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3-Jul-24 4:14

We have a customer for whom we've done a [great steaming] pile of custom work. A couple of times a year they find a problem with the custom stuff. It always turns into a wretched slog through a Lovecraftian swamp of bubbling ichor (e.g. legacy code) I didn't write but am now required to maintain. Three months ago they reported an issue with one of their features in the new generation of product that didn't happen with the old one. I compared the code between the two and it was identical. I've spent considerable hours debugging through the code for the feature.

It turns out the new code is looking in the wrong place in the registry to see if their custom features are enabled D'Oh! | :doh:

. The old code only worked accidently.

Cue the fireworks a day early, and let the naked happy dance Jig | [Dance]

commence!

Software Zen: delete this;

jeron13-Jul-24 4:44

3-Jul-24 4:44

One of our embedded systems has been around for 15+ years, we had one or two customers in that time have random device crashes. We tried setting things up and using the customers configuration, to no avail, for many months. Data from the clients revealed the crashes occur at many different addresses. Finally, in desperation, I decided to look at stack usage. There were two routines related to little used features out of hundreds (think 70-80K lines of code in assembler) that allocated 4 bytes more stack space than it deallocated. It took thousands of these routine calls before encroaching on runtime variables. Twas a happy day when I found it Beer | [beer]

, and as important, a big learning experience.

"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle

Gary Wheeler3-Jul-24 4:55

3-Jul-24 4:55

jeron1 wrote:
Twas a happy day when I found it , and as important, a big learning experience

Same here. I've had other memorable bugs that were excruciating to recreate and diagnose. One was a GDI handle leak that took over a week of run time to show up and crash the application. Another was a piece of embedded code where the TCP/IP code we bought back in 1995 did not re-initialize properly after a network hardware error. Both of these took weeks of debugging to find and reproduce and only a couple of hours to correct.

Software Zen: delete this;

jeron13-Jul-24 4:59

3-Jul-24 4:59

Gary Wheeler wrote:
Both of these took weeks of debugging to find and reproduce and only a couple of hours to correct.

Funny how that is. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

dandy723-Jul-24 5:21

dandy72

3-Jul-24 5:21

Now imagine weeks of debugging and seconds for the actual fix (after the problem was identified and well understood).

jeron123hrs 53mins ago

23hrs 53mins ago

True, it's tough when you are going through it, for me sleepless nights are the usual result!

dandy72 wrote:
after the problem was identified and well understood

To me there's a certain satisfaction to that, as rough as the road was to get to that point (and maybe learning a thing or two about better implementation, as I did).

dandy721 hr 58mins ago

dandy72

1 hr 58mins ago

I get what you say, but the last time such a thing happened to me it was a case of a missing quote in a string that was being built with multiple layers of escaping them. So of course the compiler didn't know any better and was of no help.

There was nothing satisfying about solving that particular problem. Just annoyance at whoever last modified the string in the first place...

honey the codewitch3-Jul-24 5:24

3-Jul-24 5:24

My takeaway is "don't write things in assembly" Laugh | :laugh:

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix

jeron13-Jul-24 5:32

3-Jul-24 5:32

I wouldn't necessarily argue! Big Grin | :-D

In this particular product there's a lot of time sensitive code, and over the years it's grown, A LOT.

jschell23hrs 19mins ago

jschell

23hrs 19mins ago

Hopefully you bill by the hour.

Gary Wheeler23hrs 14mins ago

23hrs 14mins ago

Unfortunately no Sigh | :sigh:

, at least in my day job.

Software Zen: delete this;

Richard Andrew x6421hrs 6mins ago

Richard Andrew x64

21hrs 6mins ago

Wait, you said the code was identical between the new and old versions of the product.

So how is there a difference that caused it to look in the wrong place?

UNLESS, it was always looking in the wrong place, and changes to the surrounding code put the information into a different place that it was unable to find by accident?

OR, are you saying that the code that just turned the feature on didn't work, and the code of the feature itself was unchanged?

The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.

Gary Wheeler3hrs 37mins ago

3hrs 37mins ago

The difference was in a class used throughout the product to access the registry. This component (a Windows service) used that class incorrectly in the old product but still managed to find the values at the appropriate key. When the service was migrated to the new product (which changes the registry key used), its incorrect usage of the registry class caused it to look at the incorrect registry key and not find the required values.

In both cases, the service and the registry class, they looked correct on inspection. It wasn't until I stepped through the service that I discovered it was assuming certain things about the registry class weren't true and never had been. FWIW, I didn't write either of them.

Software Zen: delete this;

Ron Anders14hrs 44mins ago

Ron Anders

14hrs 44mins ago

Whew.

