Craziest fix that actually worked
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Many years ago we had a program that printed delivery notes on form feed dot matrix printers. One customer bought a slightly different printer that we hadn't used before, and we couldn't stop it spooling a blank note after each one it printed. I inserted control codes at the end of the print so that after each delivery note printed, a blank one would spool, then the printer wound it back in again.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Taking a space character out of a modem name string on Windows. Yep, it fixed it. Piece of shit MSFT parsing code!
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
In the before the before, I worked for a company that had a COM+ solution written in VB6. They sold the solution to a company that would not open their firewall for COM+ so I wrote a C++ server to map COM+ function calls over port 80 which they would allow. Crazy.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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In the before the before, I worked for a company that had a COM+ solution written in VB6. They sold the solution to a company that would not open their firewall for COM+ so I wrote a C++ server to map COM+ function calls over port 80 which they would allow. Crazy.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
"All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
It's even worse when they were using Excel + VBA macros for a decade first...
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
I once replaced an entire Windows Dll with a fake version in order to achieve something Microsoft claimed was impossible, a globalized WinCE 5.1 platform. It's a long tale and the closest thing to a real hack I've ever used.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
A batch program (DCL on VMS (5?) circa 1990) that I had to delete and type in again because the system refused to execute it. :sigh:
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One time??!@#! :omg: It must be kind of a reusable solution, 'cause I've used it myself several times in my own life. Wait... that just rang a bell... a pattern, I think is what they call it. A pattern!
Anything that could possibly go wrong in some moment, will definitely go wrong in the worst possible moment...
In the worst way that could be possible!–Finagle's corollary to Murphy's Law (paraphrased).
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One time??!@#! :omg: It must be kind of a reusable solution, 'cause I've used it myself several times in my own life. Wait... that just rang a bell... a pattern, I think is what they call it. A pattern!
Anything that could possibly go wrong in some moment, will definitely go wrong in the worst possible moment...
In the worst way that could be possible!–Finagle's corollary to Murphy's Law (paraphrased).
Our company has to reboot our Win2008R2 server every morning at 6am so it performs right during the day. I think it's mainly related to our ERP system (Epicor) but it seems to work. I've worked with VMS systems that under a HEAVY load have way over a year of uptime with no problems, we had to shut it down to replace a hardware component :(
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
I once wrote a 6502 routine, running off an interrupt, to modify a single bit in memory when a particular byte of memory had a certain value. This allowed me to move the game "Frak!" from cassette tape to disk - as the anti-piracy software flipped the bit occasionally resulting in a rather amusing Captain Pugwash based "you're a Pirate" screen.
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Well, this is not the craziest fix but the craziest bug hunt:
MaxValue= 0;
for (I = 0; I < N; I++)
{
Value= SomePositiveFunction(I);
if (Value > MaxValue)
{
MaxValue = Value;
MaxI = I;
}
}This piece of code obviously finds
MaxI, the first indexIthat achieves the largest value of the function (in case of ties), doesn't it ? Well, no. It was returning the last such index ! The reason was internal FP rounding, making it such that right after the assignmentMaxValue = Value, the relationMaxValue < Valuedid hold !! Took me ages to understand that, debugger not showing what was actually going on. The fix: use the/fp:precisecompiler flag. -
I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
A coworker had a SQL query in MS SQL Server that didn't run at all. All it did was process the query for a looooong time. My coworker entered a random line break somewhere and the query ran instantly. Weirdest performance fix I've ever seen... I've been searching for a problem in C#. I was using some library from a different solution which I had built myself. I encountered a bug, fixed the library and everything worked... For a few runs at least. Out of nowhere the bug came back. I spent the whole afternoon trying to fix it, but I got MessageBoxes that weren't there anymore, errors that could not be explained etc. Restarting VS2010 finally did the trick... Another great hack I've used: in a live production we print some files and save these files to disk and call them something like 'File+date+time+milliseconds'. Then our client got a new server and the files weren't saved to disk anymore because the filename was already used! Obviously the new server was so fast it could print and save two files in the same millisecond... A Thread.Sleep(500) fixed the problem! We've actually used that solution more than once... Although it's not something I'm particulary proud of, it does the job.
