church of the bytecode god

I won’t even bother telling you about the chunk of code that provoked this entry, but I will tell you that it’s only 14 lines long. I’ve known since last night that it was the source of the truly evil and cyclical timezone-related bug in the new check-in system for techops, but I didn’t know how to fix it. Not without hard-coding in dates, anyway (a massive no-no since the dates for dragon*con change every year).A friend, who shall remain nameless, was a generally cheerful IM companion all through my attempts to sort out the mess. I am ashamed to admit that it took me nearly seven hours to fix the bug for good. After finally solving the problem and verifying that the fix was correct, I grabbed my phone and sent a text message to the friend (who was heading out for dinner with a mutual friend):

“I FIXED IT.”

My phone rang less than twenty seconds later.

For lack of a competent transcription agency, much of the conversation is lost, but bits remain…

“Since your code works now, the bytecode god demands a sacrifice.”
“And what, pray tell, does the bytecode god require?”
“You must delete part of your porn stash. Only then will the bytecode god be appeased.”

(I should note that at this point, I was hyperventilating with laughter, with tears streaming down my face, while lying on the floor of my hallway. Maybe you just had to be there.)

“What if I don’t have a porn stash?”
“WHAT?”
(Silence.)
“What if I delete someone else’s? Do they get the benefit, then?”
“It doesn’t work that way. If you delete someone else’s porn, that just means there’s less porn in the world, and the bytecode god will not be pleased.”
“So you’re saying that I should take some time tonight to download some porn and stash it on my computer so that my code will work tomorrow? Should I just tell Jeff ‘No really, honey, I’m doing it so my code will work in the morning?’”
“Well … yes.”

The things I do for techops.

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