Thursday, January 01, 2009
So what happened to the Zune?
This new (or rather, end of) year story just made my day: every first generation 30 GB Zune reportedly freezing after midnight of 30th December or, starting 31st December, 2008. (See one forum thread here, or a Google trends graph for "zune freeze" here)
So, what was the issue? Apparently, someone forgot to take care of leap years in their code. I would _hate_ to be that someone right now.
This reminds me of my first new year at CT: more than one date handling bug in our code caused weird things to happen around the turn of the year. Thankfully, our failures were nowhere as epic as this one.1
I wonder how long us programmers will keeping tripping at each happy new year's.
Update: Apparently the piece of source code that caused this problem has been identified and is out on the internets. So what did it? Well, seems like a date routine from Freescale was the culprit. See this forum post for the gory details.
So, what was the issue? Apparently, someone forgot to take care of leap years in their code. I would _hate_ to be that someone right now.
This reminds me of my first new year at CT: more than one date handling bug in our code caused weird things to happen around the turn of the year. Thankfully, our failures were nowhere as epic as this one.1
I wonder how long us programmers will keeping tripping at each happy new year's.
1 The most any business guy reported was that some flight/fare was not showing up correctly, and no one apart from a couple of devs even knew what had happened (that was before we became heavy on processes, and JIRA was no longer a joke).
Update: Apparently the piece of source code that caused this problem has been identified and is out on the internets. So what did it? Well, seems like a date routine from Freescale was the culprit. See this forum post for the gory details.
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