Hackaday Links: August 11, 2024

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its now-infamous Windows outage that took down 8 million machines with knock-on effects that reverberated through everything from healthcare to airlines. We’ve got to be honest and say that the twelve-page RCA was a little hard to get through, stuffed as it was with enough obfuscatory jargon to turn off even jargon lovers such as us. The gist, though, is that there was a “lack of a specific test for non-wildcard matching criteria,” which pretty much means someone screwed up a regular expression. Outside observers in the developer community have latched onto something more dire, though, as it appears the change that brought down so many machines was never tested on a single machine. That’s a little — OK, a lot — hard to believe, but it seems to be what Crowdstrike is saying. So go ahead and blame the regex, but it sure seems like there were deeper, darker forces at work here.

Congratulations, new parents; on top of everything else you’re dealing with, including raging sleep deprivation, there’s a good chance that your bundle of joy has just been bricked. It seems that something called a Snoo, an unbelievably expensive “smart bassinette,” has had its most useful features hidden behind a paywall, and parents are hopping mad. And rightly so; selling something for $1,700 with all the features activated only to pull back two-thirds of them unless the owner coughs up another $20 a month is a little unreasonable. Then again, back in the day we’d have gladly given someone twenty bucks a day if it helped get the kid to sleep, which the Snoo seems to do admirably well. And really, how long is the kid going to be in the thing anyway? Couple of months, tops. What’s another hundred or two when you’ve already spent nearly two grand? Still, we’d love to see someone hack one of these things, or even just do a teardown to see what makes it tick.

Dog lovers, listen up: the dog is OK. But not so much the dog owner’s apartment, as the not-goodest boy managed to burn the place down by gnawing on a lithium-ion battery pack. The entire event, which happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May, was captured on a security camera, which shows the moment the playful pup got his first mouthful of nastiness from a tooth penetrating the pack. The speed with which the fire took off is terrifying, but easy to understand since the dog bed where it started was essentially a big pile of tinder. Thankfully, the dog and his co-conspirators noped right out of the house through a doggie door, but it looks like the apartment was a total loss.

Have a project that needs a wiring harness? You might want to check out this cool harness designer. We haven’t had much chance to play with it yet, but it seems pretty cool. You select connectors, wire gauges, and lengths, and the app generates a BOM and wiring diagram.

And finally, in another case of the algorithm actually delivering for a change, we found this very good piece on the history of electrical distribution pylons. It’s heavily UK-centric, but that doesn’t get in the way at all. It not only goes over the history of pylons but also delves a bit into their engineering, both electrical and mechanical. As a bonus, it answers some of the questions you might never know you had, like what those little doo-dads attached to the wires near the insulators are.