Most frustrating bug

[majestic0110]

hi all hope you are well. Just an interesting question I have for you all - What is the most irritating bug in an implementation you have encountered? By irritating I mean the longest to fix/the most complex to fix/the most unsatisfying fix and so forth. I shall divulge mine when I have decided on which I found the most irritating! (I am indecisive at times!)

[Narue]

The most irritating bug I've encountered is mixing up << and >> in C++ iostream operations. It's irritating because I do it all too often and I know better.

>the longest to fix
Probably intermittent data corruption in a very complicated parser. It took me forever to find the source of the problem, fix it, and verify that the fix didn't break anything else due to the painfully intricate logic.

>the most complex to fix
Definitely a subtle bug in a file system. It seemed like every part of the OS relied on the buggy behavior, so I had to make sweeping changes across the entire code base to correct the problem.

>the most unsatisfying fix
Pretty much every bug that's so fundamental I have to go back to the design stages. I have trouble wrapping my head around relational logic, so most of my database designs end up with at least one of these. ;)

[majestic0110]

Nice answer! very informative and interesting I struggle with relational logic too, can be a damn pain at times. I am still trying to decide my worst experience - will get back to this later!

[majestic0110]

A word of caution though........Any bug I might submit will not rival the glamour of O/S bugs! I am somewhat less experienced in the software field! Impressive!

[jbennet]

when the power plug isnt in.

[majestic0110]

lol JB yeah I think we all know what you mean there! By the way your post count is awe inspiring !

[Ancient Dragon]

The most irritating and longest bug to fix was in a MS-DOS 6.X program. I had my own multi-threading kernel and several threads. One thread would set the value of a global integer and another thread would read it. One of the threads (foreground screen) would occationally lock up and would not allow the operator to do anything. It took me about 36 hours straight to figure out that I needed to add some sort of thread synchronization.

[majestic0110]

that sounds fun AD, great fun.

[bumsfeld]

Running out of integer space in series of scientific calculations in C. The results get really goofy at times without any warning, depending on the data input.

[Nick Evan]

An Interrupt handler that took too many clockcycles to finish. So once in n-times it was called again before it was finshed... ( on a uC btw) That gave me a hell of a headache.

[mattyd]

um, VISTA?

[jwenting]

when the power plug isnt in.

I've actually had that reported as a bug in our software on more than one occasion (of course not worded like that, the truth only comes out when questioning past the "it doesn't work" stage).

And in one of those cases that led to a new requirement that the software should not fail in case of power failure (not kidding).

[twomers]

I had an amusing one today. I'm writing a SMS sending program. It's a remake of a program I wrote ages ago for the same purpose, but the wobsite to which the program interfaces changed its layout so I had to change my program. Anyhow, cookies are now used by the site to store the numbers of the recipients and the website automatically deletes them after it has finished sending the message... but, of course, I forgot to... so the text messages that were sent went to everyone to whom a text was sent for the duration of the session... increasing exponentially (WRT new recipients). I didn't notice this and gave the program to some friends of mine. Definitely worth it. I was tempted to leave it in and not tell anyone :)