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Bizarre Droid Auto-Focus Bug Revealed
itwbennett writes "Pity the poor engineer who had to find this one. One of the more interesting of the handful of bugs that have appeared since the launch of Verizon's Droid smartphone has to do with the on-board camera's auto-focus. Apparently it just didn't work. And then suddenly it did. Naturally, this off-again, on-again made the theories fly. But the real reason for the bug was revealed in a comment on an Engadget post by someone claiming to be Google engineer Dan Morrill: 'There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle,' said Morrill. 'That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again. The 17th is the start of a new 'works correctly' cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.'"
Whenever I write something I think it particularly clever, I comment it out and write something simpler. The clever stuff I find is nearly impossible to figure out next year when you have to go back and add a feature or change something. It doesn't help that I usually think, "Oh that's so clever, there's no way I would forget how that works. It's so elegant." and don't bother to comment the hell out of it.
Simple == good
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
They should've just made it to lie about its policy enforcement to Exchange server like the iPhone did. That way it'd be banned from my corporate network like my iPhone was. Thanks Steve, you're such a smart guy.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Obligatory quote:
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it. "