Monthly Archives: February 2006

When things become super freaky do a RebuildAll

I just solved an irritating problem. I had a program sending heartbeats to another, but with the wrong frequency.

Putting in a breakpoint at the point where that frequency is set showed the value at 2000ms, rather than the 5000ms we had in the registry. So I checked the registry reading code was pulling the right value into the appropriate variable, and indeed it was. No other lines of code referred to the member that held this value. There was no way of setting the value other than reading from the registry in this one location. Even putting a breakpoint on change to that variable failed to show what was going on – it never broke on change – although the program did run like a dog with that breakpoint on. Much pulling of hair ensued.

Then I took the opportunity to inspect this. And I noticed, browsing through the various values, that there was a value of 2000 in the preceeding variable.

I then proceeded to use the old adage, “When things become super freaky do a RebuildAll”, and the problem was solved. Seems like there was some sort of link problem. I just wish I’d tried it earlier.

Commonwealth Games patch

The Commonwealth Games are looming, as is the week’s extension of summer time in Eastern Australia.

Microsoft have issued a patch for most (but not all) versions of Windows. What they haven’t done is made it an automatic update for affected users, nor made it easy to find — it’s not shown on the Microsoft Australia home page, for instance, you have to search for it. They also haven’t provided a smooth way of reverting to “normal” summer time for next year: users have to remove the patch and manually set the timezone.

Meanwhile Apple have done… nothing. Charles Wright has tracked down how to fix it on Macs, which involves going an finding a timezone update file on an ftp server, untarring and ungzipping, running an obscure (if you’re not a Unix god) command… jeez.

Ask yourself: is the typical non-geek computer user going to seek out these solutions, and even if they find them, are they going to bother to figure it out and do it? I’m betting not. I’m betting a lot of computers will be an hour out during the week of the summer time extension.

This is very sloppy behaviour from both sides of the OS fence, and something the millions of Australian computer users won’t be too happy about in March. (Though most will have forgotten about it by late-April, no doubt.)

PS. 29/3/2006. Still getting a lot of comments here, but there is a later post on this topic here.