I thought of this after a recent bug I found. I use Vivaldi browser and recently it updated. After the update my mouse cursor was not visible when within the browser window. Other programs worked fine. I tried visual studio and steam and epic game store all had my mouse, Vivaldi didn’t.
I closed all instances of Vivaldi via task nanager(was unable to click the x) and restarted it. That fixed the bug and I haven’t been able to replicate so I don’t have anything to submit for a bug report. Just a really strange thing.
What have been your weirdest bugs?
I joined a team and was assigned a bug that had been bugging them for two years. Randomly files they saved would be corrupted.
Eventually isolated it to the third party library they used to serialize the data. For some reason this library corrupted file names that were an odd length. So “cat” would get corrupted while “cats” would save and load just fine. It was a black box library we didn’t control so was told to just program a workaround to check filename length and append a character if it was odd and move on.
I still want to know what that library was doing.
Notepad on windows, I think around the XP and earlier versions, had a similar bug. If you typed
this app can breakand saved it, the file would be corrupted. Something to do with the number and placement of characters.ASCII was interpreted as UTF because the function that checked whether the given text was Unicode checked the difference between bytes at even and odd positions. Many of the common phrases used to trigger this were in the 4-3-3-5 format (by letters), e.g., Bush hid the facts However, there was never any reason that this format of character placement was necessary for the bug (though even length was necessary)
Haunting
Hmm yeah that’s really weird… I can’t think of a purpose for a check like that, plus even it was a valid reason throw an exception or return a result indicating failure, don’t just corrupt the file
I’m curious now. Can you describe “corrupted”? One char off? Non-ascii gibberish?
This was 15 years ago and I was only on that team for a year so some details are fuzzy. I just remember the odd length filename distinctly. We never found a pattern, not that we looked super hard. We did check the usual suspects like Base64 encoding and big vs little endian and such but nothing lined up. The file would just be garbled nonsense. No whitespace and every character under the sun in a massive block.