joy of bugs

Filing a good bug report can be a lot of work, but it can be a lot of fun too. Sometimes it's just a matter of taking some data and whittling it down to a short and simple test case for a bug that many people have seen before, but never quite tracked down. This can be suprisingly fun, especially when the bug is in a programming language.

Or it might just be filing a simple clear problem description and finding out that no, you're not the only one to see that strange problem, but nobody else had gotten around to reporting it, and then watching the developer go off to fix it.

But the really fun ones to me partake more of debugging, when everything is fumbling in total murk and darkness one minute, and then a sudden flash of insight lays the bug bare before me. This is perhaps one of the top ten things about really working with a computer that I wish I could teach to people who haven't got it.

I've spanned the spectrum today, with significant bug reports in each of the categories above. Now if I could only find the energy to figure out how to file a good bug report on the 2.6 kernel, for not waking up my laptop's drive on resume from APM sleep.