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The code worked differently when the moon was full

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Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#91

Post by asdff »

acdha wrote: post #38

I heard a great story a while back for a digitization project where historic content was being provided by many libraries around the world, including one in Russia. The quality of the scanned books was excellent, except for a weird distortion every so often where part of the page would be shifted partway through as if someone had shifted half the page in Photoshop. This was only noticed in books over a certain size s…

This is why you see sensitive imaging equipment in labs on air tables. Sometimes the entire room is an air table.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#93

Post by fastssd »

eitland wrote: post #89
xook wrote: post #85

Is there a database or "online myth/story" archive of wacky bugs like this and in the comments? These would make for great "cocoa at night" reading!

I'm bookmarking this thread on pinboard because of all the good pointers here.

Add this to your list: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9mk2o7/mri_disabl...

spoiler: Helium messes with MEMS oscillator, causing iPhones to stop working (the clock signal is basically flatlined)

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#94

Post by jonhohle »

tabtab wrote: post #57
vidanay wrote: post #26

We 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 t…

Our garage door opener has this problem. At very specific times of the year the sun confuses the infrared blockage sensor. The cause occurred to me when I lined up my eye to see what the sensor was seeing when it was failing, and I noticed the morning sun right next to the other end of the sensor stream. I moved a trash can to shade the sensor and it worked fine.

On sunny days our garage door won’t open until the remote is very close. Either the solar panels or inverter generate enough noise to interfere with the signal.

A few months ago our garage door openers started working like normal again. That was great until we realized it was because the inverter had failed. When the inverter was replaced, our door problems started again.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#96

Post by rramadass »

Neat Thread!

What i love about these problem-solving anecdotes is how a seemingly totally different domain is the key to the solution. It always makes me marvel at how interconnected everything in our World is. Strengthens my belief that "Cross-Disciplinary" knowledge is where "Wisdom" lies and is the key to our Future.

“From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link to it.” --- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#97

Post by DougN7 »

RegBarclay wrote: post #13
macintux wrote: post #4

> 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."

You are most definitely not alone with that exact bug. Welcome to the club! :)

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#98

Post by rramadass »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #88
vidanay wrote: post #26

We 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 t…

I had a similar issue in my industrial automation class. We were sorting cylinders by diameter and height as they went down the conveyor belt. PLC controlling motors, sensors, etc. My group got everything setup, built our program, and everything worked fine. Waited a few minutes for the TA to verify, but it failed. We changed a few things, it worked, but failed when he came over. Another group looked over our code, n…

>Finally I realized I was standing when we were testing things.

What clued you in to this possibility?

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#99

Post by thadk »

I've resolved several "celestial body" problems with routers and modems in East/West Africa over the years by pointing USB fans at them – between the sun and the workday generating heat with higher load in lower-end routers or insufficiently-air-conditioned units, can work surprisingly well to improve the network at almost no cost.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#100

Post by hypertele-Xii »

vidanay wrote: post #26

We 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 t…

So much time and money wasted by not recording the camera. Could've simply reviewed the footage from the right timestamp and immediately discovered what was wrong. All you had to do was take a still picture every time the system makes a rejection.
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