Rebooting the Boeing 777
I’m writing today from Tokyo where I am spending a few days with my wife and son before going off by myself to a conference in Taipei. The flight over was mostly uneventful, except of course that we “missed” the passing of the New Year — we were flying away from midnight and then suddenly it was past midnight when we crossed the international date line. Nevertheless, Happy New Year, everyone!
Another thing happened just before we took off. There was a power glitch during passenger boarding on the Boeing 777. I had vaguely remembered that the 777 was heavily computerized, but according to the pilot’s announcement, the glitch caused over 600 of the airplane’s onboard computers to reboot. The pilot explained that this would take about 30 minutes plus a maintenance check. So, we were about an hour late in takeoff.
One of the nice things about the Boeing 777 is that it has an on-demand video entertainment system at every seat. As I was sitting in my seat, I suddenly realized that it was rebooting and decided to snap off a picture:
Let’s just say I found it strangely comforting to know that the entertainment system, at least, was running Linux. ;-)
Linux has certainly come a long way in UI and video processing. As a long time avid user of MythTV, I can remember that just a few years ago Linux was pretty hopeless for lots of fairly standard video-processing tasks. The lack of widely used codecs was particularly frustrating. But that all seems to have changed now (though I still haven’t been able to get a DVD player for Ubuntu that reliably plays the newest discs…).
Peter Lee @ January 1, 2008