Dave Plummer

And so I would spend more time doing that.

I wasn't renowned as a creative UI genius where I'm flowering all these new ideas.

So I got to fix ugly stuff, but you get really good at that.

So I don't mind it until it's one of those things where you've been chasing it for so long that you don't know what to do next.

And you can't understand why it doesn't work or how it ever worked or whatever situation you happen to be in.

And, uh,

you know, after a day of it, it can get pretty trying.

I think the ones that, you know, take you a day, they resolve one of two ways.

Either it's like, oh, extra semicolon, and then you finally see it.

Or it's some horrible manifestation of cross-threaded department nonsense that was really hard.

But it can go both ways.

I had a bug.

It wasn't my bug, actually, but it was a manifestation of a bug in Task Manager, where every now and then it would say greater than 100% total CPU usage.

And this looks pretty silly for a Task Manager, so...

I had tried to resolve it for a long time and I'd talked to the kernel guys about my issue and they were unsympathetic, let's say, because the kernel guys are a special breed and they weren't interested in my user land problems.

It's probably some issue in my code, right?

And they're probably right, but it wasn't in this case and I was sure of it.

And so I kept adding asserts all through the code to make sure that the preparatory steps of adding the stuff together were never more than 100 and that the final sum was never more than 100.

And finally, it never asserted.

But occasionally we would get this bug where people would still see it.