Eureka! Whoops!

It's been one of those days. I've known about a problem in a web application that I'm working on, and have made several passes at solving the problem. Basically, an applet which is part of this application gets about 95% through its startup process and then freezes. But it is worse than just freezing the applet itself. The Java console--indeed, Internet Explorer itself--completely freeze when this occurs. The app isn’t spinning madly away, spiking the CPU and greedily eating cycles. Instead, the applet and IE are just brain dead, refusing to respond to input or even to repaint. No errors, no stack trace, just a hard freeze that requires using Task Manager to kill the zombified processes off. The Java console is so screwed up that you can't even scroll back to see any diagnostic trace messages that may have been displayed.


So, I have taken several stabs at diagnosing this problem. I've worked on it for hours at a time, and eventually given up, with the hope that if I just walk away from it for awhile and focus on something else, I will either be struck with divine inspiration, or perhaps more realistically, when I come back to it I will have a fresh perspective and may come up with some new approaches to solving the problem.

This bug acquired new urgency as our QA department finally noticed this rather egregious problem and entered it into our defect tracking system.

So today, filled with apprehension and dread, I once again began looking into the problem. Before long, I was certain I had identified the problem. Eureka! Make the change, rebuild, test. Whoops! Still not working. Same symptoms. Well, maybe that wasn’t the problem after all. Much cursing ensues inside my head, along with the voice telling me that I will never figure this out, I’m too dumb and finally everyone will find out how incompetent I am. (My inner voice can be quite melodramatic). This cycle repeated several times, as I rode an emotional roller coaster. At least, I kept telling myself, I keep finding things that are wrong instead of just being stuck at a dead-end like I have been for so long.

Fortunately, after several iterations of alternating between glee and despair, I finally got the problem fixed. Victory is mine. Woohoo! One less thing to worry about. Now on to the remaining 19 product defects I have to work on.