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The bug puns were everywhere! When I started working at Industrial Light and Magic in 1998, there was no bug tracker in regular use. I ended up building a bug
by zestyping 7y ago
The bug puns were everywhere!
When I started working at Industrial Light and Magic in 1998, there was no bug tracker in regular use. I ended up building a bug tracker in Python called "Roundup" (inspired by a program by Alan Trombla, who came up with the name). To create the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability in case the bug spray lawyers came after us, the icon was a little spinning GIF animation of a cowboy on a horse, lasso curled in the air.
I only stayed at ILM for two years, but Roundup remained still in use as the ILM software department's main issue tracking system long after I left, at least 6 years later. It was one of the early issue tracking systems that made it easy to subscribe to any issue, so you'd get e-mail notifications whenever the issue was updated.
The issue identifiers were numbers prefixed with a code to indicate the affected software project, like "REN003" for a bug in the rendering system. Three digits, of course, because I could hardly imagine that a single project could ever have more than a thousand bugs!
I remember that along with statuses like "in progress" and "done", we had a status I've never seen anywhere else: "cbb". As in "done, but could be better." What optimistic software engineers we were back then!
- rconti 7y agoCBB reminds me of the pieces of hardware I've labeled as "maybe bad". Only to run across 2 years later, and find myself wondering "who was this 'future me' that I envisioned might be interested in an ethernet card that exhibits flaky behavior under high load when bonded?"
- Anthony-G 7y agoBeen there and learned that lesson! Let's waste future me's time by having them figure out in what way the hardware might be bad.
- exikyut 7y agoWell, if it just corrupts packets and doesn't (make the (driver|kernel) crash|bring the link down completely|confuse PCIe so badly the PCH hard-resets) you could use it to build a resilient UDP (or even TCP) packet retransmission algorithm. Not kidding, the results would probably be drop-in usable for cellular/satellite/microwave/etc links, and spotty WAN in general.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- abiogenesis 7y agoThat sounds like an interesting historical error, because Roundup is a herbicide, not insecticide.
- Y_Y 7y agoDon't say it too loud, but I hear it also kills humans.
- jacobush 7y agoI think I used that. Was it open source? There was a short time when there were almost no open source bug trackers
- abiogenesis 7y agohttp://www.roundup-tracker.org/ http://www.roundup-tracker.org/ I'm sure bugzilla is older though.
- Daub 7y agoI also sometimes work in film production. We use the status 'good enough'
- wdfx 7y agoIt's also called "can't be bothered"