Your work looks very identical to mine and Charlie's from bug 3432. I don not want to seem rude but are you sure you got the idea yourself or did you just copy it from there?
Nope - I've never seen that bug. That's my programming style - I like to spell everything out in full with if-then statements. I do tend to use a single exit point too, but I'm not familiar enough with perl variables to do that, otherwise I would have. I know there is a bug in the RE - the dot in the middle probably needs escaping, but I'm not really sure how. For a permanent fix, I would also rename the function to something more appropriate, since it is more generic in what it decodes now. I found the script using 'find' from the /etc/e-smith directory, and greping for 'tai64' in every text file. There were three in total, the first one being right one. Need any more convincing...?
All I can say is great minds think alike

I would never try to pass off someone elses code or effort as mine. It wouldn't be right, and I would not last long here if I did. I guess we all happened to be looking at logfiles at the same time, with this problem in particular - I spotted that by the recent changes in the logfiles wiki page (which I thanked you for - check it out).
If it gets into the next set of patches, then everyone is a winner, regardless of where the code came from.