A, you refer of course to the classical heisenbug. Or at least a behavior resulting from similar principles.
And, while I hate such things, I have personally had more experience with shroedinbugs, but usually in my favor. One concrete example was in a mass username change we were doing on our old VAXen (maytheyrestinpeace), and one of the several hundred changes didn't work exactly right. Upon investigation, I found that my code was utterly broken, and should have hopelessly wrecked every last account that I had changed, and indeed running the code in debug mode showed that it never, ever did the right thing. Why it worked flawlessly on the first run remains a mystery to this day, but I've decided to call it a blessing from Eris and not worry overmuch about it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-08-30 02:15 pm (UTC)And, while I hate such things, I have personally had more experience with shroedinbugs, but usually in my favor. One concrete example was in a mass username change we were doing on our old VAXen (maytheyrestinpeace), and one of the several hundred changes didn't work exactly right. Upon investigation, I found that my code was utterly broken, and should have hopelessly wrecked every last account that I had changed, and indeed running the code in debug mode showed that it never, ever did the right thing. Why it worked flawlessly on the first run remains a mystery to this day, but I've decided to call it a blessing from Eris and not worry overmuch about it.