OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Is it a bug? Or is it a miracle?

I had a problem that didn't make sense a couple of days ago that I found
humorous and I thought I'd share it with you.

I had a form with, amoung others, two fields; Status and EmployeeID.
EmployeeID was hidden, the other visibile. If the status was changed to
completed, it was to fall of the list of working items for the employee.
So in my testing I would change the status and by gosh, the employee
would fall off the working list just as expected.

The problem was that I couldn't display any completed items for the
employee later on. And why was my employee ID changing? The value for
the employeeID was a bunch of 0s or 1s?

The code was working well. The form looked OK. I finally opened the
property sheet and checked the control source for EmployeeID and Status.
Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected.
This was due to copying/pasting the Status Control and giving it the
name EmployeeID but not changing the control source.

This is the type of error that is hard to track down as there's not code
or logic to check. Just a naming mistake. I doubt it's a common error.
But if you see values in tables you don't expect, it might be
something to check.

I found it funny. If anyone else has any humorous develper tricks maybe
that person can share their's as well.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:21:22 -0700, Salad wrote:

Humorous? I liked the one I did several years for a client where we
had a splash screen that displayed for only a second or two at the
most. The form prominently had the company logo on it: a green tree.
Just for fun I wrote some code that randomly with a chance of 5% it
would display a white tree.
You can probably imagine what happened. Users don't pay attention to
the splash screen, but they can see from the corner of their eye that
something isn't right. Before you get a chance to focus on it the
splash screen is already gone. Restart the app and all is normal.
Until it happens again a month or so later.


Another one was an April Fools joke several years ago when our Sales
people were using the popular program Act! as their contact manager.
Each rep has about 1000 accounts.
We took a screenshot of the application and built a new app. When they
started up Act! using the familiar shortcut it ran our app instead.
The login experience was the same, the main screen came up, and then a
dialog said something like "An error has occurred. Do you want to
perform maintenance to your records now?". Upon Yes the dialog would
show "Now deleting record #" and rapidly count down to zero. The
developers stood outside the office of one of the reps and we could
hear her reactions No! No! Oh, what's happening.... Until we
couldn't hold it together anymore and were rolling on the floor
laughing.

-Tom.


>Is it a bug? Or is it a miracle?
>
>I had a problem that didn't make sense a couple of days ago that I found
>humorous and I thought I'd share it with you.
>
>I had a form with, amoung others, two fields; Status and EmployeeID.
>EmployeeID was hidden, the other visibile. If the status was changed to
>completed, it was to fall of the list of working items for the employee.
> So in my testing I would change the status and by gosh, the employee
>would fall off the working list just as expected.
>
>The problem was that I couldn't display any completed items for the
>employee later on. And why was my employee ID changing? The value for
>the employeeID was a bunch of 0s or 1s?
>
>The code was working well. The form looked OK. I finally opened the
>property sheet and checked the control source for EmployeeID and Status.
> Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected.
> This was due to copying/pasting the Status Control and giving it the
>name EmployeeID but not changing the control source.
>
>This is the type of error that is hard to track down as there's not code
>or logic to check. Just a naming mistake. I doubt it's a common error.
> But if you see values in tables you don't expect, it might be
>something to check.
>
>I found it funny. If anyone else has any humorous develper tricks maybe
>that person can share their's as well.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

"Salad" wrote in message
news:e96dnf1Rl-FpKmvanZ2dnUVZ_gCdnZ2d@earthlink.com...
> Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected.

Salad, I'm sure you're not the only one to be caught with that!

The first time Access made me laugh was in version 1, working with a field
named Spouse. The error message read:
Spouse: item has no value.

--
Allen Browne - Microsoft MVP. Perth, Western Australia
Tips for Access users - http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html
Reply to group, rather than allenbrowne at mvps dot org.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Per Allen Browne:
>The first time Access made me laugh was in version 1, working with a field
>named Spouse. The error message read:
> Spouse: item has no value.

Can't recall where this came from but....

-----------------------------------
Imagine if instead of cryptic, geeky text strings, your computer
produced error messages in Haiku...


Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Seeing my great fault
Through darkening blue windows
I begin again

Everything is gone;
Your life's work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?

The code was willing,
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Printer not ready.
Could be a fatal error.
Have a pen handy?

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.

