davidschroth | (no subject)

It was an entertaining week at work, as well. Recently, for reasons that are really too complicated to explain, I had to put an extremely expensive NOP (no operation - a computer instruction that does nothing) into the idle loop of the operating system. The code was not perfect, but it accomplished what it was supposed to do. And then the fix was released to the test group, and the the system crashed in this code. And what's more, it was a crash that couldn't possibly happen. After some very tedious analysis, I discovered that some very old interrupt handling code in the operating system was randomly corrupting a register of some other process running on the system. In the case encountered, it corrupted a register critical to the code I'd put into the idle loop, and the result was a system crash. So I fixed that, and then made the mistake of asking *why* we were suddenly continuously exercising this broken code that had not been exercised since it had been put into the operating system ten years ago. It turns out a recent fix had deleted one too many lines of code, and even though I had fixed the bug that crashed the system, we still had a serious bug that needed fixing. Before Tuesday. So I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to be doing on Monday.
There was further weirdness at work. I didn't see much of my boss last week. It turns out that she had had a temporary, transient amnesiac episode. Four hours of her life just vanished. She has no memory of those four hours. Apparently, during those four hours, she was suffering from the same malady that afflicted the protagonist of the movie Memento - she couldn't form short term memories. She's told that she spent most of those four hours walking from the locker room of the health club to the parking lot, and back again. Very disconcerting. She's apparently ok now, but will certainly be having an evaluation of her condition.