Bug Vanquisher: Bugz

The Stupidest Thing I Have Ever Heard

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:39:01 GMT

Mind it I hear a lot of stupid things too.

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Depending on which Control Panel view you use, Classic or Category, do one of the following:

Click System, and then click the Automatic Updates tab.
Click Performance and Maintenance, click System, and then click the Automatic Updates tab.

Click the option that you want. Make sure Automatic Updates is not turned off.

Problem: IE8 Beta 1. ;)

Of course, I'll be reporting Windows Update as broken.

PS: Apparently, I can't even report Windows Update as broken on Windows XP. It won't let me. ;(

Yahoo is SO Much Fun!

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:25:07 GMT

Latest version of Firefox is considered "rare" by Yahoo. Yes "rare" indeed, but the most conformant to web standards of all others out there!

May I point out that new version of Yahoo Mail does not work in FF 3 Beta 2 either, because they try to move nodes from one document to other through whatever ~~arcane~~ non standard method. This should be attempted through importNode or adaptNode.

I Hate foreach

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:45:50 GMT

There are many reasons. People don't implement it properly. foreach uses duck typing which does not require one to implement IEnumerable/IEnumerator. But people always go ahead and implement them with "virtual" functions and properties. Consider the performance hit when you are recursively iterating over all the files in a drive.

foreach also requires that collection be not modified during enumeration, yet people still do these kinds of things

foreach( Transaction transaction in transactions )
{
...
transactions.Remove( transaction );
...
}

in [it].

Definitely Buggy (Next Part)

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:45:20 GMT

I have refrained from giving the heading a name ending in 'Part 2' because I suspect many more will come and eventually I'll reach infinity.

Five minutes ago, Internet Explorer crashed pointing a finger to Flash9.ocx. I submitted a bug report to WER like a good citizen. After that, a little pop-up appeared thanking me and hosting a link for further information.

But, it took part of URL from my current culture, ur-PK. Therefore, the resultant link was http://wer.microsoft.com/responses/Response.aspx/2349/ur/5.1.2600.2.00010100.2.0?SGD=529579a5-9a25-41fa-88e3-358209fcca39
which is never going to work in a million years, unless you expect US President to speak Urdu as mother-tongue.

After a little (another) stroke of genius, I spotted the mistake and made it to the correct page.
http://wer.microsoft.com/responses/Response.aspx/2349/en/5.1.2600.2.00010100.2.0?SGD=529579a5-9a25-41fa-88e3-358209fcca39

There, I realized I had worked pointlessly as there is no useful information available there.

CppCodeProvider Bug List

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:57:58 GMT

Despite making major strides in the implementation of CppCodeProvider there are still some pieces missing. There are still few cases where you get no definition when rendering UDTs split. Specific cases are:

Foremost, MemberType and PointerToMember will throw FunctionNotImplementedException if rendered.
Member types (UDT/enum/union) which are not specified to be defined inline are missing definitions.
I would love to add support to declare a function/type as friend of another UDT or union.
If a member variable is declared static const and not an integral type, it is not defined.
If a member function (function/operator/constructor/destructor) is not declared inline

Irrelevant of rendering UDTs split or not, member type and pure virtual function rendering is broken and here is why:

If a member UDT has enclosing type as one of the bases, it is not even defined.
If a member function is pure (exception constructors), it is not defined anywhere.

Apart from these, there is memory leak when you try to assign a destructor to a UDT. I am investigating that issue.

Behold!

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:35:32 GMT

Courtesy of Samsung Easy Studio. Yet I was wondering about Pakistanis having problems with English, Inzimam saying 'boyses'!

Even beats the sentence structural mistakes in my LG mobile phone. [:)]

Who Does It Like Us?

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:09:39 GMT

We do!

This is a snap shot of performance monitor in Windows Vista. I wonder where those programmers learned their math. Last column is the total bytes sent/received, second last is bytes received and before that bytes sent.

Get Indulged 2

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:23:27 GMT

This is the new theme for IE7, notice the smooth gradient and the wonderful color choice in contrast to that smooth transitions you normally see.

I sincerely hope someone from Microsoft reads my blog, apart from him as they say in Urdu:

گھر کی مرغی دال برابر

World's Suckiest Mobile

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:05:58 GMT

So unwittingly, you chose to be ensnared by the TV advertisements..
And bought that shiny new mobile..

Congratulations on buying 'World's Suckiest Mobile Phone', i.e. LG KG-200. It is a raw deal, very rough indeed. A true explanation of 'not all that glitters is gold'. It has been a month since I bought that awful mobile and not a single day passes when I regret my decision, not that I usually regret anything I do [:)].

Lets begin a journey of the abnormalities in the specimen under observation.

