Computer Glitch Halts Seattle New Year's Fireworks

supersat writes "At the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve, Seattle's fireworks show ground to a halt. The source of the problem is reported to be a corrupted file that wasn't checked until the last minute. After two reboots, the fireworks had to be detonated manually. And yes ... one blog commenter, claiming to have worked on prior shows, said that the shows run on Windows."

Comments

Re:Runs on Windows?

[v1]

It says "BSOD" in several places in the article. Unless you are writing bad drivers, (which I'd admit may have been an issue, seeing as they are interacting with hardware, the fireworks squibbs) software or data problems should not be able to cause an OS crash unless your OS sucks. (though the squibb board was likely USB controlled)

Speculating wildly, it appears to be a case of where windows just randomly corrupts something on the HD and this time it just happened to nail something the OS needed, and was only discovered when they ran it live.

Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance. Fireworks shows should have a fully functional computer system that runs completely to the end live, tested. The squibb board should have LEDs, one for each squibb, that light up as the computer fires them, so you can dry run it as many times as you like, watching the LED board to make sure everything goes off as planned. A security key on the board provides power to the squibbs themselves, so you can do a complete live run through the entire computer controlled show as many times as needed before the showmaster inserts and turns the key to heat up the squibbs and they just press the "do it again" button on the computer. There is no excuse for this.

But can't say for sure that even THAT would have helped matters in this case. Windows is known to spontaneously corrupt its OS files, and this could have very easily happened during their final test at 11:40 pm. But for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes. Put it on two machines. The squibb board was likely serial or usb anyway so you could even drag your laptop from home as a backup because the computer has no special hardware installed. Again there is no excuse for this failure, unless your squibb board catches on fire or something like that which you can't double up on.

Anyone quoting me for a big show that tried to tell me they were providing a single (windows or otherwise) computer the whole thing hinged on and there was no hot spare, would be promptly shown the DOOR.