August 2005 - Posts

Living long and prospering are not always the same thing
30 August 05 07:37 PM

Lately, I have had a series of cases where the lifetime of something has been a problem. The first was actually with the filing system. A customer was doing something innovative with VB6. What they were doing was some rather clever automation of the IDE Read More...

Postedby marklon | 1 Comments    

Do you want to send information about this error to Microsoft?
26 August 05 05:06 PM

Ah, who hasn't been asked that question by their PC? A lot of people ask me what happens if you click on "yes". Some of my friends are convinced that the information is immediately checked for credit card details, proof that they have been to porn sites Read More...

Postedby marklon | 10 Comments    

Questions and answers
26 August 05 12:29 AM

I have been asked a few questions about things that I mentioned in my blogs and I thought that I would share the answers. The first question came from one of my colleagues, Akos. "Why didn't you mention the engineers in Budapest when you were listing Read More...

Postedby marklon | 2 Comments    

Waiting for Godot
18 August 05 06:05 PM

Idle hangs are the subject of today’s rant. They can be pretty tricky things. With desktop applications, there are generally only a few threads and you have a good idea what each thread does. With components that run inside a complex host such as the Read More...

Postedby marklon | 0 Comments    

Where did all the CPU go?
16 August 05 07:05 PM

I was doing some debugging of a busy hang which didn't fit the usual pattern today and I thought that it was interesting enough to share with you. The customer was reporting that their process was hanging with 100% CPU. Ok, that sounds like a busy hang. Read More...

Postedby marklon | 2 Comments    

Hanged if you do, hanged if you don't
12 August 05 09:44 PM

Busy hangs are easy enough to troubleshoot, either live or post mortem. They tend not to be stress related although they can cause a lot of stress. In a busy hang, you are looping. Single threaded hangs are trivial to troubleshoot in development. The Read More...

Postedby marklon | 0 Comments    

Hanging by a thread
08 August 05 05:50 PM

Sorry that there hasn’t been an update for a while. I had a bug of a different kind but feeling better now. Since we are in the summer doldrums, I will talk about another subject where nothing much seems to happen. Hangs. Hangs are not nice. Fatal errors Read More...

Postedby marklon | 0 Comments    

A normal day
03 August 05 02:36 PM

I thought that I would tell you what I am working on today to give you a snapshot of a typical working week. It is actually a relatively quiet time because of the summer holidays here in the northern hemisphere. Because these are issues for customers, Read More...

Postedby marklon | 1 Comments    

Localisation of fixes
02 August 05 06:05 PM

We produce our software in English. Well, American English anyway. I am a little bit biased since I speak the Queen’s English rather than the well loved twang of our colonial friends. Oh, that would be her Britannic Majesty Elizabeth Regina II. Let’s Read More...

Postedby marklon | 1 Comments    

What happens when a customer has hit a bug and wants it fixed?
01 August 05 12:35 PM

Well, the first thing to do is to verify that this is our bug. One discussion that crops up over and over is: Customer: “Your heap manager sucks. Look, it is crashing in the heap free routine” Me: “Well, it could be our problem but I haven’t seen a heap Read More...

Postedby marklon | 0 Comments    

A case study... kind of
01 August 05 10:30 AM

So, what is a typical case that I might handle? There isn’t really a typical case but I will give you a fictional case that wouldn’t look out of place in a typical day. I don’t generally get cases when they first come in. We have engineers in the various Read More...

Postedby marklon | 3 Comments