I was in high school in the late 1980’s when NHTSA (pronounced “nit-suh”), Transport Canada, and others studied complaints of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000 vehicles. Looking back on the Audi issues, and in light of my own recent role as an expert investigating complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles, there appears to be a fundamental contradiction between […]
Tag: reliability
Lethal Software Defects: Patriot Missile Failure
During the Gulf War, twenty-eight U.S. soldiers were killed and almost one hundred others were wounded when a nearby Patriot missile defense system failed to properly track a Scud missile launched from Iraq. The cause of the failure was later found to be a programming error in the computer embedded in the Patriot’s weapons control system. On February […]
Apple’s #gotofail SSL Security Bug was Easily Preventable
If programmers at Apple had simply followed a couple of the rules in the Embedded C Coding Standard, they could have prevented the very serious `Gotofail` SSL bug from entering the iOS and OS X operating systems. Here’s a look at the programming mistakes involved and the easy-to-follow coding standard rules that could have easily prevent the bug. In case […]
An Update on Toyota and Unintended Acceleration
In early 2011, I wrote a couple of blog posts (here and here) as well as a later article (here) describing my initial thoughts on skimming NASA’s official report on its analysis of Toyota’s electronic throttle control system. Half a year later, I was contacted and retained by attorneys for numerous parties involved in suing Toyota for personal injuries and […]
Introducing Barr Group
In the ten months since forming Barr Group, I have received many questions about the new company. As we enter the new year, I thought it a good time to use this blog post to answer the most frequently asked questions, such as: What does Barr Group do? Who are Barr Group’s clients? How is Barr […]
How to Reduce Electric Utility Outages
A couple of weeks ago we had a heavy, wet snow that took down many trees and in the process interrupted power for a significant number of people. By some estimates nearly 300,000 households, businesses, and schools in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area lost power for the better part of a day. At the time, […]
Cut And Paste Engineering
Several years ago I was involved in a project that expected to have a large production volume. The development group was working with a few prototypes but the manufacturing team was not yet fully engaged. Part of my work required a unique device serial number for security and other purposes. Unfortunately, our prototypes had no […]