Always something.
Jim Louis' page alerted me to yet another bug in the system. This one is caused by a change in the new system that is otherwise quite good. Here's the background if you're interested:
In the old system if you deleted a post (or a whole page!) it was actually deleted. I thought that this was not such a good idea, as accidently erasing something (especially a whole page) would result in really losing the data. In the new system I protect against this by not actually deleting anything. When you tell the system to delete something it just sets a delete field in the database so that the system recognizes that that post (or page) has been deleted. But all the info is still in there. Eventually I'll build a trash can system so that you can go back into the trash and resurrect deleted items. This is a good thing (I was especially scared about one of our accounts being compromised and the evil-doer having such easy access to erasing everything.)
Anyway, the probelm was that when paging back or forward (using the '...more recent posts' and 'older posts...' links) the system looks to see how big the window is for the page (the number of posts set in [editpage] for 'number of posts shown on page') and then grabs that many posts either forward or back from where the surfer is. This works fine unless there are deleted posts in the window the system is trying to grab. This was happening on NOLA for the last day. One post on the front page, but then when you tried to go back one page, the next post had been deleted so the system would get stuck. Now I've made it smarter so that it checks for this happening and readjusts itself accordingly.
Anyway, that's probably not too interesting. But I mention it because it is another good example of how subtle problems are all but impossible to find unless your software is actually in use. There is just no way to think about every possibility in some abstract way. Only actual use will uncover bugs. In the open source / free software world they say "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow." Amen.
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Jim Louis' page alerted me to yet another bug in the system. This one is caused by a change in the new system that is otherwise quite good. Here's the background if you're interested:
In the old system if you deleted a post (or a whole page!) it was actually deleted. I thought that this was not such a good idea, as accidently erasing something (especially a whole page) would result in really losing the data. In the new system I protect against this by not actually deleting anything. When you tell the system to delete something it just sets a delete field in the database so that the system recognizes that that post (or page) has been deleted. But all the info is still in there. Eventually I'll build a trash can system so that you can go back into the trash and resurrect deleted items. This is a good thing (I was especially scared about one of our accounts being compromised and the evil-doer having such easy access to erasing everything.)
Anyway, the probelm was that when paging back or forward (using the '...more recent posts' and 'older posts...' links) the system looks to see how big the window is for the page (the number of posts set in [editpage] for 'number of posts shown on page') and then grabs that many posts either forward or back from where the surfer is. This works fine unless there are deleted posts in the window the system is trying to grab. This was happening on NOLA for the last day. One post on the front page, but then when you tried to go back one page, the next post had been deleted so the system would get stuck. Now I've made it smarter so that it checks for this happening and readjusts itself accordingly.
Anyway, that's probably not too interesting. But I mention it because it is another good example of how subtle problems are all but impossible to find unless your software is actually in use. There is just no way to think about every possibility in some abstract way. Only actual use will uncover bugs. In the open source / free software world they say "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow." Amen.
- jim 6-12-2001 6:50 pm