I Saw An Extremely Subtle Bug Today And I Just Have To Tell Someone

Post by neutronicus » Fri, Nov 18, 2011, 1:41 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #66

neutronicus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a physicist, I really want to argue with that statement. In particular, computer hardware operates (by design) as far as possible from any regimes where the laws of physics are well and truly complicated. A tokamak fusion reactor, by contrast, although it breaks down into orders of magnitude fewer logical parts, contains a big blob of monolithic, continuous complexity, namely the plasma itself and all its associat…

Is this actually the case though? Isn't the physics of CPU design (quantum tunneling etc) just as complicated as that of a fusion reactor (or arguably more so?) If you meant that the behavior of the plasma itself is complex from the mathematical point of view.. yes, that is true. But it _is_ modeled (along with nuclear explosions) on one of those computer thing you physics type sell short. :P

Post by adavies42 » Fri, Nov 18, 2011, 3:15 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #68

smokinn wrote: post #56

And that's why you should always have great analytics. Monitoring is what found a similarly subtle bug at my past job once. In the later afternoon a marketing guy on the traffic team came over and told me there was a problem with our trial signups. They'd dropped ~7% today for no apparently reason. We looked at the charts and today, for most of the day, compared to many other days and the past week there was indeed a…

You shouldn't redirect for assets that dont exist, even if you do for pages...

Post by bryanh » Fri, Nov 18, 2011, 4:19 PM UTC

bartl wrote: post #35

bryanh wrote: post #32

"If my users are inconvenienced, it is my fault, always." Good quote. I had a customer become irate with me before over untracked sales in my digital delivery product. I knew that the error stemmed from their web designer using their own button code and not our specially crafted button code, and I tried to help them fix it but only upset them more. Its hard to take responsibility for things seemingly outside your con…

Perhaps you should have constructed an API, and tell them "This is what your code should abide to", instead of just giving them code for the button. That is: abstract the spec away from the actual code. If closer inspection shows that their code isn't following the spec, you've earned the right for some serious fingerpointing.

Post by smokinn » Fri, Nov 18, 2011, 5:50 PM UTC

adavies42 wrote: post #73

justincormack wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't redirect for assets that dont exist, even if you do for pages...

you shouldn't redirect for pages either, 404s exist for a reason....

Post by tedunangst » Fri, Nov 18, 2011, 7:19 PM UTC

Figs wrote: post #62

tedunangst wrote: post #29

Wow. Had a very similar CSRF problem once. Customer complained they were getting page expired errors constantly. But only one customer and only with Safari, not Firefox. Turned out they were using an RSS reader on OS X that shared the system cookie jar with Safari. Every ten minutes it would log in with a password and get a new session cookie. Safari would then use the new session cookie which didn't match the CSRF f…

How did you resolve the problem?