25 Jan 07 Making software better
I’ve now been at work for 15 hours since I last slept, most of which has been devoted to tracking down a problem that makes me want to rip my hair out and a large chunk of which I won’t get paid for.
However, that’s not a big deal 
Along the way, I needed to look at a lot of ‘printf’ output. Normally, our software doesn’t spew a lot of debug information. We print a certain amount my default because it allows our customer to self-diagnose to a degree – but if we print too much, the customer freaks out and that makes more work for us when a vast majority of all of our output is purely informational. Even some messages that say things like “ERROR! THE WORLD WILL EXPLODE IN 10 SECONDS” can safely be ignored, so we keep most of our debug output off.
What that means to me tonight (this morning) is that I need to turn it on. Ok, great. There’s one line in a config file somewhere, right? Or maybe just one runtime “knob” (that reminds me, I should write a post about knobs) that can be turned? Heh. Wrong.
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