To begin, you start the wrong way. Never follow the established conventions of how to unlock your mobile. While every other mobile I have ever used unlocks by the combination [Left soft key] + *, this stain of filth unlocks with [Right soft key] + #.
Next best (read beast) thing is that there is no sent message store and drafts folder. Outbox which should only hold the messages which are to be sent or already sent, performs the only function of being a drafts folder, only misnamed to outbox.
Sending a message to multiple recipients is a pain in ... You have to edit a nasty list of recipients every time to include those people. And for adding insult to injury, that list is only limited to 12 entries, so beware if you need to send an SMS/MMS to more than 12 people, that list will need to be purged of all entries. Similar chaos reigns for two messages which need to be sent to more than 12 people.
Even before sending anything, you need to enter text, don't you? In the next paragraph, you mind will suffer severe damage, be warned!
The feature we all have come to appreciate when enter text on limited keys than the alphabet of language is called T9 mode. An intelligent text entry system which displays all words that can be formed with the number sequence entered. And allows new words to be entered in the existing dictionary.
It is the second feature which is missing from my abnormality. Try as one may, there is no way to even add my name to that damned dictionary. And continuing the trend of not following established practices, words that can be formed are cycled with up/down arrow keys instead of *.
If you ever customize an SMS template, don't forget to redo everything after you turn on your phone again. LG thinks better about templates and will not let you meddle with things like: 'I am sorry', 'I love you' , 'Happy birthday' etc.
While on the subject of turning off your phone, you will be amazed by the surprising frequency with which this set can turn itself off. Plug the data cable to data transfer, it turns off every time!
Disaster spells if you have set a custom wallpaper, which resets to nothing on my set. A colleague also bought the same set and it never happens for him. Weird, even the bugs are non-consistent.
Continuing the trend of hideous and tricky, contact book rushes to the front. This phone supports entering Name, Number, Home Number, Company Name, Email Address, Office Number, Fax number and Birthday for a contact. Additionally, you can assign a picture, video, ring tone and a group.
But soon you will discover a terrible requirement, for these additional pieces of information, the contact must reside in phone memory. Even, a dumb person can say that use the contact's number stored in SIM memory as key to attach extra information, some sort of lookup table or dictionary.
Speaking of attaching picture, video or ring tone to a contact, they too must reside in phone memory instead of SD memory card. It is not able to find anything, anything in SD card even if it is full to bursting point with pictures and audio.
When searching contacts, don't be amazed if two numbers seem to be born on same date or have identical email addresses. Phone automatically saves you the trouble of entering vast pieces of information and incorrectly displays last viewed contact's information which has not been entered for others.
Contacts is full of surprises, say you are editing some contact starting with 'S'. When you acknowledge all the changes and contacts reappear, they start from 'A' and your focus is lost. Please search again.
One day you will come to recognize that you were wrong to expect focus staying on the object it was before you edited it. Even editing is not necessary for call register which by default starts in 'All Calls'. If you ever wander into things like received or dialed numbers to see details and press back, you are actually coming back to 'All Calls'.
Tools, what an enigma! No one needs stop watches anymore because LG stopped building one in their cell phones. If you need a stop watch, go to recording and record some audio, you don't have to save it. The recording duration is your stop watch, with second granularity.
Explain increasement and decreasement to yourself and everyone.
Whenever you run 'A' java application and stop it, you prove yourself to be dumb because the phone prompts you with: "? Java application stopped". You moron! How dare you stop it!
Pakistan only has Islamabad as its sole city. Nothing else exists, even Karachi where I live. Because, LG thinks so and city setting only has Islamabad.

Weird, Weirdo or Weirder?

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:59:01 GMT

It is up to you to classify the two abnormalities of ASP.Net that ships with netfx 2.

The first one had to do with web services only. I read it on Clemens Vasters blog accidentally. You can read the details there. I am not going to repeat them in this post.

It is the second one which is most cruel. Specifically, MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack="true" does not work with AJAX. It seems ScriptManager thinks of it belonging to her mother-in-law. It whines pretty badly.

Even when you are not using AJAX, you are not entirely out of the woods. It can bite you if the page does not have any HtmlForm after PageBuilder is finished with it. I mean, why even check the property to be true of false if there is no form to set that property in the first place.

In a recent application I was working on, we had pages with no form element in them. I set MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack="true" in <pages/> section of root web.config and mysteriously those pages could not be rendered.

Now that ASP.Net has an additional ListView control for client side interaction, you will not be able to set MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack="true" in any page that uses it because it is built on AJAX.

A similar minor problem happens when you set <deployment retail="true"/> in machine.config. ASP.Net stops generating details when exceptions are thrown by web applications. Try all you might with <customErrors mode="off"/>, nothing will work. retail="true" is the overriding factor here.

Technorati tags: Debugging

All Things 'Live'

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:21:47 GMT

Yes, everything that could be alive has been moved to Live, or, additionally to Live. The live in Live. From Live.

