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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

#71

Post by mark-r »

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 knew a guy who was a computer tech early in his career. One of his rounds was on a military base, and they had just moved their computer room up one floor. They started having problems with their tape drive, it would just randomly pop up an error while they were using it. He tried mightily to diagnose the problem but couldn't figure it out. Finally he took a break and walked to the nearest window and looked out. He saw a radar antenna making a sweep - and realized the error came when the antenna was pointed in their direction.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#72

Post by mark-r »

dhosek wrote: post #66
Johnny555 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end of that article is a good reminder of the units command, I've been using Google for units conversion for so long that I forgot about the standalone units . It even comes standard with OSX.

Is there an equivalent command for doing things like 147 days from today or days since 21 jun 2021 or 88 days after 15 Aug 2021? This is the one thing I really wish was in Spotlight (I use spotlight for unit conversion and calculations which is really handy).

I use the Python datetime module for stuff like that. Excel can be useful too, since it treats dates as a number of days.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#73

Post by ethbr0 »

munificent wrote: post #47
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…

Bughenge.

My exact thought. Please tell me this was filed as the Stonehenge Bug.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#74

Post by ethbr0 »

bgirard wrote: post #39
m4rtink wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a story about an astronomer loosing the chance to be the first to report a commet one cold winter night - just as he wanted to send the email to report it, the Internet connection was dead! He ran from the observatory to the nearest place with Internet connectivity, but by the time he sent the email from there, there was already a report from another astronomer elsewhere, a few minutes ago. Reason for the mys…

When I started dating my wife she lived in a shared student residence. She would tell me that her internet didn't work when her room was cold. She had to wait for her space heater to heat up the the room. I didn't believe her at first but it turned out be true. She lived there for a year so I observed it several times. Never did find out what the problem is. I don't know if thermal contraction could effect solders be…

We had it on a copper cable line in university. The line was hung overly-tight without slack (old job).

When it got just cold enough in the winter: no connection. Warmed up: connection.

Finally realized it was the line, got Comcast to redrop from pole, and situation was resolved.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#75

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

bgirard wrote: post #39
m4rtink wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a story about an astronomer loosing the chance to be the first to report a commet one cold winter night - just as he wanted to send the email to report it, the Internet connection was dead! He ran from the observatory to the nearest place with Internet connectivity, but by the time he sent the email from there, there was already a report from another astronomer elsewhere, a few minutes ago. Reason for the mys…

When I started dating my wife she lived in a shared student residence. She would tell me that her internet didn't work when her room was cold. She had to wait for her space heater to heat up the the room. I didn't believe her at first but it turned out be true. She lived there for a year so I observed it several times. Never did find out what the problem is. I don't know if thermal contraction could effect solders be…

Yes, and not at all unusual. The gap between the ideal world of textbook circuits and the messy and random world of real circuits is a source of constant distraction and surprise.

Thermal stresses, RF interference, issues caused by lighting, rain, and condensation, bad solder joints, other kinds of temperature sensitivity, designs with marginal component tolerances, component drift over time, vibration sensitivity, strange failure modes in damaged ICs, timing issues, power supply noise, coupling between circuit tracks and/or adjacent wiring, logic errors due to radiation (sometimes from surrounding metal), dust, insects, and animal damage - and on and on.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#76

Post by ethbr0 »

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…

I deal with this all the time at work. People are capable of tuning out frighteningly obvious things, if they happen with enough regularity for long enough.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#77

Post by justusthane »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #11
tux3 wrote: post #10

Tangentially related, here's another fun bug that inexplicably cares what time it is: Open Office cannot print on Tuesdays ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... )

A bit unrelated, but another fun one, "We can't send mail more than 500 miles": https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

I love the 500 mile email bug! I read another one years ago about a server that would inexplicably crash, and it turned out to be due to stepping on a particular floor tile in the server room. I wish I could find that one.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#78

Post by treeman79 »

m4rtink wrote: post #31
mhandley wrote: post #12

The phase of the moon really can affect performance. A friend of mine worked on wireless links in Scotland and was struggling with loss at certain times of day, but not exactly the same time every day. When they graphed loss against time, the pattern was really periodic over many days. The periodicity turned out to be 12 hours 25 minutes, which they eventually realized is exactly the time between low tides. The probl…

I heard a story about an astronomer loosing the chance to be the first to report a commet one cold winter night - just as he wanted to send the email to report it, the Internet connection was dead! He ran from the observatory to the nearest place with Internet connectivity, but by the time he sent the email from there, there was already a report from another astronomer elsewhere, a few minutes ago. Reason for the mys…

In college we had a transmitter that linked several campuses.

If internet went out on any campus we would go and replace the lightbulb left on the transmitter. A couple minutes later all would be good.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#79

Post by oceliker »

> Did you know (I know because I'm old) that Windows 95, for a time, was unable to run longer than 49.7 days of runtime?

Yep! Because foone did a whole month-long Twitter thread on it, even had a livestream showing the crash.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1413694652822163459

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb46tX7-d_o

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#80

Post by jagged-chisel »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #63
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…

You get the same problem with geostationary satellites, e.g. for satellite TV. There's period of about 10 days every spring and fall where, for up to 30 minutes every day, the sun transits 'behind' a satellite within the beamwidth of the dish and totally overwhelms the signal at the LNB.

So an eclipse…of sorts
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