Stupid computer tricks March 29, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in computers, research.Tags: bugs, computer, computers, software
trackback
I swear I’d be a help-desk person’s worst nightmare.
I’ve been struggling to get an application up and running, and when I requested some help, I was sent a bashrc file that was supposed to fix some path problems. I installed this on Tuesday night, but things still didn’t seem to be working right. I asked my husband for help (given he’s a lot more Unix literate than I am), and he couldn’t figure out what was going on, either. Even after logging out and back in and then running the initialization again, it still couldn’t find the application I was trying to use. It was like I’d never installed the file. After spending well over an hour on this, we gave up.
Then next day, I was trying to show the problems to the person who sent me the file. Except that when I showed hir, everything worked just as it was supposed to.
I’m glad it works now, but I sure wish the timing wasn’t perfect to make me look like an idiot.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
It’s a Heisenbug! (props to my eventual future brother-in-law for that term)
I love it!
But I must be crawling with them. :-P