Bug unplugged
Since 1.23 is out a few people are experiencing a nasty map bug, or at least it manifestates in the map view – it exists elsewhere as well but is less noticeable. I crafted a small Javascriptlet to get around this bug, but it’s not a solution that can be applied on the productive system. So here’s a javascriptlet that can help you temporarily:
javascript:WMap.mapData = new MapData(); WMap.scroll_map_to_char(); void(0);
If you copy that line of code into your browser’s addressbar, you can bypass the bug for a while at least.
But now the more important question: What is the Matrix bug?
The answer is rather complicated and I would say that this is among one of the most notable bugs that I have experienced so far. Noteable because the reproduceabilty is extremely weird. The company does not have any computer where this bug can be reproduced, however I possess an Asus eee, a device that can reproduce the bug as I found out at home.
So on monday I took it to work (like always, I type a lot of stuff when I am on the train). I connected it with the company’s network and the first thing I noticed is that my local developer machine cannot reproduce the bug with my machine. Weird. But well, I am using a different webserver. So I connected to my collegue’s webserver and the bug worked as expected.
We tried the whole day to get behind this bug. We found out that it is not the fault of our PHP programs – PHP is never called. The client’s request simply vanishes at some point. We used wireshark and looked at everything – but we could not make any progress here. The requests arrive at the webserver but there, the requests simply die. At the end of the day my netbook’s battery was drained (they lastet for more than 6 hours).
The next day I brought my charger with me, just to get over the day a bit longer. I fired up the browser, requested the page in question – and it worked. Out of the box. We couldn’t figure out what was different. The server was unchanged, the software was and no matter how often we pressed F5, we couldn’t get the bug working again.
Until I unplugged the device and refreshed the browser. And there the bug surfaced again. I put the netbook on the charger and the bug vanished. I am pretty sure that this must be hard to believe, as I said, this is one of the weirdest bugs that I’ve ever faced, but this is true! It is only reproduceable if the netbook is running in battery mode where the CPU and other chips are running in battery-safe mode (which is of course influencing the timing in the network traffic, which can have side effects, in this case with grave effects)! You still don’t believe it? Watch the video! I am refreshing the browser (Internet Explorer 6 in this case) several times, sometimes unplugged, sometimes plugged in.
Although this bug appears to be funny, I can reassure you that we are taking it very serious and that we are working on a solution to fix it.
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