Crabby is as crabby does
10 Oct 2003

As long as I'm being crabby today about email clients, let's talk about Criminally Stupid Bugs.  I'm not talking about basic programmer errors.  We all make mistakes.  No, I'm talking about things for which some programmer deserves to be tarred and feathered.  Here are a couple of examples:

• For the last several weeks, development builds of Vault have been beeping.  Nobody knew why, but every so often the app would just emit a beep.  It was driving people crazy.  It turns out that we had a silly bug which occasionally caused the app to try and append an empty string into the user messages pane.  This should be harmless, right?  Nope.  It turns out that in the .NET Framework, if you call AppendText() with an empty string on a RichTextBox, sometimes it beeps.  Apparently somebody at Microsoft thought this would be cute.  If I ever find out who it is, I'm going to invoice him for the cost of the psychiatrist we hired to help those employees here who went insane listening to that #^%!^% beep.
  
  
• One of the third-party tools we use in our automated build system has an unforgivably bad habit.  It's a command-line tool which is being used in an entirely automated fashion.  We even pass it a special flag which supposedly makes it "quiet".  Nonetheless, every so often this tool pops up a dialog box to let us know that a new version of the tool is available at the vendor's website.  This brings the entire automated build to a stop until we visit the build machine and click the cancel button.  In other words, we can't do automated builds unless we're here at the office to babysit the build machine.  I'm not going to name the vendor here, but I'd like to say a word to the CEO of that company:  You know who you are.  You need to find the programmer who thought this would be cute.  Do not fire them over this, because then it would be more difficult for you to torture them on an ongoing basis.  You need to keep this employee on your staff and make it a part of your corporate mission to continually find new ways of making him miserable for the remainder of his days.

I'm sure I'll be less crabby after the weekend.