A Bugs Life
Software bugs are everywhere. This shouldn’t be so bad, except that software is everywhere—from your office computer, to your cell phone, home router, television set, car engine, and the list goes on and on. Heck, even an electric toothbrush has a tiny microcontroller programmed with firmware in it. Most of this software has been tested and tried, but bugs keep popping up nevertheless.
Last week I kept a bug diary. The dreadful results are described below.
Saturday, July 26
FaceTime would not connect. After updating iOS the problem was resolved. Of course, “you must always update to the latest version”, but mind you, this problem never existed before. User experience: Everything was working fine, and then all of a sudden it didn’t.
Sunday, July 27
Tried the OS X Yosemite Beta. Okay, it’s a beta release. Reported a bug where the GUI was actually messing up the screen. Sadly couldn’t take a screenshot, because it would redraw the screen, effectively clearing things up. Luckily, the bug did reproduce every time.
Monday, July 28
Didn’t go near my computer, but today a colleague sent in a bug report for a piece of software of mine. My bad. One of those cases of “this should never happen”. A set of dictionary keys holds only unique items, so how could it be that an item appeared twice?
Tuesday, July 29
Encountered trouble trying to build the PCRE regular expression library with gcc 4.9.1 on Linux. Somehow it wouldn’t pass confidence tests. Reportedly did work with older gcc; smelled an awful lot like a compiler problem.
Found a recent online tirade by Linus Torvalds, in which he called gcc, I quote, “pure and utter *shit*.” Turns out the compiler’s code generator emits buggy code.
Wednesday, July 30
The pedestrian lights near the office stayed on “Walk” all day long. Nearly got run over by a BMW, as the driver hit the gas when he got the green light. Could have been caused by a loose wire somewhere, but I like to think it was a software bug.
Thursday, July 31
Twitter app on iPhone kept crashing upon loading a particular news article. Who knows, maybe it was ad malware trying to infect the system.
Friday, August 1
At last, a small victory. Fixed an endless loop problem in the RADIUS PAM module. Found some additional related issues, such as by the looks of it is a broken stupid unusual implementation of our RADIUS server.
Special bonus bug of the week (Linux): Exiting an interactive bash shell and getting “Illegal instruction” on the screen. This is most likely caused by stack corruption.