Server's poor response
Not quick enough for browser.
Timed out, plum blossom.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Login incorrect.
Only perfect spellers may
enter this system.

Wind catches lily
scatt'ring petals to the wind:
segmentation fault

This site has been moved.
We'd tell you where, but then we'd
have to delete you.

ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have.
You ask way too much.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
"My Novel" not found.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.

The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
endless others exist

Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy

You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

No keyboard present
Hit F1 to continue
Zen engineering?

Hal, open the file
Hal, open the damn file, Hal
open the, please Hal

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

The ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
Netscape, too, has gone.

Rather than a beep
Or a rude error message,
These words: "File not found."

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
-----------------------------------

--
PeteCresswell

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

(PeteCresswell) wrote:

> Per Allen Browne:
>
>>The first time Access made me laugh was in version 1, working with a field
>>named Spouse. The error message read:
>> Spouse: item has no value.
>
An aquaintancee of mine, after a bitter divorce, said basically the same
thing to me the other day. It's funny when you can get a computer to
say that.
>
> Windows NT crashed.
> I am the Blue Screen of Death.
> No one hears your screams.

Back in 1984 or so the company I was working for started getting in
personal computers. One of the VPs was the Lotus guru there and he had
been working for about 4 hours on a Lotus spreadsheet. Someone down the
street drove into an electric pole and I could hear the boom when the
transformer blew. Then I heard the scream from the VP as he lost his
work.

> A file that big?
> It might be very useful.
> But now it is gone.

Although I have rarely used it I have blessed a couple of times the
person that wrote Novell's Salvage program. The fear would course thru
my veins when a file was mistakenly deleted and ecstasy replaced that
emotion as Salvage did its magic.

I remember a time my company got a tape backup system. Somebody set the
thing up and it looked like it was doing what it was supposed to do. It
would be scanning the files and looked like it was coping the files to
tape. Nobody thought to check a backup and see if it could restore a
file. One day they needed to restore the file and noticed that because
of a certain switch setting the tapes were basically blank...and lost
their work.

The first company I worked for had 2 DG computers with 2 hard drives for
each computer. A computer operator had just started working there and
obviously was not trained in backups. She took a backup disk pack out
and restored that disk to Drive1, removed it and restored it up to Drive
0 then went to the other computer and did the same. So now we had 4
hard drives all with the backup disk's data. She lost her job over that
mistake.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Tom van Stiphout wrote:

> On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:21:22 -0700, Salad wrote:
>
> Humorous? I liked the one I did several years for a client where we
> had a splash screen that displayed for only a second or two at the
> most. The form prominently had the company logo on it: a green tree.
> Just for fun I wrote some code that randomly with a chance of 5% it
> would display a white tree.
> You can probably imagine what happened. Users don't pay attention to
> the splash screen, but they can see from the corner of their eye that
> something isn't right. Before you get a chance to focus on it the
> splash screen is already gone. Restart the app and all is normal.
> Until it happens again a month or so later.
>
>
> Another one was an April Fools joke several years ago when our Sales
> people were using the popular program Act! as their contact manager.
> Each rep has about 1000 accounts.
> We took a screenshot of the application and built a new app. When they
> started up Act! using the familiar shortcut it ran our app instead.
> The login experience was the same, the main screen came up, and then a
> dialog said something like "An error has occurred. Do you want to
> perform maintenance to your records now?". Upon Yes the dialog would
> show "Now deleting record #" and rapidly count down to zero. The
> developers stood outside the office of one of the reps and we could
> hear her reactions No! No! Oh, what's happening.... Until we
> couldn't hold it together anymore and were rolling on the floor
> laughing.
>

I can imagine the fear that the rep felt as that counter went down...did
anyone call the janitor to clean up the puddle?

This one doesn't have the fear effect. Back in the late 80s I was
messing around with the system and this guy mentioned it'd be great if I
could write a program that would take money out of a bank and transfer
it to his account.

