I got to spend the holidays near home this year, and with everything else going on I didn’t really pay much attention to the Comair/Delta problem that stranded over 30,000 passengers last weekend. Now that I’m starting to pay attention to the news again, though, I was interested in ArsTechnica‘s discussion of the software glitch that made everything go wrong:
At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing. What happened on SBS’s system is that the massive ice and weather delays necessitated an abnormally high number of crew reassignments which overflowed a hard limit of 32,768 changes per month.
It makes a me wonder what hard limits I’ve left in code here or there.