

Bugs in the software flash the message "Something's out there" - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/bugs-in-software-flash-message.html

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tudorachim
Wow! I found this part the most hilarious: "To calculate information about the
influence of one weather station on another ... the code draws little coloured
circles (actually little 32-sided polygons) on a virtual white screen and then
goes looking for non-white pixels to identify areas for which data is
missing."

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scott_s
Scientific applications are usually written by scientists who are usually not
professional programmers. Telling them to hire a professional programmer is
like telling a struggling single mother to hire a nanny. It would obviously
help, but the money's not there.

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Luyt
If their basic data manipulation utilities are written like this, one wonders
how the source of their climate modeling software looks...

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scott_s
Why assume climate modelers are special? Most scientific code is going to be
like this.

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whimsy
Incidentally, in case anyone did not get the reference, the title comes from a
song called "99 Red Balloons" which is a brief chronicle of military awareness
computers detecting a group of red balloons as an incoming threat which leads
to a war.

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Tichy
I think it's very clever: they cover up their manipulation of data as bugs.
They might even get away with it.

Seriously, interesting to read, hoping for more!

