Not quite a TS story, but this story about hacking a refrigerator reminded me of a bug I was assigned to track down long ago when I wore the hat of a software engineer.
This was back in the early 90's when Windows 3.1 and OS/2 were things, and DOS was still used. Our company was porting a lot of code from a legacy DOS platform and we were getting calls from customers that one particular reporting subsystem would crash randomly when printing reports. After a little bit of poking around I discovered that it would crash only on certain days. Only on Wednesdays.
Only on Wednesdays in September.
Only on Wednesdays in September if it was the 10th or later.
Anybody who did C programming in the 90's or earlier probably already sees what the problem was. Turns out whoever originally wrote this reporting subsystem miscalculated by one byte when defining a buffer to store the current date when printing the report headers. When the date consisted of the longest named month, the longest named day, and a 2 digit day of the month it overflowed that buffer. And the rest as they say, is history.
Submitted December 04, 2014 at 12:46AM by IphtashuFitz http://ift.tt/1wsSujA talesfromtechsupport
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