Database Error Detection and Recovery
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview by Steve Bourne with Bruce Lindsay, responsible for a lot of the SQL and RDBMS we use today, in which they discuss error detection and recovery.
My favorite part other than the photos is the definition of Heisenbugs - those problems that disappear only when you explicitly look for them."
For stuff like this, a wonderful debugging tool is valgrind -- it takes about 5 minutes to download and install (GPL, Linux/x86), and will find all kinds of memory-usage bugs in your program that you never even knew existed.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.