- #1
DennisN
Gold Member
2023 Award
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I was just writing in another thread about a stupid experiment I did when I was young. This made me think that it might be fun with a thread of such confessions from members. Most people have done stupid things; what I'm after is sheer stupidity; e.g. technology mishandled/misunderstood/destroyed, scientific experiments gone awkwardly wrong, mathematical ignorance, you get my points, things you're actually ashamed of.
Here is your chance for confession and absolution!
To be fair, I should start with myself. I've done some really stupid things of course, and here is one tale which I'm particularly ashamed of:
As a professional programmer I was once developing a dedicated installation software for another commercial software. As any good installation program, mine should be able to remove previous installations. I was very proud of my solution, it was lean and mean and written in C, and it used recursion for the deletion of files. It was fast as lightning, and I was working on a tight schedule.
The problem was that something went wrong when I was testing it. My computer died. Just like that. Blue screen. Very strange, I thought I had gotten a malware, some virus. This was over 10 years ago, and we did not have any good backup system at the company, so it took me three days until my computer environment was reinstalled and up and running again.
And then I finally started to look at my code again. I saw no problem, everything was fine. So I decided I had to debug it step-by-step. I followed the flow of the code, checked path variables and just before the recursion call, a call to another function which did what? Hey, it empties the path and sets it default to "C:\". Hmmm, why? And so I clicked "Enter" and bang, the recursion started again, fast as lightning it started to delete EVERYTHING from the computer again.
I had programmed my own malware, and run it twice. And then I had three more days of computer maintenance.
Ok, let the confessions begin...
Here is your chance for confession and absolution!
To be fair, I should start with myself. I've done some really stupid things of course, and here is one tale which I'm particularly ashamed of:
As a professional programmer I was once developing a dedicated installation software for another commercial software. As any good installation program, mine should be able to remove previous installations. I was very proud of my solution, it was lean and mean and written in C, and it used recursion for the deletion of files. It was fast as lightning, and I was working on a tight schedule.
The problem was that something went wrong when I was testing it. My computer died. Just like that. Blue screen. Very strange, I thought I had gotten a malware, some virus. This was over 10 years ago, and we did not have any good backup system at the company, so it took me three days until my computer environment was reinstalled and up and running again.
And then I finally started to look at my code again. I saw no problem, everything was fine. So I decided I had to debug it step-by-step. I followed the flow of the code, checked path variables and just before the recursion call, a call to another function which did what? Hey, it empties the path and sets it default to "C:\". Hmmm, why? And so I clicked "Enter" and bang, the recursion started again, fast as lightning it started to delete EVERYTHING from the computer again.
I had programmed my own malware, and run it twice. And then I had three more days of computer maintenance.
Ok, let the confessions begin...
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