Meaning, I am using Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live OneCare Beta 2, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Family Safety etc.

You need to be a US citizen to use some of these, which obviously I am not. Then, how can I say I am using those services? That's due to services rendered by a website, which enabled me to download the installer. You must agree that this is a bug, because installer should also check the geographical location of its path to Windows Live servers.

Bugging and Buzzing

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 05:35:26 GMT

I put a requested feature bug on connect about missing auto complete functionality in WPF TextBox. Getting the idea of making people vote on it from here, please do the same for this bug too. It has already got two votes of 5/5.

SMTP server at Microsoft Middle East site is down

Tue, 15 May 2007 06:55:28 GMT

There is some problem with their smtp server, the registration page is blurting out everything. Their website is hosted in d:\websites, they are running .Net framework 1.1.

See for yourself.

It gets back to bite in the butt!

Mon, 14 May 2007 08:29:23 GMT

Last week, we are changing the architecture of a project a bit. Some functions returned string messages. Well string messages from all sorts of classes defined in a constant namespace.

I was assigned the job to clean that mess up and have a single class that contained codes for all possible messages. Each function would now return some message code which would latter be looked up through another function. That function was interface specific as there were a number of ways to call those core function. Each interface necessitated its own handling of message codes.

So far so good, I unified the message codes, removed a couple of classes whose sole purpose was to act as a container to some weird error condition. All messages ended up in one class and there corresponding codes in another. Everything was working fine till that moment.

During that entire process, I had to go through almost all the code which made me quite sentimental about the project as it had been written over the past two years by people I never heard of. You could almost associate a personality to a piece of code by simply looking at it.

This had many revelations for me. Unnecessary lines, improperly written loops, things like

bool flag = true;

if( flag )
    return true;
else
    return false;

The thing I wrote above is very neatly formatted, image this with no indentation and multiple statements on one line.

Since every thing was done successfully and the application worked correctly, apart from two or three codes left from the final lookup function, my spirits were really high. And having seen almost all code written over a long period of time, I noticed some functions took there parameters by reference. Running FxCop identified them as design changes. I went ahead and removed ref from every type which was not a valuetype. But alas, I forgot the check after this breaking change that the application was still working fine or not.

Many use cases were broken. You see the problem was that I removed ref from string parameters too, which were being modified in the function and the caller needed that modified value. You may wonder why string needed that special handling, it is because a string once created, is immutable. Any time you change it to something else, it creates a new string with the new contents and old copy is unmodified.

Here is a little program to demonstrate that. You should see the message You have been bitten in the butt. printed on the command line. [Note: If you also see Even this does not work, you should check you compiler's sanity.]

using System;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main( )
    {
        string message = "Message";
        
        BiteInTheButt( message );
        
        if ( message != "New message" )
            Console.WriteLine( "You have been bitten in the butt." );
        
        BiteInTheButt( ref message );
        
        if ( message != "New message 2" )
            Console.WriteLine( "Even this does not work" );
    }

    static void BiteInTheButt( string message )
    {
        message = "New message";
    }

    static void BiteInTheButt( ref string message )
    {
        message = "New message 2";
    }
}

This problem will happen with any immutable type. If you want to modify the original object passed in argument, you should pass it as ref parameter. I also suppose the Freezables in WPF behave similarly after they are frozen, no matter what you do with them in the caller, there is simply no way to propagate back the changes you do.

In general, if you pass an immutable type as argument and want any changes made to it to be propagated back, prefix it with a ref!

Getting dirtier with Visual Studio Orcas

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:37:49 GMT

Aha! I forgot about one bug I encountered in the setup. It installed VSTO for Office 2003. I never had Office 2003 installed on it. The version of Office installed on my machine is Office 2007. Setup went ahead to install its VSTO version for Office 2003 and latter on complained that some functionality (actually most) will not work unless I installed Office 2003.

The question is: I didn't have the right version in the first place, why install something that will not be supported? It should have detected the correct version.

Some corrections

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:46:55 GMT

There was a compilation error in my iterator code which I just found.

Instead of writing this

friend random_access_iterator operator + ( diff offset , const random_access_iterator& other )
{
#ifdef _SECURE_STL
if( c != other.c )
throw invalid_argument( );
#endif
return random_access_iterator( other ) += offset;
}

It should be written like this

friend random_access_iterator operator + ( diff offset , const random_access_iterator& other )
{
#ifdef _SECURE_STL
if( !other.c )
throw invalid_argument( );
#endif
return random_access_iterator( other ) += offset;
}

because being a friend function it does not have access to member c.

Also, I changed the definition of c from const cont* to cont*, because of compilation error in operator * ( ) and operator -> ( ). This change requires a const_cast< cont* > in the constructors where c is initialized.

Please check this code with and without the preprocessor symbol defined. Some more errors may have been hidden which I didn't find. Do inform me to correct the code if you happen to find one.