It's an OO world.
public class Naerling : Lazy<Person>{
public void DoWork(){ throw new NotImplementedException(); }
} -
In the before the before, I worked for a company that had a COM+ solution written in VB6. They sold the solution to a company that would not open their firewall for COM+ so I wrote a C++ server to map COM+ function calls over port 80 which they would allow. Crazy.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
I had to adapt a very, very legacy 6502 DA system intended for remote operation to local working. The system used a dialler to establish a phone connection and then tickled the modem to pick up the line (yes it was THAT old) and then squirted data to a remote Vax/VMS system in ASCII/Hex. Using just an 8086 PC and MSBasic I managed to emulate the dialler, the modem and the remote system - this worked perfectly for years.
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Many years ago we had a program that printed delivery notes on form feed dot matrix printers. One customer bought a slightly different printer that we hadn't used before, and we couldn't stop it spooling a blank note after each one it printed. I inserted control codes at the end of the print so that after each delivery note printed, a blank one would spool, then the printer wound it back in again.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
I had that too
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Many years ago we had a program that printed delivery notes on form feed dot matrix printers. One customer bought a slightly different printer that we hadn't used before, and we couldn't stop it spooling a blank note after each one it printed. I inserted control codes at the end of the print so that after each delivery note printed, a blank one would spool, then the printer wound it back in again.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
BTDTGTTS :-D
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I'm just curious what the most surreal fix to a problem you've ever ran into has been? Trying to get some integration tests for an application that uses COM Interop to manipulate MS Excel on a new CI server a coworker and I ran into a problem where the tests would pass if ran manually; but when Cruise Control tried to run them we got an access denied type error when trying to write a file. The solution[^], courtesy of MSDN was to create a folder named
DesktopinC:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. I don't even....Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
The most surreal aspects of what I could contribute are in the problems, not so much in the solutions. Rewriting something letter-by-letter worked several times with me, too. And there were no hidden letters or non-breaking spaces in the original. In a VB6 program, we got runtime errors when the program was run under Windows XP, but not when run under Windows 9x/ME/2000. Most annoying thing was, the error was reproducible only in the compiled program, but never in the development environment. Took us weeks to find out. Turned out it was using modal dialog windows (from the MsgBox function) in the GotFocus event handler. I don't remember the fix we used, though. In VB6, the SendKeys function ceased to work properly under Windows Vista. So I programmed a function that performed the needed keystroke actions one after the other. The weirdest issue we ever encountered is the following, I think: Some clients from Switzerland got a "path not found" error when running one of our programs, but it worked fine with most clients. During tests with several different Windows versions, no problems of this kind were ever encountered. Turned out it were only French-speaking clients that got that error. But setting the system language to French didn't reproduce it. Luckily, we had an MSDN abo that time, so we could legally download and test a French Windows version (I don't remember whether XP, Vista or 7; maybe all of them). Here, the error suddenly was present. A short investigation revealed that the API call for a path "plenked", i. e. it put superfluous spaces before punctuation marks - and the backslash was a punctuation mark too, seemingly. (Note: in French, spaces before punctuation marks except the full stop are required.) Solution was simple: Remove all spaces immediately before and after backslashes in a path.
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Our company has to reboot our Win2008R2 server every morning at 6am so it performs right during the day. I think it's mainly related to our ERP system (Epicor) but it seems to work. I've worked with VMS systems that under a HEAVY load have way over a year of uptime with no problems, we had to shut it down to replace a hardware component :(
Randy Riegel wrote:
Our company has to reboot our Win2008R2 server every morning at 6am so it performs right during the day
Blame that on shit programming. We have the same problem here, the reason? some bastard java programmer thought it would be fun to place a hibernate context (or whatever they're called) on the session on a web app, every single request. At every single action on the web app. Needless to say that even if we had the time to fix it, nobody understands what the hell is going on on that application. all we know is that perm gen blows up hourly. So now we have a job running on the server to run the GC every once in a while. Your case is probably easier, maybe it's just a config that is suboptimal, one of the server-restart-required apps here is a 1998 asp + vb6 app that got the threading model switched. In that case the app was recompiled, but maybe there's something you can do about the ERP that does not require a recompile...
I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p) "Given the chance I'd rather work smart than work hard." - PHS241 "'Sophisticated platform' typically means 'I have no idea how it works.'"
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A batch program (DCL on VMS (5?) circa 1990) that I had to delete and type in again because the system refused to execute it. :sigh:
I've had to do that loads of times in various environments. Notepad for JavaScript code is notorious. I guess that it is somehow getting some control char that it does not bother to display. Yes, I know that I should be using something other than Notepad (and, yes, something other than JavaScript), but I'm in a locked-down environment where I am not allowed to load or run any unapproved software (which is unhelpful for a software developer).
