Mountain Biking Helps Squash Bugs 82
Dr.Milius writes "Henning Brauer of the OpenBSD project recently made an interesting post to the openbsd-tech mailing list about how a mountain bike ride helped him relate two baffling bugs in their new BGP and NTP daemons. It turns out they were both off-by-one errors that were easy to fix but notoriously difficult to spot. Always great when the experts show us how it's done."
Bake Cookies! (Score:4, Interesting)
hard-to-find bugs are often the easiest to fix (Score:3, Interesting)
I often find that the bugs that are most difficult to find are the easiest to fix. They are often some tiny corner case in one line of code that someone never thought of.
In the last product I worked on, we had a killer crash bug that different developers spent WEEKS investigating it, giving up, and then "hot potatoing" the bug to another developer. About two months later, I finally fixed the bug. A BSTR allocated using SysAllocString() should have been freed using SysFreeString(), but it was being "freed" using COM's CoTaskMemFree(). This would corrupt COM's heap causing random COM crashes in unrelated code much later!
Re:hard-to-find bugs are often the easiest to fix (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:not difficult to spot at all (Score:2, Interesting)