So I was coming back from Atlanta yesterday and, as I arrived a bit early at the gate, settled in to read my RSS feeds. I picked a spot that was far enough away from the gate not to be too crowded, while at the same time allowing me to keep an eye on the TV screen showing the flight status.After a while, I noticed that the screen, which had been alternating between the flight status and a series of Delta ads, wasn’t updating any more. Getting out of my seat to go and get a closer look, I discovered what the problem was. It was only after I checked a different screen that I discovered that my gate had changed…

Residents living in a city-owned apartment complex in Nottingham, England, were locked out of their homes on Tuesday of this week after a new security system was installed. Property manager Nottingham City Homes was installing security upgrades, including steel doors and “improvements” to the electronic entry system. Some of the residents were unable to get in after the upgrade, and Nottingham City Homes blamed a “software glitch” for the problem.Resident Jordan Gunn said: “My partner has been locked out several times. He has had to come round and throw pebbles at my window.” Good job she doesn’t live on the 25th floor. Not to worry, after the company apologized for the problems, they said that they should all have been fixed by Thursday. Hopefully it didn’t rain during the intervening two days. Oh wait, it’s England.

Verizon blamed a software glitch this week for the fact that it published approximately 12,500 unlisted phone numbers in a Washington County, MD phone directory. The company stated that it is taking steps to make amends to affected customers, anywhere from changing people’s numbers to paying up to $1,000 towards the installation of security systems. After the glitch was discovered, Verizon managed to stop 95% of the directories from being distributed.In a statement, Leigh A. Hyer, vice president and general counsel for Verizon’s Mid-Atlantic North Region said “We very much regret what has happened and want to make it as right as possible.” However, it turns out that Verizon is not required by law to keep unlisted numbers out of the directory. Hyer added: “It is a service we sell … it’s not a guarantee.”

As if the financial world wasn’t in enough turmoil already, it has been revealed that programmers at debt rating company Moody’s made a “coding error” that overrated several debt products in early 2007. The products affected were targeted at institutional investors, and after the error was corrected, their ratings dropped from the top triple-A designation by “several notches”. It is estimated that institutions that invested in the previously top-rated debt products will have lost up to 60% of their investment.Oh well, it’s only money.

The quiet market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire in England is not a place you would expect to see in the news very often. But, according to the Banbury Guardian, a bingo cashier in the town’s Gala bingo hall was jailed this week for stealing approximately $32,000 from her employer.Apparently, the bingo hall uses a swipe card system, called Buzzcard, that allows patrons to load money onto the card and use it to store winnings. When Emma Meechan, the cashier in question, discovered a misfeature in the system that caused about $335,000 to be mistakenly loaded onto some of the cards, she took advantage of the glitch and pocketed some of the money. Meechan was sentenced to serve 8 months behind bars.

Approximately 250,000 cell phone subscribers lost service for most of Tuesday this week in Vermont and neighboring states. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, a “software issue” caused the problem, which caused the loss of Unicel’s cell phone service from about 4:00 am until 2:30 in the afternoon. Public Relations Manager Miriam Svobodny said the outage affected customers in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Maine and parts of Massachusetts. She also said that the breakdown was the largest of its kind in the past 10 years. Apparently, users were still able to make 911 calls during the outage.

Ford Motor Company announced this week that it will recall 65,000 Volvo V70 and XC70 cars because of a problem with the software that controls the side-impact air bags. Apparently the recall applies only to cars in Europe. According to Volvo’s spokeswoman Maria Bohlin, the software needs to be “adjusted” because the airbags do not deploy fast enough. She said, “We will send letters to all the owners of the affected cars and tell them to take the car to a mechanic to get this upgrade.”I wonder how long it will be before software upgrades like this can be automatically downloaded to the car with no need to bring them to a “mechanic.”

Glitch Watch is a bit abbreviated this week by virtue of the fact that I am on the road which severely limits the amount of time I have available to sort through the mail bag. However, one story did catch my eye this week. Irish airline Aer Lingus inadvertently advertised €5 (about $8) business class seats from Ireland to Boston. The normal business class seat price is apparently €1,775 (about $2,765) each way.Between 7:30 am and 9:00 am when the “glitch” was discovered, about 700 tickets were sold, including some to Aer Lingus employees themselves, and the airline now has the problem of what to do with them. Initially, they canceled the tickets, on the basis that it was clearly a mistake. But in the PR firestorm that ensued, the airline backpedaled and offered the customers economy class tickets. Still not a bad deal!

Stillwater, MN: the Stillwater Lift Bridge got stuck in the open position for more than two hours this week after its controlling computer got “confused”. According to Minnesota Department of Transportation spokeswoman Mary McFarland-Brooks, the computer “said that the bridge was both open to boat traffic and available to motorists at the same time, which obviously couldn’t be the case.” Although strong winds were thought to have played a part in the incident, a reboot of the computer fixed the problem and had motorists on their way again.Meanwhile, in Japan last week, Hitachi announced that they had discovered a programming fault in software used to measure the impact of earthquakes on pipes at atomic power stations. The fault allowed the software to underestimate the impact of earthquakes on steel pipes in eight nuclear reactors. Good job it wasn’t anything important. The software has been in place and monitoring the pipes since 1980. Test results using corrected software indicated that there were no problems with the pipes.

Problems with a new $3m automated trip reservation system caused difficulties last week for disabled users of Chicago’s paratransit system. Apparently, computerizing the dispatch system was supposed to make things better for the roughly 6,000 disabled people who use the system each day. But according to Pace Executive Director T.J. Ross, “it has created more problems to date than it has solved.”Back to London’s Heathrow Airport again this week, where problems with the new Terminal 5 baggage handling system just won’t go away. The new terminal has been plagued with problems since it opened at the end of March, and on Saturday the baggage system failed, causing handlers to have to sort bags by hand.But our favorite story of the week comes from Lee County, FL where, if you are using a TomTom to find your way around, you may end up going around in circles. It seems that there is a specific area of road that has the device confused. According to a Tom Tom spokesperson, “There is a segment of road between I-95 and the first road that crosses the route that causes an anomaly due to the manner in which TomTom’s software application processes the location of Ft Myers.” Apparently the problem has been found and fixed, and an update is available from TomTom’s web site.