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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.'"
It's all over the comments on the engadget page but since 2^31 milliseconds is about 24.5 days, it's highly probably we're dealing with a very classic not so funny sign extension bug here. So if I may presume the real problem, it's that autofocusing depends on catching timestamps from the system to know how long it's been since the last sampling in order to adjust the lens and check for accuracy. It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number, thus breaking the algorithm when it measures time deltas and causing it to mis focus before snapping the picture.
The patch is simple, make that signed int something like an unsigned long or truncate it properly. Hopefully we're not waiting long.
My work here is dung.
... Droid doesn't
Spring Break, the biggest part of it, occurs within a working cycle.
by someone claiming to be Google engineer Dan Morrill
Yeah, it could also be one of those lame Dan Morrill impersonators who solve perplexing engineering/programming issues, then post the solution under his name. MAN that's annoying..
I've been waiting a long long time for standardization of integer types.
This is definitely NOT the Droid you are looking for
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Just buy two with opposing date stamps.
15+ years ago I had to debug some code in a report printing app for OS/2 (remember that OS?). The bug would cause the app to crash when a report was printed out. But the bug would only happen on certain days. Certain days in September. Only on Wednesdays in September. Only when it was a Wednesday in September after the 9th.
The bug? The original programmer had tried to optimize memory usage as much as possible and was off by a count of one. With "September" being the longest month spelled out, "Wednesday" the longest day spelled out, and a 2 digit date, the header that the program put together to send to the printer would overflow its buffer by one character.
that caused Windows 95 to require a reboot in about the same timeframe.
Best Slashdot Co
Considering that a lunar cycle is 29.5 days long, we've actually found a bug that depends (approximately) on the phase of the moon!
"'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."
Cool! The device will later be fixed to properly behave poorly only every 24.45 days!
In excusable. The industry is too mature for that type of shit.
Spelling error? Inexcusable. The English language is too mature for that type of shit.
(In case you missed it, your argument has just as much validity in the real world due to differences in people.)
Since we're talking about phone bugs, here's one I had to fight with for a while...
Lots of users are having problems with the GPS functionality on the iPhone 3G/3GS (see e.g. here). No apparent pattern there, but in Brazil, lots of users from one specific carrier were having GPS problems, and the beginning of these problems coincided with the start of Daylight Savings Time in Brazil. My iPhone, as well as my girlfriend's, are with this carrier and were experiencing the problem. Those with unlocked phones report trying other carriers' SIM cards and had GPS working again, but once you popped back the problematic carrier's SIM card, the GPS was dead again.
This nearly drove me nuts as I paid an obscene amount of money for the TomTom app and couldn't get it to work, so keeping up with the engineer spirit, I tried to debug the problem myself. I observed an interesting fact: there's a Clock app on the iPhone with a World Clock pane, and if I added a clock from any time zone, including my own, it was off by one hour. However the iPhone's main clock, shown on the top of the screen, was showing the right time. Eventually I discovered that if I restored my phone as a brand new phone (not restoring from backup) the GPS would work fine and world clocks would be fine... until you reboot the phone. After rebooting, the GPS is gone again and the world clock is off by one hour again.
Now you might ask what the time has to do with GPS. A lot, it turns out. GPS works by triangulating your distance from the satellites in the GPS constellation, which depends on knowing the exact position of the satellites. Since their orbits are corrected every so often, you must rely on so-called ephemeris data from each satellite, which is the required information to compute fairly exact orbits, and is updated fairly often (Wikipedia says GPS receivers should update ephemeris data every 4 hours). Originally this data is broadcast by the satellites themselves in their navigation message, at an awfully slow rate of 50 bits/s. You read it right, bits, not bytes or KB or MB, that's bits. As the navigation message is 1500 bits long, it takes at least 30 seconds to download it, which is about the time most standalone GPS receivers take to get a fix from a cold start (i.e. with stale ephemeris data). To work around this delay, most phones with GPS use the assisted-GPS variety, which downloads ephemeris data from a faster channel such as the cellular network. My theory is that some WTF-worthy excuse for an engineer at the carrier decided that, rather than doing time zone updates the right way, by updating configuration files to point to the new time zone, he'd just rather adjust the clock forward by one hour. The GPS chipset probably works with time zone neutral clocks so it asks for (say) UTC time and gets it off by one hour, and then computes the satellite orbits as though it were one hour later than it actually is. Obviously this means the triangulation computations go horribly wrong and rather than reporting something absurd, the chipset just pretends it couldn't get a fix.
