And the tap drips, drip drip drip drip drip

[venta]

Aargh. This afternoon I have been staring at a little spinny egg-timer.

I don't mean I've been waiting for something to happen, and doing other stuff while the timer spins.

I mean my actual job has involved me watching a little spinny egg-timer. Carefully. All afternoon.

(Mostly I'm hoping to catch it glitching, so I can immediately leap on it and investigate the logs to see why it did that. However, in the usual manner it seems that adding logging has changed a hard-to-reproduce bug into an impossible-to-reproduce bug. Bother.)

Comments

10:15 on a Saturday night

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Well, there's your answer then; add logging and the glitch will go away without you needing to understand it!
(Except obviously if you're not _watching_ the logging, it will reoccur at random...)

[venta.livejournal.com]

One kudo to you :)

And yes, it's the perfect solution - anyone *using* this software is bound to understand that a huge text file that grows at around 150 lines per second and rapidly fills up their entire storage is just a necessary evil :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

However, in the usual manner it seems that adding logging has changed a hard-to-reproduce bug into an impossible-to-reproduce bug. Bother.

Heisenbug wins again!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Late update: best possible result!

Not only was it A Bug, it was A Bug which was neither my fault nor my responsibility to fix :-)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Excellent! :-)

(Hope not too much of your time was sucked up discovering this...)

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Eh? I'm missing something here. The egg timers I use cost about £2 so why bother fixing a broken one?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I wasn't very clear - not a physical egg-timer, but a spinning graphic of an egg-timer on a computer screen in some software I've written. It's a "please wait while stuff happens" indicator to the user, but things are going wrong in the depths of the code, and the first outwardly visible symptom is that the egg-timer starts to slow down and the animation goes jerky.

[metame.livejournal.com]

Any way you can change the animation to something easier to monitor? Maybe that counts seconds at 1 per second?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I can change it, but I'm not sure that that'd be easier to monitor. I think it's easier to answer the question "is that smooth animation animating smoothly" than it is to answer "did that take 1.1 seconds to update the counter". Seconds would be easier to work out on average over time, but I need to know that the problem is happening right this instant.

Today's strategy: wild speculation as to cause, followed by investigation to see if that cause is happening :)

[metame.livejournal.com]

Fair enough... you know what you're doing.
In the realms of way-more-effort-than-worth-it you could find a song which has a beat matching the usual rotation speed, and then just bop around til you find it is out of sync....

[venta.livejournal.com]

Dude, I can control the rotation speed! To the boogie-debugger, now!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Could try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIHMN1rFi9s

Or just jitterbugging…

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew. I clicked on that link without even pausing to consider that you might be Rickrolling me (which, mercifully, you weren't).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Straitsrolling is probably almost as bad.