The Mudlogging Company's Year 2000 Compliance Program
We have identified four major areas of concern to our clients and others in the oil exploration and production industry.
1) Office application software, most notably software used in the Accounting department.
2) Field operations software used on the drilling site in the data acquisition system, the graphics/logging system and other subsidiary data display computers.
3) Microprocessor code embedded in sensors and data collection equipment.
4) Computer hardware supporting all of the above.
Office applications
As in most business offices across the country, The Mudlogging Company (TMC) is equipped with Microsoft software packages. Most desk top systems are Windows NT for Workstations version 4.0, the primary domain server is Windows NT 4.0 and Office 97 Professional is the primary office application suite. All Windows NT workstations and the server are upgraded to Service Pack 6a and the Y2K upgrade has been installed. All Office 97 installations have been upgraded to Service Release 2 with the Y2K upgrade (especially for Excel, Access and the ODBC extensions). All of these upgrades are identified by Microsoft Corporation as qualifying as Y2K compliant. Software packages not fully compliant with Y2K have been disabled or uninstalled from the systems.
Accounting software
Accounting software has been upgraded with the software designer/vendor's upgrades for Y2K compliance. EDT software was upgraded in January, 1999 for Y2K compliance. All clients currently expecting EDT invoicing from TMC have already received at least one invoice using the new upgrade.
Field operations software
Data collected at the well site was not affected by the Y2K "roll-over" at midnight December 31, 1999. Date and time stamps are recorded with each data record but are initiated by manual data entry by the mudlogging engineer. Data dependent on rates are measured by reference to internal counters in software and hardware not dependent on dates or the CMOS clock circuit. All of the data acquisition software is designed in-house and none of the software is dependent on date/time calculations of duration beyond one 24 hour period and are measured relative to the manual date and time setting preformed by the engineer.
Logging the data collected is done by an "off-line" database application and graphics system separate from the data acquisition system and totally independent of any real-time or date/time clock.
Microprocessor code
A number of our data collection instrument sensors are based on microprocessors, none of which require or contain a date/time clock. Data collected is typically 12 to 16 bit analog signals that are translated into 4 to 20 ma signals with no digital or time related components.
Other embedded microprocessor equipped systems, in particular gas analysis equipment, deliver digital data but do not use or deliver date/time information from hardware based RTC's or software managed real time clocks. Chart recorders do not calculate dates and record time information only as a duration interval from an arbitrary time point.
Computer hardware
All computer hardware now in use both in the field and in the TMC office have been tested for Y2K compliance at the hardware level. All BIOS EPROMs in all computer systems used in the field and office have been upgraded to the latest version and verified for Y2K compliance. All CMOS RAM/ Real-Time Clock chips fully support the 1999/2000 rollover without error. All computer hardware that does not support Y2K compatible operation has been removed from service.
Ongoing Compliance Monitoring Programs
In addition, the Field Operations and the Network Administration departments maintain email subscriptions to numerous Y2K web sites and Microsoft's Y2K site. Various Y2K utility programs have been purchased and utilized to measure compliance of hardware and software. TMC is already aware of the next "millennium bug" and has begun a compliance program for the "2038 bug", associated with the ANSI C library ctime routines.
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e-mail: info@mudloggingco.com