The Mars Surveyor failure was caused by software updates. A $154 million software error.

Was this the most expensive software error ever? actually no, seems that the Ariane 5 explosion in 1996 wins with $370 million. That of course if we don’t count the loss of human life as happened with the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine that killed at least five patients between 1985-1987 due to radiation overdose, or with the MIM-104 Patriot missile in 1991 that prevented the interception of a Iraqui Scud missile that killed 28 US soldiers at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, due to a failure in the clock, a failure that had already been discovered, but unfortunately no updated software was provided to the soldiers. The manufacturer sent instructions to work around the problem, but were not clear enough and therefore not properly used.

Saving money in testing can be very expensive!

More info in the wikipedia, the most famous computer bugs.

I can’t ressist linking to Ted Neward’s entry “Management Lessons for Developers”. It’s funny but it’s also true. I like the communication joke, it’s one of the more important skills that developers forget.

Finally it’s public, IONA has acquired LogicBlaze, one of SimulaLabs portfolio companies (the company I work for), with whom I was sharing offices all this time. Congratulations!

From Debbie’s blog:

It’s not easy to keep up with blogging, I had to forget about
blogging everyday from EclipseCON, specially when you have to
“socialize”, which basically means drink in the bar and
stay up late, with guys like these: IONA folks Debbie
Moynihan and STP Oisin
Hurley, Xfire Dan
Diephouse, ObjectWeb Adrian
Mos, moreUnit Vera
Wahler, Eclipse on Swing Dieter
Krachtus, Stephen Walli,
OSGi Peter Kriens, MVNrepository
Fernando Rodriguez, and of course SimulaLabs Philip
Dodds and David Schwartz.

After the conference I had the chance to meet another Spaniard in
the Valley, ZoomBlog and eGroups Rogelio
Bernal and enjoy a visit to Googleplex
invited by Gregor
Hohpe (I basically invited myself 😉 ), where I also met Dion
Almaer and Greg Stein,
both working on Google’s open source group. Pretty cool place, with
volleyball court on beach sand, free lunch and drinks (I guess all
non alcoholic), and all the things you probably heard somewhere else.
Something that is not as well known is that one of the buffet
restaurants where you can eat for free is all Spanish tapas, some
typical like jamon
serrano and cheese, and some more modern cuisine, pretty good
stuff, only missed some wine. But one thing they don’t have is the
view I have from my office 😀

Saturday and Sunday was time to go down to Los Angeles, all the
way through the Pacific Highway 1, stopping in Santa Cruz, Monterrey,
Carmel, Big Sur (great drive, specially if you have a sports car),
visiting Hearst Castle at night (which BTW it’s NOT a Castle, let’s
say mansion), Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, where I met another
Spaniard Spaniards.es creator
Eneko Alonso. It was fun
to drive, it’s a beautiful nature area.

Finally I got yesterday to Santa Clara, where EclipseCON is going
on. Saturday I drove all the way up from Los Angeles to Sonoma
Valley, stopping in San Francisco and Sausalito. Sunday I spent the
day in Sonoma Valley and Napa, visiting some wineries and tasting,
with a friend that I brought with me, people look at us and smile,
they even took us pictures, I don’t know why…

BTW I can’t believe how useful is becoming the GPS I just bought,
a Garmin Nuvi 370,
very portable (important when you have a convertible), with both
Europe and North America maps, MP3 player, bluetooth and all the
stuff. I guess I saved several hours by using it. The only thing I
don’t like is that it doesn’t save where you’ve been, that would be
pretty cool for auto geotag pictures.

Anyway, later on the day I got to the hotel in Santa Clara where I
met some other folks at EclipseCON,
the table was pretty much like United Nations, with people from
several countries and after several drinks the most quoted movie was
of course… Borat! Lots of fun with Adrian
Mos a.k.a. “Urkin, the town rapist” 😉 (Objectweb), Vera
Wahler (moreUnit), and many others, including as usual the very
British Philip Dodds, not
this one, I mean this
other Philip Dodds 😉

Now I’m sitting in the RCP
UI Development in the Eclipse Workbench tutorial, if you are
around make sure you check the bar at the Hyatt lobby this evening,
we’ll be there. We’ll probably be there since the afternoon, I’m sure
there’s people already there drinking 😉

A bit of self promotion ahead, my company, Simula
Labs, is listed as 4^th in this Ten
Leading Open Source Innovators report, over other companies like
SugarCRM.
In the conclusions
you can read how last year trend with big companies like Oracle, Sun
or IBM pushing for open source it’s going to continue this 2007.

I’ll be at EclipseCON
March 5th-8^th in Santa Clara, CA. You can meet me for
first hand info about Maven, OSGi, and Eclipse integration, just
leave a comment or ask for me at the SimulaLabs
booth, or look for me near the bar 😉

It’s gonna be a fun trip for me, I’m gonna drive from Los Angeles
up the coastline the weekend before
and down the weekend after, and hopefully drive around San Francisco
and Napa or Sonoma.

See you there!