my family overseas can get a look now and then at what I'm up to during the week.

But while I was signing up for the service and filling out a customer form about my age and other information, a thought crossed my mind. What are all these "free'' services going to eventually do with the increasing amounts of information being collected? The information I filled out was quite innocuous and didn't seem evasive. However other sites seem to be knocking at the door a bit harder.

I went to see Enemy of the State last week. An entertaining film which was a bit flawed in parts. In it Gene Hackman returns in a role he played in the 1974 film The Conversation, which was also about the use of surveillance technology to intrude on personal privacy. If you have a chance get the video of the movie, which was directed by Francis Coppola, and is far superior.

New word of the week: "Cybersquatting'' applies to people who register Internet domain names in the hopes of selling them to corporations who might want to use them. The World Intellectual Property Organisation is attempting to stop the practice with a series of proposals to be submitted to the California-based body ICANN, the Internet's manager for domain names.

Domain names, or addresses, are the combination of letters and other characters that identify an Internet site. There are currently 4.8 million domain names registered around the world, with 70,000 new ones being added each week.

Any name not already in use can be registered on-line for around $100, thus preventing other individuals or organisations from using it. For example there's one site listing the domain name 'www.The-Beatles.co.uk' for sale to the highest bidder.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation was itself the target of a cybersquatter. It's domain name is wipo.int. A site set up by a cybersquatter as wipo.com was offered to it for $5,000.

TechTattle deals with issues regarding technology. Contact Ahmed at techtattle ygazette.newsmedia.bm or 295-5881 ext. 248, or 238-3854.