Bad Timing: Novel bugs for the New Year

New year, new technology, same old bugs but with a twist. More and more society put its faith in poorly tested technology and more and more we pay the price.

An unusual bug hit the Seattle Space Needle fireworks display just as the New Year started. A crowd of around 20,000 and many more TV viewers saw the display start a minute before the New Year, then stop as the Star Wars theme played. It restarted for a short time then stopped again. It kicked off again without the music, and kept going. Dennis Bounds, the TV host, evidently familiar with shopping shows, jokingly declared “The eight minute show went on about twelve minutes, so I guess you can look at it as a bonus.” It sounds like someone had a sore finger at the end, as the show restarted manually with lots of button pushing. According to the newspaper the cause was a corrupt file, and according to the TV repeated reboots of a computer had no effect. The software setup for a show needs a lot of preparation, and (you would expect) redundancy to avoid a single point of failure. As per usual the heroes at the controls saved the day. This is probably one of the most public software failures for a while, but who knows what the rest of the year will bring?

Heroes at the controls would not be able to save another unbelievable series of bugs, so let us hope the software gets fixed soon. A new prison in Washington, Iowa was the literal prison for the world’s unluckiest beta tester. The jail was scheduled to open on December 15, but has been delayed. A potential prisoner with an arrest warrant went to turn himself in, and found himself locked in. While this is definitely an acceptable scenario, there was no one else there, so he rang the police who kindly assisted him with his escape. (Isn’t that technically against the law?) Sherrif Jerry Dunbar observed “I guess he wanted to be the first person to turn himself in at the new jail. He was.”. He was also the first to escape, and probably the only one who will ever have police assistance. I wonder if the prisoner can sue for mental suffering? The bugs sound rather critical, like the software allowing all doors to be open at the same time, and the door labels on the touch screens not matching the numbers in the specification. Sherriff Dunbar is confident the jail will open on Jan 8, and I wish him all the best. It should all go to plan from here, as the company supplying the software is “Accurate Controls” (but not just yet!) [grin]

So, a new year, some bizarre bugs; here’s hoping for the chaos to continue (but on other people’s projects, not our own!)