So I created a table of bank names. The form would come up and prompt
the user to select a bank. Then prompt the user for the account holder
name. It then made a bunch of beeping sounds to simulate a modem,
connect to the bank and search for the account holder. If the account
holder was found (random yes/no), a random number was returned showing
how much money was in the person's account and ask how much money the
user wanted to tranfer to their account. They'd enter the money and
then they were prompted to enter their bank account number. If they
said Yes to continue the transfer the program would beep like a modem
then complete the transaction. I went to the guy and when prompted for
his account number he took out his checkbook and transferred some money
from his friends account to his account. He was impressed until I told
him it was a fake program. My sister came to visit me at work a short
time afterwards and I had her run the program. She punched in her
boyfriend's name and the random dollar amount in the account was within
a few dollars of what he had in his account. She was convinced I was
accessing their bank account and could transfer money to her account.


> -Tom.
>
>
>
>>Is it a bug? Or is it a miracle?
>>
>>I had a problem that didn't make sense a couple of days ago that I found
>>humorous and I thought I'd share it with you.
>>
>>I had a form with, amoung others, two fields; Status and EmployeeID.
>>EmployeeID was hidden, the other visibile. If the status was changed to
>>completed, it was to fall of the list of working items for the employee.
>> So in my testing I would change the status and by gosh, the employee
>>would fall off the working list just as expected.
>>
>>The problem was that I couldn't display any completed items for the
>>employee later on. And why was my employee ID changing? The value for
>>the employeeID was a bunch of 0s or 1s?
>>
>>The code was working well. The form looked OK. I finally opened the
>>property sheet and checked the control source for EmployeeID and Status.
>> Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected.
>> This was due to copying/pasting the Status Control and giving it the
>>name EmployeeID but not changing the control source.
>>
>>This is the type of error that is hard to track down as there's not code
>>or logic to check. Just a naming mistake. I doubt it's a common error.
>> But if you see values in tables you don't expect, it might be
>>something to check.
>>
>>I found it funny. If anyone else has any humorous develper tricks maybe
>>that person can share their's as well.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Per Salad:
>A computer operator had just started working there and
>obviously was not trained in backups. She took a backup disk pack out
>and restored that disk to Drive1, removed it and restored it up to Drive
>0 then went to the other computer and did the same. So now we had 4
>hard drives all with the backup disk's data.

Not all that long ago my external backup drive bit the big one.

Whipped out one of the backup drives, plugged it in..... Poof!

Helluva coincidence, thought I.

About 2 am that morning, I woke up and realized that the USB card
was on the way out and frying drives as they were plugged in.

My practice of keeping at least one backup at another location
saved me from myself.

--
PeteCresswell

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

I wrote an application for scoring a quiz competition in real time. My app
was running on laptops in 8 different game rooms simultaneously. Part of
the app was that I displayed the 8 minute game clock on the scoreboard
(attached to a monitor connected to the laptops' VGA port) for the players
and game officials. My clock ran on the form's timer event every 200ms,
checking the current system clock time versus the time tick that I store at
the beginning of the match, calculating the elapsed time, and adjusting the
captions of label controls appropriately to simulate a countdown clock.

Everything was going fine until every room reported an error within 20
seconds of each other, at 9pm. It turns out that the laptops were set for
the Eastern time zone while we were in the Western time zone. 9pm in the
west is midnight on the east coast and my algorithm for calculating elapsed
time failed when the time difference in seconds exceeded the limit for an
integer variable. Basically, when the clock struck twelve my app turned
into a pumpkin! I call it the Cinderella error.


"Salad" wrote in message
news:e96dnf1Rl-FpKmvanZ2dnUVZ_gCdnZ2d@earthlink.com...
> Is it a bug? Or is it a miracle?
>
> I had a problem that didn't make sense a couple of days ago that I found
> humorous and I thought I'd share it with you.
>
> I had a form with, amoung others, two fields; Status and EmployeeID.
> EmployeeID was hidden, the other visibile. If the status was changed to
> completed, it was to fall of the list of working items for the employee.
> So in my testing I would change the status and by gosh, the employee would
> fall off the working list just as expected.
>
> The problem was that I couldn't display any completed items for the
> employee later on. And why was my employee ID changing? The value for
> the employeeID was a bunch of 0s or 1s?
>
> The code was working well. The form looked OK. I finally opened the
> property sheet and checked the control source for EmployeeID and Status.
> Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected.
> This was due to copying/pasting the Status Control and giving it the name
> EmployeeID but not changing the control source.
>
> This is the type of error that is hard to track down as there's not code
> or logic to check. Just a naming mistake. I doubt it's a common error.
> But if you see values in tables you don't expect, it might be something to
> check.
>
> I found it funny. If anyone else has any humorous develper tricks maybe
> that person can share their's as well.

