I thought that this was going to be different story. There was a program I heard about back in the 90s which would literally crash depending on the phase of the moon! The story is that it wanted to print a date. The programmer happened to have an astronomy library available that gave a string containing the date. So the programmer called that, and then parsed out the date. Unfortunately the astronomy library wrote it…
The code worked differently when the moon was full
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Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#22In the analogue days, before pixels existed, a customer had trouble with their phone line not working when the moon was full.
The problem was that they lived on the coast, and a subsurface junction box would get wet during king tides, causing the telephone line to fail.
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#23Reminds me of a story where a company's internet would regularly drop at the same time every day -- let's say 3pm.
Nobody could figure it out so they called in an expert.
After lots of attempts and figuring, one day the person in question happens to look out the window at the time in question ... and sees a service truck park exactly in line-of-sight between the business and their internet-signal pickup broadcast point.
Ah ha!
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#24I hoped this would be an article about nethack.
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#25Elrond - 'There is moon programming here.. see?'
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#26We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to the current management. Finally, one day a technician was on site for another project when the customer came up to him and said "It's happening right now! Come fix it!" The technician rushed over to the equipment and discovered that the sun was shining at exactly the right angle to cause a lens flare in one of our cameras. This happened twice a year as the sun moved along its trajectory. A strategically placed piece of opaque plastic fixed it permanently.
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#27Sometimes the day star lines up directly behind your satellite or microwave dish and you have very poor snr for a few minutes.
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#28Signed integers should be used as sparingly as floating-point. They should not be used in ordinary code because ordinary code has no use for them until they break something.
The most notable exception would be languages which allow negative indexing, but IMHO if that were syntactic instead of relying on actual signed integers, it would be safer (I.e., [- $int] would be a different syntax from [(-$int)] and the latter would not be correctly typed.)
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#29> Bugs based on a time calculations can often show themselves later when view through a longer lens and scope of time...sometimes WAY longer than you'd expect. When I worked for BBN in '97-'98, someone from outside the company as I recall came to talk to a room of engineers about the wide variety of calendar-related behaviors in various UNIX systems that were expected to cause problems for Y2K. It was a very, very lo…
Dates are a pain. The date bug I committed with the longest tail was daylight time. It was all good until we got to a day with 25 hours when we "fell back."
I had one of those on my Pebble:
Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full
#30Reminds me of a story where a company's internet would regularly drop at the same time every day -- let's say 3pm. Nobody could figure it out so they called in an expert. After lots of attempts and figuring, one day the person in question happens to look out the window at the time in question ... and sees a service truck park exactly in line-of-sight between the business and their internet-signal pickup broadcast poi…
i once lived in an apartment in an old building where if you turned on the light in the bathroom the dsl would lose sync.
why this would occur i'll never know. (probably old telephone wiring wrapped around old 110v wiring? maybe? or who knows what kind of weird leakage/ground loops may have existed)