Thread: Fixed Bug 3.0 Beta 7 Fish - White Outline
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Old 11-30-2008, 12:42 PM   #17
Jim Sachs
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Southern Oregon
Posts: 9,816
Great! Regarding the joys of bug-fixing, if it's a bug like this one, with a definite cause and fix, then it's very satisfying. Unfortunately, about half the bugs I work on have no obvious fix - they are related to the drivers/background programs/viruses/etc., that people have on their computers. There's nothing more frustrating than to spend days looking for the cause of something that I can't even duplicate, only to have the customer say, "Oh, never mind - I turned off the MA-Destroyer program I had been running, and the problem disappeared! Who would have guessed?"

A good example of this is the DirectX-Drift problem. I'll upload a new version of MA, and a user will report that it doesn't run, or there are visual anomolies. So I'll tear apart the code looking for something that I might have changed since the last version. About this time, Cliff will recommend that the user re-install DirectX, and I'll be thinking how silly that sounds - why would DirectX need re-installing? Do the files drift out of adjustment on their own? But sure enough, this often fixes the problem. Well, I've recently found out that there is a very pervasive virus out there that slowly and silently attacks the DirectX files. Re-installing puts fresh copies of all those DLLs back in their proper places.

They say that when you rule out the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth. The trouble with computers is that ruling out the impossible can take a lifetime.
Jim Sachs
Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium
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