Take the "Funny Bug" challenge!

[laima_vainina]

As complex as computers, hardware, and computer software is today, there is no such thing as a bug-free software or hardware. However, there are times when these defects are just so hilarious.

What are the funniest bugs you have experienced or seen?

Write down an interesting experience or a comic story and make others laugh a bit.

Everyone that will post in this forum thread an interesting bug experience will receive 150 reputation points!

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

I have experienced hundreds and thousands of bugs in my last almost 11 years of professional career. Every 2 times a year, however I have a smile due to.... Daylight Saving Time change.

In 2010 in one of the products I worked for, we have build our own UI calendar widget. The solution was simple:

1. For the current month, take the 1st day 00:00 date time.

2. Take the day of month number = at start it's the number "1", and print it to the calendar day box.

3. Add 24hours

4. Repeat step 2-3 until a new month comes.

Usually countries start their DST at 1:00 or 2:00, but.... not in Chile! They start they DST at 0:00 and rewind to previous day 23:00! How it affected our solution? When we iterated over April it looked like that:

1. 1st April, 00:00 -> we print "1", add 24h

2. 2nd April, 00:00 -> we print "2", add 24h

3. 3rd April, 00:00 -> We print "3", add 24h

4. We expected "4th April, 00:00" but ..... DST ! so 3rd April, 00:00 + 24h = 3rd April, 23:00 !!! So we print again "3" 😄

[MaciejNeumann]

This is super interesting - are there any other countries that are doing this or Chile is only one?

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

It is interesting as for just a moment there's the other day and then you go back to the previous one 😄

There are just a few other countries like - Iran, Jordan, Lebanon or Paraguay. Iran was double complicated as they have not even TZ - (UTC+3:30)

[AntonioSousa]

To me it has to be the Java/Javascript (and so many other languages) incorrect handling of floating point expressions. They say that the following expression is false:

.1 + .2 == .3

If you don't believe that modern languages have such basic problems (it's not an implementation bug, it's a "formal" bug), just launch your Developer Tools console, in any browser, and check it out:

Firefox:

Chrome:

[MaciejNeumann]

I've checked it myself and you are totally right, also got "false". I didn't know about it at all earlier.

If someone is interested in why programming languages are behaving like that, here is a medium article about this (I had to know why 😉 😞

https://medium.com/better-programming/why-is-0-1-0-2-not-equal-to-0-3-in-most-programming-languages-...

In JavaScript 0.1 + 0.2 actually equals 0.30000000000000004

[AntonioSousa]

@Maciej N.,

The classic paper that dealt with this issue is almost 30 years old. It's available for instance here:
https://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/bachelor/IEEE754_article.pdf

Unfortunately, there is one real case where these rounding errors ended in clear disaster. Please notice the paragraph between pages 7 & 8 of the following PDF:

• https://www.gao.gov/assets/220/215614.pdf

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

JavaScript is so lovely!

Guess ?

6 === '6'

10 + '20'

[rswarnka]

May be not as funny as others, but most often when you copy paste the codes from the rich-text websites/editors/chat/office suite, there are some notorious characters that escape from the eyes such as double quote, newlines, zero-width characters, and so many other characters. Often you get cryptic error and scratch head around but no help to avail. (very funny when you realize it was due to text transformation on copy paste).

Another, funny functional bug often see on poorly designed websites, when you try to recover password by 'forget password' and it says 'User with this email does not exists'. But again when you try to register with same email it says 'User with email already exist, try logging in instead of registering'. You are in dilemma.

Back of my mind, I remember a performance bug on bank website which did not had pagination for the account statements. Pulling the last 6 months data was enough to cause one of their server to crazy and go unresponsive. There are even some funny Regular expressions which can cause the target program to crash. I won't be listing those here of course. 😄

Last one: I remember an mobile OS bug - with just a single character that caused chat it to break. (Not funny though:P). Special characters which cannot be read by the messaging app force it to shut down.

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

This recalled me:

[ChadTurner]

While I was in college I had a professor with the last name 'Null'. However, his email address and everything on the computer was listed as 'Smith'. When we asked him why his full name 'David Null' isn't present on anything in the system. He stated that his last name 'Null' was wreaking havoc on the IT infrastructure shortly after he was hired so as a last resort, the David and the IT Department agreed on selecting a new last name.

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

Hahahah Chad, that's hilarious! Kind of related :

[ChadTurner]

Love it! That's great! 🙂 At a previous organization their naming convention was to abbreviate the PC role in the computer name. we always got a good laugh when the Finance Assistant's computer came up in the ticketing software as "Fine.Ass"

[AntonioSousa]

Also slightly related:

Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2105-5-80

[r_weber]

One of my favourite "bugs" of all time goes back to the dial-up era, when I was still using a 56k modem in my dad's home office. Back then I created my first shared internet access, by hooking up the modem to a old Intel 486 linux computer that would take the job of dialing in and NATing the dial-up connection.

My whole familiy complained that the connection dropped frequently whenever my dad was working in his office. I spent days and hours to debug the dial-up process and the connection until late into the night.

I finally found the bug that caused the connection to drop. It was a nasty hardware "bug". It turned out that the flourescent lamp in the office created some interference with the modem when the light was turned on, which caused the modem to drop the connection. So everytime my dad walked into the room he'd turn on the light and everything went offline.

Btw.: the first discovered computer bug was actually a moth stuck in a relay in the Mark II computer at Harvard University, discovered 1947 - imagine we'd call them moths not bugs today!
"hey I found a moth in your code" "Moth tracking software" "Moth report" "I fixed this critical moth with my last commit"

[AntonioSousa]

Interference is a very nasty thing. It's incredible the amount of stuff that today use the 2.4 GHz band. I have had one with a microwave oven in the past interfering with my wifi...

[laima_vainina]

I really appreciate that you shared such an interesting story of your personal experience and also about this historical fact. It's funny that the term "bug" came from a real insect 🙂