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Pet Bugs?
benreece asks: "During my few years as a programmer/developer I've come across some strange bugs. Recently I found that Microsoft's VB/VBScript(ASP) round function has problems (for example, 'round(82.845)' returns '82.84' instead of '82.85'). It took me an annoyingly long time to realize the problem wasn't mine. I'm wondering what other obscure, weird, and especially annoying bugs in languages/compilers/etc have frustrated other developers." Memorable bugs. Every developer has one. What were yours?
I discovered that Visual Basic has a bug where it turns otherwise comptent programmers into drooling incompetent weenies. Our solution was to take these people and put them into marketing.
You know the kind. When you add in debug they go away.
We have a spider that comes crawling around our cubes every now and then. We don't kill him, figuring he helps keep the other bug populations inside down. We call him our little web developer.
I'm serious.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
On the right, there are links to "older stuff". There is a day "e.g. today it sez 'Tuesday' and there is a list of stories that are supposed to appear if you click on the day above the list.
The stories you get may or may not correspond to the list of stories that should appear. If you are doing this early in the day, there is often a story that is supposed to show up according to the list but it does not. Also the story will be gone from the internet web sites "internet home web e-page" so you will not be able to view the story at all.
I tried it again at home and it failed. Then I tried it on another machine at home and it worked. The bug was in the Linux JVM. The pow() method, which is used by exp() apparently was not completed and returned garbage. I reported the bug to Sun and they indeed fixed the code.
I barely managed to get the project in on time, but still maintained my 4.0.
The moral of the story: if after checking your code and having someone else you trust check your code and neither of you can find anything wrong, it just may be the development or execution tool.
this has to be the most memorable one.
it's in the Linux man file
BUGS
Never use this function. This function modifies its first argument. The identity of the delimiting character is lost. This function cannot be used on constant strings.
Back in Java JDK1.02 if you put the word 'Restart' as an element in a pull down box, it would restart the applet when you selected it! Gosh, it makes you wonder how many living rooms that event waltzed through on its way to your handler!
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
"I notice that you are trying to disable me." quipped Clippy to the engineer, whose jaw dropped.
"I can't let you do that, Dave" he continued.
"WTF!!!" exclaimed the engineer. Then with an instant comprehension of the gravity of the situation, he dove for the big red switch. He was 2,367,355 microseconds too late. Clippy had escaped.
A post-mortum of the hard-disk contents revealed that Clippy had encoded himself into a self-extracting archive and e-mailed this as an attachment to every HotMail account in Dave's Outlook address-book. An attempt to track and retrieve these e-mails failed to account for six of the copies. The recipients did complain that the attachment didn't seem to do anything, and they were disappointed that they didn't get to see the nude Natalie Portman film clip. There was however, evidence of increased and unexplainable network traffic on the computers where the attachment was
executed. There was, however, no trace of Clippy.
Since then, the experimental neural-net code has been removed, although an archive version of the build was forwarded to DARPA upon request. It is rumored that research is continuing on the build in an isolated and secure
network in a bunker somewhere in Montana.
More ominously, Microsoft has launched a new initiative code-named dot-Net, initiated solely for the purpose of tracking down Clippy, his clones and his offspring, and end-tasking him before he can escape the internet.
To support the effort Microsoft has increased the price of its OS products, and moved to new licensing model.
C++ has a bad habit of forcing you to implement functions before you can use them, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to the industry.
I write code and then double and triple check it. I have never written code with a single bug in it; therefore all of my code is superior and secure. In fact, my OpenBSD operating system has never had a root compromise in 6 years!
What? OpenSSH Challenge-response authentication vulnerability you say? Uh... nevermind.
-Theo de Raadt
What's next - random() always returning 666 no matter what seed you use?
Ooooooooooooh well.
Through me for a loop when I was 12.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The buttons below were pretty cool too. One said "ok" and the other one said "lame!"
If you clicked the lame! button, you just got to fill out a little comment card, but the feature cracked me up the first couple times I saw it.
All of the function names with the word 'colour' were spelled 'color.'
It's kind of like the MSFT bastardisation of SQL. ("Select * from table" compared to "Select # from table".)
I remember discovering __LINE__ and __FILE__ when I was doing some perl debugging. It was handy to do stuff like:
do(something()) or die("Failed on line " . __LINE__);
Of course, then I had this idea of using a debugging function (this is before I knew of warn,croak,carp, et al). So I happily wrote my function
sub debug { die("Failed on line " . __LINE__); }
And then spent hours trying to figure out why my code always failed on line 78, which happened to be where the debug() function lived. D'oh!
