In Valid Logic

For our wedding, my sister gave us this nice alarm clock weather station from Sharper Image.  It is quite nice and has I really like it, but I’ve noticed that it seems to have a bug in its software that seems to pop up about once a month.

Every so often, when I get up in the morning and hit the snooze, it will turn off the buzzer like expected, but it doesn’t go off again in 5 mins like it is supposed to (yes, it has a 5min snooze… not the usual 9min).  Instead, it gets trapped in this sort of dead-end zone where it won’t go off again (at all), you can’t turn off the alarm (the icon on the screen that the alarm is on won’t go off), can’t reset the alarm to go off the next day, can’t change the alarm time or anything else, yet the clock continues to tick along.  Only way to fix it is to unplug it, pull the battery, then plug it in and reset the time/alarm.

Goes to show that bugs can exist in the smallest of applications and in the simpliest of functions.  Normally, you wouldn’t expect to see a bug in something as basic as an alarm clock, but perhaps it goes to show that in your own alarm clocks, don’t assume your own code is without holes.