Facepalm moments

[Marcb]

I just had a facepalm moment when I finally tracked down a bug in a little program I'm writing...
I was fixated for a month on a piece of code I just knew must be causing the problem... I re-wrote it in dozens of creative ways and guru every time...
I re-read the Rkms, googled and still guru every time..

Decided tonight to get on with other bits and come back to it...
Reading further down the code I saw it:
Turns out I forgot to free an exec list memory block instead... 2 seconds later, bugs gone...

What are some of your face palm moments?

[djrikki]

Looking through source code wondering why the hell it isn't working only to find you missed one measly closed curly } bracket or other such delimiter like an 'end if' or an 'end tell'.
Such basic branching always ends up in a facepalm moment for me

[jj]

Do it loads of times in work.  Reading through code to see why it doesn't work only to realsie you have used a ( instead of a { or vice versa.  Really easy to miss in amongst loads of code.

[Tension]

See the story of the Hedley Davis Memorial Disk Drive.

Facepalming wasn`t about in those days..

[TheGoose]

Here's a good one for you:

[tone007]

Plugging in a Zorro card backwards and powering up the A2000.  Luckily the board was a crappy revision anyway.

[Tripitaka]

Pulling a PCI graphics card from a PC at work, then I realised...it was still powered up. Oops, amazingly it did no harm to the PC or card.

[Heiroglyph]

Reading the docs, being aware of the fact I could blow up a USB port and still managing to plug in  one of the USB cables on my brand new Deneb backwards.  Port blown.

That was just last Friday and my forehead still hurts.

[LoadWB]

I was writing a screen blanker for the Commodore 64.  It was meant to work like the simple one on the TI-99/4A: countdown timer (I actually used a CIA TOD alarm) then set a bit to blank the screen, then reset that bit once a key is pressed.  Simple!

Except it would not work.  I removed the TOD alarm and implemented a countdown using an unused zero-page word.  I rewrote the TOD alarm handler.  I checked and checked.  Hours staring at this simple code, not understanding why it would not work.  I even duplicated functionality in BASIC (with an ML helper for the TOD alarm) to verify that I was POKEing the right places.

The next day it hit me.  Square in the gonads.  I had a BNE when I should have used a BEQ.  STUPID STUPID STUPID!  I was using the WarpEngine's ML monitor to write my code, and I probably could have found it if I had stepped through the code line-by-line (which, now I think of it, I believe the WarpEngine can do.)

Ah, well.  Lesson learned.

Another really good one would be when I was attempting a hardware upgrade for a client running an Exchange 2003 server.  I had diligently moved the Exchange database files to the D: partition so I could nuke the Windows installation in case the hardware move did not go so well.  Everything worked perfectly except that I had missed moving the log files, and they got nuked.  It took this poor machine 30 hours to do an eseutil repair on 42GB of email for a multi-million dollar company, and made me sweat every minute of it.  That has been the only major failure this server has suffered in the past eight years -- by my own hand!

[Tension]

It took this poor machine 30 hours to do an eseutil repair on 42GB of email for a multi-million dollar company, and made me sweat every minute of it.

I believe I would have shat myself in that situation.

[LoadWB]

Do it loads of times in work.  Reading through code to see why it doesn't work only to realsie you have used a ( instead of a { or vice versa.  Really easy to miss in amongst loads of code.

I remember reading somewhere that this error is what actually caused the AT&T outage in 1990.

http://www.phworld.org/history/attcrash.htm

(This just talks about the technicals, not the actual cause of the error other than a coding error.)

[spirantho]

Not a facepalm from my own doing, but a worthy one.

My local Uni has an email forwarding service for students who go away for holidays etc. One particular student set up an email forward to his home account.
Unfortunately he forgot to remove the email forwarding he'd previously set up from his home account to his uni account.

You can guess what happened. It resulted in a very irate sysadmin and a ton of headaches as a wonderful company checking for spammers thought the entire uni was a spam account and blocked everyone on it. I believe he may still be trying to get it unlocked....

[kolla]

Realizing what i had done when the old powermac refused to boot up with a zip-drive stuck into the SCSI port... the funny smell... fuuuu.... luckily the machine survived, the zip-drive didn't. To my defence, it was 8 o'clock in the morning, and it seemed like an obvious thing to do for some weird reason. Had a similar experience with my old A3000 and DSS8+ ... both survived.

[marcfrick2112]

Ohhhh, Man ... My poor A4000T looking sad in my closet...

Anyway, I buy a nice A4000T from a guy for $1000. CS MK3, Toaster/Flyer/PAR/TBC3. But all was never well with the machine.... Anywho, I have to take it apart.... And guess what? I forgot to note the orientation of the ribbon cables to the ports module.... Poof! I got it fixed.... now, it's broken again.....:madashell:

[yssing]

Working on a rather big php project, and I had an annoying problem when moving from wamp til lamp. That I finally solved, was really because I did not read my own source and the error message correctly.
I also realised that LAMP is more strict than WAMP, which is good though..