What’s the weirdest software bug you’ve encountered?

[Ian]

Quite probably one in one of my very own programs. I am fascinated by Sun and Moon and made some Visual Basic programs that track the sun and moon across the sky, either as little icons that move on top (Z dimension) of your other open windows, or as a picture, or as digits. A parameter file lets you put in things like the moon's phase, your height (for shadows), earth's tilt (can have fun with this one), and up to 96 latitude / longitude pairs for examination. Anyway I was on me hols once and opened up my little sun bars (it's my own desktop toy, you see). Although there was no error, they were all f***ed up with the calculations clearly wrong and the sun / moon not where they should be for the lat and lon I entered. I puzzled over this for ages. In the end the "bug" was very simple!! I had used my (Dutch) wife's laptop, which used a comma as a decimal point rather than a full stop!

 

[AllThingsTech]

@Ian we’ve similarly had challenges with full stops and commas in numbers as we did a project to offer our product in different languages

 

[Hitcore]

@Ian , lol.
Tell your wife I said "de groeten"!

 

[Retro]

Just why are these tiny typo style bugs so hard to track down?!

@Ian if you've not seen my entry yet featuring the most vexing bug I've ever encountered, check it out here:

What’s the weirdest software bug you’ve encountered?

I can tell you mine: I was on a call to a friend on Discord. It was clear that my audio delivery to him was being delayed. Note that it was a video call so it was clear that he was receiving my (audio) messages late, So, here goes: Friend says “sorry about that”. I ask what he’s apologising...

nerdzone.uk

 

[AllThingsTech]

@Retro were IDEs advanced with the ability to go straight to a method definition?

 

[Retro]

Not back then. Perhaps professional software development apps of the time did, but I never saw any of these. Again, without the internet, access to information was orders of magnitude more limited. If I was able to go back to that time, it would probably feel like the Stone Age.

 

[AllThingsTech]

Or Iron Age? Ice Age?