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?
We deployed a client software in a Docker container on Windows 10. It could not connect to the backend, even though we saw SYN packages originating from it.
So, we ran WireShark on the Windows host and saw that the SYN-ACK packages from the backend were arriving there, too, but no ACK came through to complete the TCP handshake.Eventually, we rolled out a network debugging container on that Windows host and then could see in the tcpdump, that the SYN-ACK packages, which arrived on the Windows host, just did not show up in the container. Hyper-V or something was quietly dropping them.
Other network connections were working fine, just the SYN-ACK from our backend triggered this.
I worked at an IoT platform startup. All of our embedded device demos stopped working August 1st. I was told the same thing happened last year, but it was fine, things would start working in September. I decided to go fix it anyway. Eventually I figured out the culprit was a custom HTTP library. Instead of doing anything sensible, the way it found the Content-Length header was to loop over the bytes of the response until it found the first ‘g’ add 5 to that pointer and then assume that whatever was there was the number of bytes it should read. Unfortunately, HTTP responses have a Date header which includes the month and August has a ‘g’ in it.
There were a bunch of these demo devices already flashed and shipped out. The ‘fix’ to get them to work, even in August, was to downgrade requests to HTTP 0.9 which didn’t require a Date header in the response.
Load 2TB of data into ram during startup. Prompt user credentials to continue. Whoops, we need to do cryptography on those credentials… Free the heap. Invalid creds force exits. Valid creds goes gray until those 2TB are loaded back into memory… From storage halfway across the country over the 3mbps link, the best available in BFE.
I use a 3D CAD software that once you switch to 3D mode, it makes things partially transparent, but it does so by scaling the opacity of the entire window. The end result is that transparent parts look correct when you have a black desktop background, but otherwise you’ll see what’s on the window behind it or the desktop background. Same issue when you get gaps between two sides or curves. I think no one noticed because they would usually launch it from a terminal, so they always had black backgrounds.
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)
I still want to know what they library was doing.
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.
Early in the GNOME /wayland transition, there was a bug I hit where you could drag windows off the edge of the screen, and somehow the desktop would scroll. It was kinda cool conceptually, but completely broken functionally, as it was hard to scroll back.
Edit: Wayland was actually the solution, Xorg was the problem:
https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/bc70285d-88ac-42aa-80be-b8b8f012547b.png
I hit a bug recently in KDE Wayland where the task bar was just slightly offset from the edge of the screen, so there was a gap behind it. Very dumb.
OPAM (OCaml’s package manager) had a bug where it couldn’t find
curlorwgetto download stuff with (don’t ask me why it shelled out to those in the first place) if you were in more than 32 Unix groups. Have fun thinking of a reasonable explanation for that!Why are you in 32 unix groups?
Opam doesn’t endorse polyamory past a certain threshold
Once upon a time I worked with a CMS that allowed an admin to delete the CMS itself and also any web server that ran it. Poof: gone. Fun times.
to be real evil, create a test to confirm what that button does cause you know…100% code coverage
Right clicking the title bar of a window on Linux Mint, the menu appears but I can’t click it until I move the window away from it (the menu doesn’t close) and then it becomes responsive. I love Linux.
Did you customize your window manager or is that stock?
Pretty sure it’s stock Cinnamon, but I do have extensions installed which could be screwing with things.
