frustrating times

Rotkiv · 02-08-2005, 10:07 AM

yes, i want to hear one or some of your most frustrating programming stories, problems that you thought were huge but ended up being some small stupid problem that you should not have made.

as for me, last night, I was trying to make an exercise program from a book, but I wasn't getting the correct output, and I thought it was this whole huge problem of trying to figure out a formula for converting hex to decimal, then I read the assignment again, and it told me right in the book, but applying their hint didn't work! I was still getting the wrong output. oh, a logic error i see. I corrected it, different output but still wrong! WTF!!!!!
then, a half an hour later, i see that i didn't initialize a variable that i was multiplying and adding to.

but once I fixed that, it was all good. and they were happy. yay.

sde · 02-08-2005, 10:16 AM

ah yes, sometimes i just get up and go to lunch or something, .. then come back and something i've spent hours trying to fix jumps right out.

Rotkiv · 02-08-2005, 01:52 PM

yeah, i had already walked away from that project for a week before all of this.

sde · 02-08-2005, 02:33 PM

my worst moment was trying to program a forum that could have unlimited sub-forums. trying to get the concept of infinity, and i just could not get a grasp on it.

i ended up getting so bent out of shape i did not touch a computer for 2 weeks.

technobard · 02-09-2005, 12:10 PM

I don't remember the worst programming moments because they were so traumatic that my subconscious wiped them from my memory. I'm sorry, what was I saying?

Not too long ago, I was playing with a sorting program. I generated some sample data by creating 10000 and beyond objects. When the sort finished, I printed the first 10 records. Well, the print routine was left over from when I had less than 100 records. I kept looking at the output, thinking that the sort was wrong somehow, because the records appeared to be duplicates. I spent some time poring over the code, but I couldn't find anything wrong. Finally, it dawned on me that the code was fine. I was selecting data from a finite list at random. Within 10000 records there were a lot of duplicates. Doh!

Admin · 02-10-2005, 08:22 AM

currently i am frustered with sessions that are not unique to each user because a stupid person linked to a page with their session id appeneded to the URL.... argh.