We all know that software never goes wrong for its developers.\u00a0 “It works for me,” they always say.\u00a0 Here’s a story of how that sometimes goes to extremes.<\/p>\n
“Hi Richie, I’ve got a problem with the ActiveX plugin.”\u00a0 It was Brett, one of our consultants, working on a solution for an important customer.\u00a0 Inevitably, I couldn’t reproduce the bug.\u00a0 “Come to my office and I’ll demonstrate,” said Brett.<\/p>\n
The bug was that clicking a link didn’t work – nothing happened.\u00a0 Sure enough, Brett clicked the link and nothing happened.\u00a0 “Can I try?” I said, wondering what I’d been doing differently on my machine.\u00a0 The link worked perfectly.\u00a0 “What?!”\u00a0 Brett tried – nothing.\u00a0 I tried – it worked perfectly.<\/p>\n
So we thought, it is working every other time?\u00a0 Does it matter where the focus is when you click?\u00a0 Does it matter whether you’re standing up when you click it?\u00a0 (Stranger things have happened!)\u00a0 Everything we could think of had no effect – it always<\/strong> worked for me; it never <\/strong>worked for Brett.<\/p>\n “Hey, Dave, come and have a go at this!”\u00a0 Dave was another consultant.\u00a0 Needless to say, it failed for Dave.\u00a0 Probably it would have worked if he’d been a developer – these things never fail for developers.<\/p>\n I’m not sure what it was that made me think of this, but I wondered, what happens if I press-and-hold the link before releasing it?\u00a0 It failed.\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 I’d made it fail!\u00a0 The next job was for Brett: “Click it as fast you can.”\u00a0 And it worked perfectly.\u00a0 My natural clicking action was a bit faster than the others – clickrelease – whereas the others were a bit slower: click-tiny-pause-release.<\/p>\n So, the bug: When the link was clicked, a timer would start.\u00a0 The timer had nothing to do with the link – it was starting when it shouldn’t.\u00a0 The timer would fire one tenth of a second later, and take the focus away from the ActiveX control.\u00a0 If the whole mouse-button-down-mouse-button-up sequence happened in under a tenth of a second, the link would work.\u00a0 Any slower, it would fail.<\/p>\n So we trained the important customer to be really really quick<\/em> with the mouse, and the money rolled in.\u00a0 Or did we fix the bug?\u00a0 I forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all know that software never goes wrong for its developers.\u00a0 “It works for me,” they always say.\u00a0 Here’s a story of how that sometimes goes to extremes. “Hi Richie, I’ve got a problem with the ActiveX plugin.”\u00a0 It was Brett, one of our consultants, working on a solution for an important customer.\u00a0 Inevitably, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-30days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entrian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}