The Worst Kind of Bug
When writing code, one is always bound to run across bugs. Some bugs are nice and easy, they always occur and that makes them fairly easy to troubelshoot. Other bugs are reported but you can’t seem to duplicate them. While annoying, at least those can potentially be attributed to faulty reporting or the user not knowing what they’re talking about. (Not saying that is a good thing to do, but it’s nice to have some way of explaining it.)
The worst kind of bug, however, is the kind that happens intermittently. You write your program or website and it seems to work fine. Then it doesn’t work, but you didn’t change anything. Then it works again. Then it doesn’t. Then it does. You’re going mad.
There’s an interesting post over on Ridiculous Fish there’s an interesting post on this sort of bug and how they can be a serious problem. (For those of you not of the computer geek type, I’ll give you a prize if you make it all the way through that treatise.) Luckily mine wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was still annoying.
I just had a picture on a webpage that would randomly disappear in Internet Explorer. I didn’t have to change anything. It would just disappear, poof!, when I refreshed the web page. Then it would come wandering back the next time. Luckily, thanks to Google, I found the answer on Make it Mobile. Turns out that an absolutely positioned element next to a floated element will randomly not show up in Internet Explorer. Isn’t that nice?
Mum saw the title of your post and said, “Oh dear, is James sick?” I explained that you were talking about computer problems, to which she replied, “Oh, I was going to have you tell him we hope he feels better soon.” :-D
Do I have to make it through ALL the comments, too, to get the prize? Honestly, this article sounded like a generative linguist trying to describe dementia. If you enjoy this kind of material, I’ll take you with me to visit Grandma next time I go.
I especially liked, “Memory barriers are for those who really know what they’re doing!”