Jaa

Debugging Devices, to be sure to be sure.

  • Artikkeli

First things first, Happy St. Patrick's Day! I'm finishing work soon to partake in a wee drop o' the black stuff. Cheers to all youse ex-pats, and all youse back in Norn Iron.

I'm so pleased that my current job doesn't isolate me from my first love: programming devices. I've been working with a programming writer, on debugging some sample code for the documentation and came across a wonderful bug. The problem was this: the code didn't seem to work when they brought her device into my office, and yet she swore it had worked perfectly five minutes ago.

If you have done any debugging, in other words, if you have done any programming, you know this issue very well indeed. Chances are you made one tiny change that you were completely sure was insignificant, and later on something else apparently unrelated stopped working. You swear nothing has changed, but of course something has changed - you don't didn't think it mattered.

In this case, the programmer writer- who, by the way, can squeeze almost an entire application into the initialization parameter of a single for() statement - also promised she hadn't changed anything, and she was right. And yet, when she walked into my office to demonstrate her program, it had stopped working.

It turns out the application made use of Bluetooth, and by walking down the corridor into my office, her device had picked up an extra Bluetooth device within range. This caused an index counter to be one too many, and the program stopped working.

I live for bugs like this :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2005
    I'm working on my first pocket pc program -- a rather simple one, but just learning right now -- I've tried compiling/building the program and it works fine -- my SDK emulator runs the first round of it nicely... then I try to take the files and put them onto my iPAQ (sending them to my other computer to upload) and it won't recognize it as a pocket pc program... I don't understand why... any help?
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2005

    You should check that the SDK you are using matches the OS that the iPAQ is running. For example, if you are using an SDK for Windows Mobile 2003 SE, it very probably won't work on a device that is running the Pocket PC OS, rather than Windows Mobile... Make sense?
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2005
    You should have known straight away this was a bluetooth bug john ;-)

    ok maybe not :-)