We all make mistakes

Last Friday I was working at a customer where I had to Copy & Paste some person document's into a secondary address book. Every time I attempted to do it the process would hang and simply wouldn't stop unless I manually broke it off (CTRL + BREAK). Now I had to paste about 600 records so this was not good news. After some investigation I found the culprit in the "(RenamePastedAccounts)" agent that had an infinite loop in it.

Now this agent is really, really simple. It loops through all the pasted documents and simply checks for a specific value in a field. If found it does something to that field and goes to the next document.....
Right, so do you see the mistake there?
If the value is NOT in the field it will never go to the next document, effectively doing the same check on the same document over and over again.

 While Not doc Is Nothing
        If 'value in field' Then
            ....
            Set doc = dc.getnextdocument(doc)
        End If
  Wend

It was easy to solve (just move the line that sets the document outside of the If clause) but I just couldn't help but chuckle. I think it demonstrates a fundamental flaw in development when it comes to testing. We've probably all done it. The difficult work you test and have tested but that simple procedure, that so easy to code action...... You know what it needs to do, you know how to do it and you are so confident about what you're doing that you forget to test it.... thoroughly.

So even at Big Blue, with all it's checks and testing this can happen it seems. Just glad it's not my name in that agent, knowing it will be distributed in hundreds of thousands of Domino environments, inevitable found and blogged about on sites around the globe and causing SPR's to be opened and Technotes to be published...... It's there for the world to see and there's nothing you can do but pray everybody upgrades before they ever run into it. And until it is corrected in a new version that honestly simple, stupid mistake will haunt you forever.
 
Ana......I feel for you.

Coming from someone that only last week managed to literally bring down a (test) server with a similarly simple and obvious coding mistake.

Lotusphere 2011

I'm not there..... Unfortunately but that's live isn't it?!


Some of my colleagues are though and at the Business Development Day yesterday they got a really nice surprise when IBM used Forbo's (one of our customers) Connections cases as an example in their presentation.

Thanks to @marceldehoog for the picture!

Project success factor

Geek Jewelry

via oddee.com

Wedding rings for a Nerd-couple.
To divorce: "Simply unplug"....

Nemo!

I've installed my fare share of servers over the years. It's not my main task but if it comes up I'll do it. The one thing I've always really liked about setting up servers is that you usually also get the chance to make up it's name. Ok, you can't always go berserk with it as most companies have some sort of naming scheme but in general you have some wriggling space to come up with something original. And I really like the idea that for years to come users will wonder whoever came up with the crazy idea of calling a server "Ferengi" (yes it was inspired by Startrek). Enfin, you get my drift.

My current companies server name isn't that inventive. It is simply called 'mail2'. Kind of lame if you ask me. Especially as there is no 'mail1' in sight anywhere. So when I heard they were installing a totally new server I proposed renaming it to something more inventive. My colleagues (who apparently don't really care much how its named anyway) started joking and the result is that our new server will be named "Nemo", after our late office fish that died earlier this week and was ceremonially buried in the toilet.

I love it! Especially as I'm envisioning a whole lot of spin-off server names. What about a Quickr server called "Dory", "Marlin" the Docova server and of course "Bloat" the Sametime server!

Bloat - Finding Nemo

I can just imagine saying "Hé, can you reset Bloat? It's having hick-ups".