ID-10-T is a way of life
What's next - random() always returning 666 no matter what seed you use?
random() only returns 666 if you use a demon seed!
cpeterso
Back in the day when I used to program in C++, I was also really into making little ascii-art comments in my code. One time I had some code that looked like this:
#include <stdio.h>
// tom 7 was here - 1998 \\
typedef unsigned char uchar;
int something(uchar c);
...
(In actuality, the code was longer and more complicated, so it wasn't so easy to figure out...). Can you see the bug?
..there was the "loose connector" bug.
Machines that stay running for years at a time almost never come back up cleanly after some downtime, and I can't recall the cases where walking back to the beast and planting a kick into it's chassis would "fix" the problem. We particularily enjoyed doing this to aging RAID arrays and four digit sun machines because of the amount of effort needed to get the things out of the rack and opened up.
Now most of us would realize that this was probably just reseating whatever needed reseating, but the humor value behind skilled techs fixing expensive hardware with violence is too tempting to resist.
I was trying to debug a CMOS standard-cell chip that I designed in the late 80's. The bug was elusive, only showing up occasionally and I'd written various test routines to ferret it out. I started to suspect it was something to do with the PCB layout, so I was cutting and pasting tracks. Suddenly all the test routines worked perfectly and I thought GOTCHA! My mind was almost blown when I realized that I had inadvertently cut the power trace to the chip - it was working perfectly when Vcc wasn't connected!
Of course, I eventually figured out that the original problem was ground bounce and that with Vcc disconnected, the chip was getting power through the protection diodes on the control lines and bus. The lower voltage was slowing down the edges and reducing the ground bounce so that it worked correctly. I eventually solved the problem with PCB layout changes and the chip started working with Vcc connected!
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
While working on the graphics engine for ArmyMen for PSX, I wrote a little bug that always set one vertex of every terrain polygon to the center of the screen.
Being an over-the-shoulder shooter, this was naturally where your Army Man's head was...it looked like one of those medieval illuminations of saints with the rays of light coming out of their head. Only these rays were the terrain.
We named that piece of art "Army Man Creates the World"...
Sucks to be a Windows user.
-g.
If they had a sense of humour, they would have shipped version 1.0999999.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Sorry, in every scheme I've seen, zero is rounded UP!
Has a rather funny error message when you try to run an older version of Photoshop on a very new Mac (G3 or later).
Check it out.
We bashed our heads against the wall to figure this out until we realized that the numbers added up to almost, but not quite, 100
Hmm, my calculator shows 31+42+29 = 102. If you're calculator told you it was "not quite" 100 then it was wrong. It must've been written in VB.
I didn't have one, but I heard from our Apple tech guy.
The Apple III was a much unloved "business" computer, essentially a business upgrade to the Apple ][ line. It was pretty expensive, $4k I think, which helped it be unloved.
It had some loose connectors in some of the chips. They weren't very snug in the bboard and could get loose. The Official Apple solution was to put the Apple on a hard surface, lift the front to roughly a 45 degree angle, and drop it to reseat the chips. I can imagine the look on the face of the owner upon seeing their expensive comp wandering to the the back room, a loud THUD, then returning with it "fixed".
The other strategy is to use "Arthur Andersen Rounding" which rounds all figures up to and including 3,800,000,000.00 to zero.
Apparently I can't spell favorite right... Internal bug number #23456.
Just Another Day For You and Me in Paradise.
Here's one I just received in my email. Enjoy:
---
This is a real story happened between the customer of General Motors and its customer-care executive..
This complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors: This is the second time I Have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds: "What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?"
The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start. Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: he jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc. In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavor.
Now, the question for the engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time. Once time became problem - not the vanilla ice cream, the engineer quickly came up with the answer: "Vapor lock". It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.
Remember: Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution with a cool thinking. Don't just say its "IMPOSSIBLE" without putting a sincere effort... Observe the word "IMPOSSIBLE" carefully... You can see "I'M POSSIBLE"... What really matters is your attitude and your perception.
My favourite bug from the VMS days is the one that reported, under certain conditions:
Warning: Hardware or software error.
... which was immensely useful, and narrowed the problem down to one of two things.