one of my programs drew random lines everywhere on the screen becuase of a logic error I had in it . it was pretty amusing until i relized my computer was going to run out of memory and that I needed to save my research paper before that happened.

In heindsight that must make it even more funny, no?

I once wrote a program in Turbo pascal while i was in school. All I did was make it run through the autoexec.bat then display a blank screen and wait for some sort of password before it continues to boot. I did that because I always run out of computer in the internet lab... then the idiot who checks on the lab didn't know any of this, every time i go to the internet lab he tells me that everything is occupied and a computer is broken coz` it wont boot... I'd suggest that I can fix it but in doing so will make me a priority user whenever i needed to use one...

i did something like that, since all logons are authenticated against a network server, I created a fake one, so everytime a user would try to logon to a server it would re-route to locahost and the user would get an error. Then when I wanted to logon, I would switch to the appropraite server, which was named after another server to prevent students from using it.

Not as cool as yours though

Hello,

I have a sin from Iowa State too.... before I had a computer of my own, I also did a little bit of darkness to make sure a computer was available for me. Came back an hour later, and the disabled computer was there for me. I would sit down, and someone else would say "it's broke", and I would nod and fix it. then do the research / paper / whatever.

The program that had a problem with was a recursive C++ thing that used the fork command to cause the computer to use up all of the available processes with useless children. I brought down the unix box with everyone on it, and caught the error in a hurry. Thankfully, they did not find me, as well, no one could open a process to see what was wrong with the box! Also, am thankful that I saw the error right away, and quickly fixed it.

Christian

wow....plz gimmi some insight on ur program...wut u used and the source code if ur willing to share...im just a noob startin out in this huge world:!:

Well, once I was working some a function that would return a string along the lines of : "This system has been running for 1 week, 3 days, 2 hours, 1 minute, 0 seconds."

I was doing this in VB and using a DLL to retrieve the TSC (Time Stamp Counter: contains the number of clock pulses since the comp was booted). It would divide by the clock freq. (unfortunately I had to hard-code this, I don't know how to get a real value) to get the number of seconds since reboot and then use the mod statement and some multiplication and division to come up with the string. All my variables were doubles (I want this thing to work even when the computer has been booted more than 10 minutes), but I was getting an overflow error when I did this:

dim weekDivider as Double
weekDivider = 7 * 24 * 60 * 60

I was up until 4:30 AM finding the bug. It turns out that when you do math on ordinal values, VB assumes that you're putting it in an Integer data type unless you put a pound sign after each of the numbers, like this:

weekDivider = 7# * 24# * 60# * 60#

I will never understand why VB does this...