Computing Blog

If machine translation ever achieves perfection, it would  take all the fun out of things like this:

Lammi Bars and Hämeenkoski apply Cypriots kähinöissä was used, among other things, an ax and muovikuulapyssyä.
Häme police said Lammi and Hämeenkoski youth elvytteli Friday morning fight in the village back to life the old tradition.

First, pools of people were Hämeenkoski tough guy by a young man. The dispute was the subject of an online music service to use.

- Still do not have detailed information about the dispute reasons, but the use of Spotify, it had begun, Inspector Ilkka Iivari says.

In this situation, threatened, and one window was broken. Lammi Bars car ammuskeltiin muovikuulapyssyllä. After the episode kind of puddles left their villages of origin.

Häme Touch the kind of went after to explore the mystery of the broken window. Lammintausta supermarket in the center of the yard crews encountered again. Now threatened, such as an ax. Police release, the event was also a “catch up with other textiles.”

The situation ended with one hot young men tried to drive the car Hämeenkoski cover types on. From major injuries were avoided. Car hit a little to one young person, who left the hospital in order to check for dents.

According to police, the composition of the teams is not yet fully known. The main factors that are known to the police. The youngster age of about 18 years.

- It should be remembered that the villages of winning, the assizes disappears. Häme police recall in a statement.

Do you ever get sidetracked when you find a bug that’s outside the scope of the feature you’re currently testing? What do you do? Do you stop and raise a bug report there and then, or do you continue with your original testing and make a note of it for later?

I recently encountered such a bug while creating test data, and came to the conclusion it, while not a show-stopper, it was a little more than a minor annoyance and needed to be logged. It probably helped that I was able to isolate and repeat the bug while creating my test data, so didn’t end up chasing down rabbit holes in the process.

After logging the bug it turned out that another tester had noticed the problem much like I had, but hadn’t logged it at the time because of tight time constraints. I think that justified my logging it.

A thread in the Software Testing Club asked about the funniest bugs people had seen. This one of mine is much about the way it was reported as it’s about the bug itself.

Many years ago, we had a support call from a customer, saying “Help, our system is possessed by the spirit of a negligent Edwardian maintenance engineer“.

The function dealt with planned maintenance schedules, which had a frequency in weeks. To allow for two-year maintenance intervals, the frequency field was a 3-digit integer.

The customer had a business requirement that was not explicitly supported; they wanted planned maintenance jobs that would be performed on-demand based on criteria that were outside the scope of the system, rather than performed at fixed intervals. When the engineers decided the job needed doing, they’d update the record and set the due date.

So they entered the maximum permissible number into the “Frequency” field, 999, which worked out as just short of 20 years. Once the maintenance task was performed and completed, the system would obediently calculate the next due date some time in the next century (I told you this was some time ago, didn’t I?)

Then the system started showing long-overdue maintenance tasks that were supposed to have been done in 1907.

We had hit an instance of what was later called the Y2K bug way back in 1987.

The irony was that the Oracle database at the time supported four-digit years, but the UI (built using a precursor to Oracle’s SQL*Forms) did not. The short-term workaround was to limit the value of the field to 520, buying enough time for Oracle’s UI tool to support 4-digit years properly. Later upgrades supported the “missing” functionality properly by making Frequency and Next Due Date optional fields.