Took me a lot of head scratching before I realized that the system was just YDDD, where Y is the last digit of the year (in this case, 9) and DDD is the number of days into the year (so 365 is December 31st in normal years).
This is definitely the weirdest example of the Y2K problem I've seen.
yep that's it...
Which, it should be noted, is unrelated to the Julian Calendar. That one confused me for a while.
yeah i was going to say that i know they aren't truly julian dates but... i figured someone else would point it out. i guess you could think of it as the last 3 digits are julian dates but they just reset every year?