This post is coming to you from Sweden – a very fine country that I heartily recommend visiting if you get the chance. (If you’re wondering why I’m in Sweden – I’m here on business as one of my clients is located in Gothenburg). Anyway, the fact that I’m in Sweden is relevant to this post, as to get here I had to put myself at the mercies of United Airlines. Now the fact that the flight over here was less than perfect wouldn’t be news to any of you that travel regularly. However, the reason that the flight was a disaster is relevant, as I’ll now try and explain…

Upon arrival at the United check in desk at Dulles airport, I was greeted by an array of self check in kiosks, with a total of one real live human being to take care of baggage check in. Thinking myself to be computer savvy, I negotiated the check in kiosk with ease, only to be told that:

1. I had to see the human in order to check my bags in, and
2. The system was unable to assign me a seat and that seat assignment would be done at the gate.

The first instruction was par for the course, while the second instruction I found to be very strange. Anyway, I shrugged my shoulders and went over to the sole person working the desk. There was one gentleman in front of me. This gentleman, not unreasonably asked if he could use some of his frequent flier miles to upgrade to business class. No problem said the United employee, who proceeded to rattle the keys. After 5 minutes, he announced that although the system was showing that seats were available in business class, the computer system refused to allow him to assign a seat. This was the second clue that things were heading south in a hurry. It then took the clerk another 10 minutes to wait list the gentleman (giving a total processing time of 15 minutes). Although it’s possible the clerk was incompetent, I got the impression that he really knew what he was doing, and was just being stymied by the system.

Anyway, I checked my bag in and proceeded to the gate. When I got to the gate, I found another 100+ passengers that also had no seat assignments. When eventually I got called to the counter, I found a harried women with a sea of boarding passes printed out in front of her. She was manually searching through them trying to find my name. Eventually she found it and handed it over. My nature being what it is, I politely inquired as to the reason for this astonishingly strange system of assigning seats and issuing boarding passes. Apparently this was the opportunity that the clerk had been waiting for to vent her frustration, as she gladly explained to me that the powers that be had over booked the flight. And so my gentle reader, we come to the point of this post. It was apparent that the United system was unable to handle an overbooked flight correctly, and rather than degrade gracefully, had all but collapsed. At which point I started making some snarky comments to myself about database programmers and how surely all database programmers worked in that field because they couldn’t handle the rigors of the embedded / real time world and that any half decent embedded systems person would never make such an elementary mistake. It was then that I had my epiphany. We make the same mistake in the embedded world all the time. When was the last time you used RMA (Rate monotonic analysis) to guarantee that all your tasks would meet their scheduling deadlines? How many failures of embedded systems are caused by overloading (or over scheduling) and the failure to correctly assign task priorities. How many times do weird things happen in your code that you just shrug off as “one of those things”? In short, I found myself cutting a break to the poor sod that wrote United’s code. I was still ticked off though!

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Periodically someone tries to come up with a definition of an embedded system. For example there is an excellent and oft cited definition here. What got me thinking about this topic is the latest gadget I love to hate – my Verizon Treo phone running Windows mobile. A few years ago, there would have been no doubt that a cell phone was an embedded system. Today, the Treo, the i-Phone etc are all running versions of traditional computer operating systems, and are much more computer like than they are an embedded system. So the question is what are they – an embedded system or a computer?

Well today I offer a new simple test to tell if these devices are fish or fowl (foul is perhaps more appropriate), to wit:

“Is the device a pain in the neck to use?” If the answer is “yes”, then it’s a computer. My Treo is a computer. Enough said!

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