Bugs

While going through some Evolution [ a Linux email client ] mailing list today, I came across the following text :

While I was adding debug printfs to maildir_summary_check() somehow this
bug went away (classical heisenbug ;)). I could not reproduce it anymore.


A bit of googling on this "heisenbug" took me to this wiki page that lists some popular but funny ways of classifying software bugs. Few of them are :

• Heisenbug

These type of bugs are the most annoying ones and encountered by most programmers who work with large pieces of code or large pieces of multi-threaded code.  By definition, this is a computer bug that disappears when an attempt is made to study it. Example : You see this bug in production systems but you do not see them in your debug builds !!

• Bohrbug

These type of bugs, once caught can be studied but with great difficulty. The conditions under which these type of bugs occur is usually unknown, or takes a very long time to deduce. Example : a buffer overflow bug that manifests itself only when a particular [ usually large or corrupted ] set of data is used. We had some funny name for these type of bugs. We called them, "scratch the head" bugs :D .. Basically originated from someone trying to explain the scenario when this bug occurred by saying, "I was using this software for doing some work, and suddenly out of the blue, just when I scratched my head, it crashed !!!"

• Mandelbug

These are bugs whose behaviors may or may not be chaotic, but are so very complex that there is probably no practical solution. Example : A bug manifested due to the fundamental flaw in the design of the program.

• Schroedinbug

One of the funniest and most annoying bugs. Usually caused by using the program under a particular scenario [ most of the time its an unusual way to use the program ] and it is realized that the program should have never worked in the first place. And from this point onwards, the program simply stops working for everybody else till that annoying bug is fixed.

GMail filter

Had been struggling since a couple of hours to fix this problem of mine. It ended up in a silly search filter that did not flash to me soon. Thought of sharing it with all :)

Problem :

1. I have a filter to star all emails that land up in my GMail inbox.
2. I am using the GMail Labs feature of having multiple inboxes and the first pane on top lists all the emails that are starred ( is:starred )

This helps me in seeing all the important [ un-archived ] in the top of my mailbox [ in the separate pane ]

I have also subscribe to GMail alerts and they land up in my inbox as starred based on the above filter.

Since, the number of GMail alerts has increased and they keep flooding my "is:starred" pane, i wanted to modify the search for creating this pane to show all the mails addressed to me excluding the GMail alerts.

Solution :

I was not able to find a search term to exclude some mails in the "is:starred" pane.
So, I had to modify the filter that adds a star to all incoming mails.
The filter had to be written with the following criteria:

• Mail should be addressed to my email id
• Mail should not be from Google Alerts
• Apply star

I could not find a way to add a search string in GMail that says, the from address is not Google Alerts. So, after going through the list of GMail keywords, I was able to finally create a simple search string that excludes emails that contain the words "Google" and "Alerts". The new filter looks something like this :

The picture has been modified to make the image small and visible. The new search string is :

Has the words : (-google -alerts)

Software Professional

Came across this amazingly simple form for creating a new userid on the APSRTC online booking site. Check out the options for Occupation field. Its the most innovative and simplest number of options given :)