Gary Wheeler3hrs 36mins ago

Re: Sabotage to drive sales

3hrs 36mins ago

Yup

Software Zen: delete this;

Sabotage to drive sales

Richard Deeming2-Jul-24 23:51

Richard Deeming

2-Jul-24 23:51

Maybe I'm being cynical, but this just seems wrong to me.

I've been using the HTML editor library CKeditor since the early days, when it was still known as FCKeditor.

I've stuck with v4 because it does everything we need it to, and it's free so long as you don't use any "premium" add-ons. As far as I can see, v5 has some nice features, but is no longer free unless your entire project is open source. And with no pricing information available, with everything hidden behind a "request a quote" button, you can bet it's not cheap!

Yesterday, every editor instance started displaying a big red warning message, obscuring the content being edited:

Quote:
This CKEditor 4.x.x version is not secure.
Consider upgrading to the latest one, 4.24.0-lts.

But is 4.24.0-lts free? No - you have to buy an "extended support model" for your installation. D'Oh! | :doh:

Sure, there's a new config option[^] you can flip to turn off this check - for now. But that feature wasn't present when we integrated the editor; it has been retrospectively applied to all old versions, and defaulted to "yes, please obscure the editor with a sales pitch on every load".

I don't have a problem with you charging for a new version of your library. Nor with charging for "extended support" on an old version of your library. But actively sabotaging old free versions of your library to try to drive sales of your new version or the "extended support" version? No thank you. Mad | :mad:

We'll be sticking with the last free version of v4 with the version check disabled, at least until it either stops working or they start sabotaging it even more. Once that happens, we'll be looking to the competition for its replacement.

For those with long memories, this is reminiscent of the Red Gate / .NET Reflector débâcle, where they took a freeware tool and abused its auto-update feature to try to force everyone to upgrade to their new commercial version. Their argument was that continuing to use the free version was like "wanting today's gas at yesterday's prices". They really struggled to understand that it was more like Homer's elephant rides - expecting people to pay today's prices for the gas they already bought yesterday:

Homer: Um, Milhouse saw the elephant twice and rode him once, right?
Louann: Yes, but we paid you four dollars.
Homer: Well, that was under our old price structure. Under our new price structure, your bill comes to a total of $700.

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

honey the codewitch3-Jul-24 0:32

Re: Sabotage to drive sales

3-Jul-24 0:32

Surely there has to be a suite of VS Code extensions you can use, like Live Server and other things.
There's nothing strictly WYSIWYG though in VS Code to my knowledge. It's all tags.

Oh, this is a web page component?

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix

Richard Deeming3-Jul-24 0:45

Richard Deeming

3-Jul-24 0:45

honey the codewitch wrote:
Oh, this is a web page component?

Yes.

CKEditor - Wikipedia[^]

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

Re: Sabotage to drive sales

charlieg6hrs 8mins ago

charlieg

6hrs 8mins ago

you're not being cynical. I suppose a company has to survive and the new model is annual renewal. This might work in 10-20 years, but there are just too many of us old farts out there. I've jettisoned multiple products because they went to this model. I'm a small - well maybe I was a small developer, arguing with retirement at the moment. If I buy version x.x, and it works fine, why the elephant did my purchase magically upgrade to an annual subscription? Total BS.

Chunk them.

Decades ago, I worked in the telco field. There were these things called switches - dedicated hardware that could take one incoming call and redirect it to another destination. At the time, we used Oracle. Good database, good support, etc. As time progressed, hardware advanced. We went from 256 connections to 512, 1024, etc. Then being able to do this over the network and jettison the switch. Technically, infinite connections. Oracle's position became predatory - your license and costs are based on your max connections, since they are infinite... They got dropped.

I suggest chunking them.

Charlie Gilley

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759

Has never been more appropriate.

PDF from Mandarin to English? (Solved)

honey the codewitch2-Jul-24 23:36

Re: PDF from Mandarin to English?

2-Jul-24 23:36

Edit: Indivara suggested the DeepL service, which worked beautifully.

I have a PDF datasheet for a piece of equipment that I really need to understand.

The trouble is it's in Chinese.

I go to look at the HTML for this, and it's embedded in a frame in the page behind a captcha so I can't use google translate on it.

I got the PDF downloaded, tried to open it in chrome, but if there's an option to translate I'm not seeing it.

Anyone know the secret sauce to make this happen?

Thanks!

Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix

modified yesterday.

Andy_L_J3-Jul-24 0:48

Andy_L_J

3-Jul-24 0:48

Download Google translate to your phone. Use the camera function to capture the Mandarin.

I don't speak Idiot - please talk slowly and clearly

"I have sexdaily. I mean dyslexia. Fcuk!"

Driven to the arms of Heineken by the wife

Re: PDF from Mandarin to English?

honey the codewitch3-Jul-24 0:54