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Salad wrote:

>Back in 1984 or so the company I was working for started getting in
>personal computers. One of the VPs was the Lotus guru there and he had
>been working for about 4 hours on a Lotus spreadsheet. Someone down the
>street drove into an electric pole and I could hear the boom when the
>transformer blew. Then I heard the scream from the VP as he lost his
>work.

Undoubtedly that file was for a meeting the next day.

>I remember a time my company got a tape backup system. Somebody set the
>thing up and it looked like it was doing what it was supposed to do. It
>would be scanning the files and looked like it was coping the files to
>tape. Nobody thought to check a backup and see if it could restore a
>file. One day they needed to restore the file and noticed that because
>of a certain switch setting the tapes were basically blank...and lost
>their work.

I once visited a new site to do some computer networking troubleshooting. I asked
the client if I could take a quick look to see if their backup was working properly.
A few mouse clicks showed a screen with lots of red stop sign symbols. I saw that
only the Thursday backup was working. Their expensive backup software required that
you "format" the tape drive for a few seconds so it would mark the tape. (Somewhat
like a dog and a fire hydrant I suppose.)

The high priced consultants didn't bother showing them how to do those few mouse
clicks every morning to verify that their backup worked.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

On Apr 5, 9:59=A0am, "(PeteCresswell)" wrote:
> Per Allen Browne:
>
> >The first time Access made me laugh was in version 1, working with a fiel=
d
> >named Spouse. The error message read:
> > =A0 =A0Spouse: item has no value.
>
> Can't recall where this came from but....
>
> -----------------------------------
> Imagine if instead of cryptic, geeky text strings, your computer
> produced error messages in Haiku...
>
> Three things are certain:
> Death, taxes, and lost data.
> Guess which has occurred.
>
> Seeing my great fault
> Through darkening blue windows
> I begin again
>
> Everything is gone;
> Your life's work has been destroyed.
> Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
>
> The code was willing,
> It considered your request,
> But the chips were weak.
>
> Windows NT crashed.
> I am the Blue Screen of Death.
> No one hears your screams.
>
> Printer not ready.
> Could be a fatal error.
> Have a pen handy?
>
> A file that big?
> It might be very useful.
> But now it is gone.
>
> Errors have occurred.
> We won't tell you where or why.
> Lazy programmers.
>
> Server's poor response
> Not quick enough for browser.
> Timed out, plum blossom.
>
> Chaos reigns within.
> Reflect, repent, and reboot.
> Order shall return.
>
> Login incorrect.
> Only perfect spellers may
> enter this system.
>
> Wind catches lily
> scatt'ring petals to the wind:
> segmentation fault
>
> This site has been moved.
> We'd tell you where, but then we'd
> have to delete you.
>
> ABORTED effort:
> Close all that you have.
> You ask way too much.
>
> First snow, then silence.
> This thousand dollar screen dies
> so beautifully.
>
> With searching comes loss
> and the presence of absence:
> "My Novel" not found.
>
> The Tao that is seen
> Is not the true Tao, until
> You bring fresh toner.
>
> The Web site you seek
> cannot be located but
> endless others exist
>
> Stay the patient course
> Of little worth is your ire
> The network is down
>
> A crash reduces
> your expensive computer
> to a simple stone.
>
> There is a chasm
> of carbon and silicon
> the software can't bridge
>
> Yesterday it worked
> Today it is not working
> Windows is like that
>
> To have no errors
> Would be life without meaning
> No struggle, no joy
>
> You step in the stream,
> but the water has moved on.
> This page is not here.
>
> No keyboard present
> Hit F1 to continue
> Zen engineering?
>
> Hal, open the file
> Hal, open the damn file, Hal
> open the, please Hal
>
> Out of memory.
> We wish to hold the whole sky,
> But we never will.
>
> Having been erased,
> The document you're seeking
> Must now be retyped.
>
> The ten thousand things
> How long do any persist?
> Netscape, too, has gone.
>
> Rather than a beep
> Or a rude error message,
> These words: "File not found."
>
> Serious error.
> All shortcuts have disappeared.
> Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
> -----------------------------------
>
> --
> PeteCresswell

What a great idea!!! I think, from now on, I will program all my
applications' error traps in Haiku!

- GL