It took a lot of complaining from a lot of people (to the carrier and to the government agencies responsible for telecommunications), but the carrier finally fixed the problem. However, it was a nightmare trying to deal with clueless customer support representatives who didn't try in the least to help (and probably were thinking all along `what does this wacko think GPS has to do with DST?'), just blindly suggesting that we restore the phone, or even try to uninstall the built-in Maps app, or blaming it on Apple and saying they weren't responsible -- and never mind that unlocked phones with SIM cards from other carriers worked fine, and that the iPhone support situation is unique in Brazil as Apple outsourced support to the carriers themselves. In the end, the customer support WTFs would be worth another post of its own, at least twice the size of this one.
But
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
It is necessary to have some radioactive elements in your phone for it to focus.
PS, it may or may not also kill cats!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Congratulations. You are among the few (but growing in number) who not only can't RTFA, but lack the attention span or comprehension skills to read the summary itself.
MTV has a network for you.
Is that network called MTV?
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
It is gratifying for Google to be so open about the fact that it is a bug, the details of the bug, and a promise to fix it. Most consumer electronics companies are much more cagey about this sort of thing. I suspect Google will win some important trust because they are treating their customers like adults.
Read and be enlightened.
Of course my favorite joke about the matter:
Q: "How did Intel decide to name the 586 processor?"
A: "They took 486, added 100, and came up with 585.999999999999824"
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
After about 42 years my auto-focus suddenly stopped working as well.
You think if I live to 84 or so it will suddenly get better again?
I sure hope there's a patch...
G.
No, they would have discovered their are focus problems. They would not necessarily know the cause. They may even implement a fix or two, and at some point, the problem went away, so they marked the bug "fixed". They could easily have been testing for 90 days or more without discovering the exact nature of the bug, with multiple false positives indicating that it had been fixed.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
There was a wonderful bug in ubuntu where it wouldn't print on tuesdays. It would generate a postscript file, which includes the date, but a faulty entry for file-type detection caused postscript on tuesday to be interpreted as some kind of erlang file... which obviously didn't print very well :)
http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Honestly, autofocus on the just-so-so camera is the last of my worries:
Really, fix the camera sometime down the line. But make the phone dial hands-free. Make email work. Make the navigation something other than worthless. Make "lock the screen" really lock the screen.
Someone at Google should use one of their own phones for a while and see how (s)he likes it.
It's a wonderfully powerful platform, but clearly not as well-thought-out or fluid to work as iPhone/iPod Touch
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmmm, did the auto-focus programmer used to work on the Patriot anti-missile system?
Table-ized A.I.
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The initial release of 4.3BSD had a bug like that. It wouldn't interoperate with implementations that chose TCP sequence numbers in the upper half of the 32-bit address space. BSD itself didn't do this until it had been up for 2^31 seconds, so it got through testing. Other implementations cycled faster. We were losing network connections for two hours out of every four.
It took a 1-line fix, after three days of looking at the generated machine code to figure out exactly how the sequence number arithmetic worked. Too many casts in the source.
Woke up today, and just can't focus!!!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Open Source had everything to do with finding the bug. Either you mistakenly believe that Android is a Google platform, or that paid employees don't work on Open Source software. If a Red Hat employee finds a bug in the Linux kernel, does it mean "Open Source had 0 (sic) to do with finding the bug"? Paid Google employees aren't finding bugs in Apples code, now are they?
It won't be available until December 11th! OMFG! (feigns disgust)
You mean they already have a roll-out plan in place, and they already informed you with details of that plan ???? You either don't know how software is developed (closed and/or FOSS), or you didn't eat your Wheaties this morning. If this was closed source you would neither know about the bug, or any roll-out plan, most likely because the bug would remain hidden or there would be no desire to share that information with you.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So since January 1st, 1970?
Of course. That's when the world was created, fully-formed. How do you know the world existed before Jan 1 1970? :-)
It was a single line comment. No terminator necessary.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law