Monthly Archives: January 2007

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Software reliability – defining the problem

Computerworld – Tanenbaum outlines his vision for a grandma-proof OS

Tanenbaum wants to mainstream a new metric: LFs (lifetime failures).

Though I generally agree with Tanenbaum about software reliability, and that it is important that we (as an industry) make progress in that area, this quote struck me:

When consumers go to buy an electrical appliance such as a TV or stereo they expect to bring it home, plug it in and see it work. And it is exactly what happens — for years on end. But not so with computers, even though it should, says Tanenbaum…

Uh…I run OpenBSD, Linux (well, ok, not right now, but that’s actually a deviation from my norm), and WindowsXP on my various assemblies of cheap PC hardware (all built myself – no vendor support for me! Cheaper components with shorter MTBFs! Yay!) – and I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a WindowsXP BSOD (ok, it’s more like the reboot-of-death now, if you have the default settings intact) since leaving Microsoft. That’s nearly 6 years without a [catastrophic] failure of the OS. I’ve had a few kernel panics in Linux and OpenBSD, but that’s because I was hacking. Neither have failed for me under normal usage scenarios.

The quote struck me because my electrical service goes out far more frequently than that.

I’m just sayin’.

Update:
Tanenbaum’s argument serves as an interesting corollary to my previous post about why we don’t make software better (probably the reverse, actually).

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Making software better

I’ve now been at work for 15 hours since I last slept, most of which has been devoted to tracking down a problem that makes me want to rip my hair out and a large chunk of which I won’t get paid for.

However, that’s not a big deal :-)

Along the way, I needed to look at a lot of ‘printf’ output. Normally, our software doesn’t spew a lot of debug information. We print a certain amount my default because it allows our customer to self-diagnose to a degree – but if we print too much, the customer freaks out and that makes more work for us when a vast majority of all of our output is purely informational. Even some messages that say things like “ERROR! THE WORLD WILL EXPLODE IN 10 SECONDS” can safely be ignored, so we keep most of our debug output off.

What that means to me tonight (this morning) is that I need to turn it on. Ok, great. There’s one line in a config file somewhere, right? Or maybe just one runtime “knob” (that reminds me, I should write a post about knobs) that can be turned? Heh. Wrong.
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There’s no place like 2006…

Here we are. Down here, in 2007, where you live (a little inside joke that only one other person will get). I’m currently working late, and I thought I might finally get around to my first 2007 post while I was waiting for the computer I’m working on to do things. What to say? The lives of my family and me are never dull. How can it be with year-old twins getting into everything? I suppose you could say our lives settled down a little bit in relation to 2005. I’m more established at my place of employment. My family has a routine, sort of. The twins are in the stage during which everything they do is super-cute. Even when they disobey it’s cute (which makes it hard to be consistent with them).

What else? Oh yeah, I knocked up my wife. Again. We called this baby “Scooby” until the birth because we didn’t discover the gender until birth. I’ll post about that sometime. It was different than I expected it to be. Scooby was born in the nick of time – December 31.

I submitted a patent application with some co-inventors. I won’t get rich from it because my employer owns it.

I’ve learned a lot about my industry and about the technical stuff related to my job (and consequently picked up a lot of professional confidence along the way).

Scooby’s impending arrival meant that we needed another bedroom in the house. This meant that my study had to go, or at least be moved. Moved to where, you ask? Outside, of course! We decided to put it out in a detached building on my property. For myriad reasons (ok, not myriad, but several), we didn’t want to get one of the prefabricated ones from The Home Depot and concluded that I would build one myself. See all my “detached study” postings for more about that. The main part of that for this post is that I severely injured my back while working on it. I was out of work for about a month. I’ve more or less recovered now, although I’m still taking some medication to keep the nerves in my back from becoming inflamed, which allows them to heal and prevents permanent nerve damage (which I understand is the cause of the chronic back pain that most people have).

Anyway, this has been an eventful year; one that can’t be done justice in a format like this. I’ll just close with this. God has blessed my family tremendously. He has given us good health, an uneventful birth of our third child, and family that seems to have an inexhaustible willingness to help us.