Menu

Subscribe

bugs

3rd party JS libraries cause downtime

Facebook Connect went down hard tonight. HuffPo reports that their site was redirecting to a Facebook error page, even when people weren’t attempting to log in.

It makes me more comfortable with our decision to strip so many 3rd party javascripts from GigaOM during our last redesign.

Higgs-Bugson

A hypothetical error whose existence is suggested by log events and vague reports from the users that cannot be reproduced in development conditions. QA and user support teams point to the Higgs-bugson as an explanation for the results they see in the field. Software engineers, however, often deny the existence of the Higgs-Bugson and offer alternative theories that often blame the user. » about 200 words

The Bugs That Haunt Me

A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I’d put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly.

Now I’ve rediscovered that draft post…and that I never fixed the bad code it had fingered. Worse, I’m no longer in a position to change the code.

Along similar lines, I’ve been told that a database driven DHCP config file generator that I wrote back in the late 1990s is still in use, and still suffers bugs due to my failure to sanitize MAC addresses that, being entered by humans, sometimes have errors.

I’ve written bad code since then and will write more bad code still, but as my participation in open source projects has increased, I’ve enjoyed the benefit of community examples and criticism. My work now is better for it.

MySQL 5.1 Released, Community Takes Stock

MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important.”

Still, people are finding inspiration in OurDelta and Drizzle. Competition from those braches/forks and criticism from the community are sure to help re-align the MySQL core, or provide a reasonable alternative if Sun/MySQL can’t deliver. In the meanwhile, the High Availability MySQL blog is worth following.

MySQL Bug?

After an upgrade to MySQL 5.0.51b on RHEL 5 I started seeing curious results in a fairly common query. Here’s a simplified version:

``` SELECT ID, post_date_gmt FROM wp_posts GROUP BY ID ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 5 ```

What I expected was to get a handful of post ID numbers sorted in descending order by the post_date_gmt. Instead, I got a list of post IDs sorted in ascending order by the ID number. Something like this:

``` 3 2007-05-21 00:00:00 4 2007-05-21 00:00:00 5 2007-05-21 00:00:00 6 2007-05-21 00:00:00 7 2007-05-21 00:00:00 ```

After some fiddling I discovered that the GROUP BY clause was causing a problem. So this query works:

``` SELECT ID, post_date_gmt FROM wp_posts ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 5 ```

…and outputs the results I expected:

``` 337832 2008-06-20 15:20:03 335991 2008-06-17 13:00:42 337777 2008-06-02 12:15:46 337390 2008-05-28 00:00:00 337831 2008-05-28 00:00:00 ```

The GROUP BY clause may be unnecessary, though it was originally written in to accommodate conditions where a JOIN (which is often added when the query is dynamically generated) causes MySQL to return multiple rows representing the same record ID.

Still, isn’t this behavior weird? It’s certainly different from previous versions.

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)

Contentsbsuite FeaturesFixed/Changed/AddedInstallationUpgradingCommandsClear bsuite_speedcacheRebuild bsuite tag indexOptionsMinimum userlevel to view bsuite reportsOutput default CSSDefault pulse graph styleSuggest related entries in postTag input formatHighlight search words and offer search helpFilter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist wordsIgnore hits from registered users at or above userlevelIgnore hits from these IP numbersTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsMoney GrubbingWork […] » about 800 words

Catching Bugs Before They Catch You

I got itchy about magic quotes the other day because it’s the cause (through a fairly long cascade of errors) of some performance problems and runaways I’ve been seeing lately (pictured above). But I deserve most of the blame for allowing a query like this to run at all: SELECT type, data, count(*) AS hits […] » about 300 words

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v6)

Contentsbsuite FeaturesFixed/Changed/AddedInstallationUpgradingCommandsOptionsTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsUpdate: bugfix release b2v7 available. It’s been a while since I released a new version of bsuite, my multi-purpose WordPress plugin. I’d been hoping to finish up a series of new features, but those have been delayed and this is mostly just a collection of bugfixes. This update is recommended […] » about 500 words

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v3)

ContentsFixedInstallationbsuite FeaturesI’ve fixed another bug in bsuite b2, my multi-purpose plugin. This update is recommended for all bsuite users. Fixed Previous versions would throw errors at the bottom of the page when the http referrer info included search words from a recognized search engine.  Installation Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download […] » about 300 words

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2b)

ContentsFixesInstallationbsuite FeaturesI’ve fixed a couple bugs in bsuite b2, released last week. Fixes A bug with search word highlighting that caused it to litter the display in some cases.  A silly mistake of mine that cause a mysql error for some users. Installation Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there […] » about 300 words

Fixing position: fixed In IE

It turns out the Internet Explorer doesn’t properly support CSS’s position: fixed. Google led me to the following:

The DoxDesk solution looks promising and simple, but I think bugs elsewhere in my layout are preventing it from working. It’s time to start again from scratch.