I arrived in Spain with no problems. Well, not quite no problems. Ryanair karma bit me in the ass for the last time I got a free checked bag. When I originally booked the flight, I hadn’t told them I wanted to check a bag. This morning, I went online and modified the reservation to include a checked bag, they said they’d be charging €15 for it. However, when I got to the airport, they said that they had no record of the change in their system and charged me an additional €25. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get double-charged.
Then, the security line was held up because the X-ray machine needed to be rebooted. It was a Windows XP-based system by L-3 Security and Detection Systems. The reason I know who made it is because they actually had the scrolling marquee screensaver announcing it. I have no idea why you would use something as complex and insecure as windows to run an X-ray machine. That’s the kind of place you should be using something like VxWorks or an embedded UNIX-based system.
My friend Danny rented a car, so he was nice enough to pick me up at the airport. We’re staying with a guy from couchsurfing. He was really nice; he showed us around the place and then took us on a driving tour to Playa de Pinedo, one of the beaches near Valencia and then drove us out to Bruño so we’d know how to get there Wednesday. The only slightly weird thing is that he gave us the keys to this apartment, and then took off until tomorrow afternoon. We had assumed that he lived here too, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The kitchen was completely empty, and there’s no clothes in the master bedroom. No idea what the real story with the apartment is (usually rented out, kept for mistress, something else?), but it’s a nice enough place. There’s good wifi, and digital TV (with English sound). Plus, Spain is about 15 degrees warmer and 70% sunnier than the Netherlands, so that’s always good.
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- Our bags on our beds
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- It wasn’t actually this dark
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- Evidence in the ‘he doesn’t live here’ category
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- The bare kitchen
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- The master bedroom?
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- The closet in the master bedroom
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- Living room with Danny on the computer
Trust me, as someone who had coded for VxWorks before, you can still make your embedded system suck if you write shitty application code for it, which is the root cause for most of these sorts of problems. And of course, like any Unix box, bad configuration can cause problems too, but this is one of the reasons VxWorks is so popular over embedded Linux.
But still, at least if you used a good embedded OS, you could use built in failure features like watchdog timers as part of your system design. Using a consumer OS with a kernel optimized for general interactivity is absurd. But the problem is, there are very few good coders embedded companies can find these days willing/able to work with unfamiliar tools on the software end, so sometimes sticking with .net on windows can be an appealing choice if you want to have an actual product to sell on budget/time. Also, years of bad apps on windows has trained end users to accept poor reliability and stability as a norm, so these manufacturers can get away with it too.