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Re: Two-line Buttons

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On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:17:27 +0100, "Richard Cornford"
<Richard@litotes.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>Almost all desktop web browsers have some mechanism for reporting errors 
>in javascript, and those mechanisms will report syntax errors (along 
>with runtime errors). You should become familiar with those error 
>reporting mechanisms and use them when doing any work with javascript; 
>they proved useful clues as to what you are doing wrong when things 
>don't work (as expected, or at all).

The OP would find themselves in the perplexing situation that their
code worked when it generated error messages, but not when the code
was changed to eliminate the messages. I've had this happen to me on
several occasions and it can be very frustrating. Especially when
(like me) you are not entirely sure what you are doing.

I've even had a hardware version of this conundrum. On a very early IT
system (c. 1970) a rubber "O" seal fell off a removable disk, and
lodged in the drive's SEEK servo. When the drive was first used, the
rubber ring caused friction and I/O errors (the SEEK timed out).
However, if you drove the disk hard enough, the rubber heated up, and
became less sticky. Smoke would come out of the drive, but you got no
I/O errors when it was smoking. :-)

Before we found the fix, I wrote a program to bypass the problem. It
did maximum possible seeks for a minute or so, which would get the
drive smoking nicely. I called the program "smoker" and was always
amused to hear the operators calling for "smoker" to be run.

"Smoker" helped the engineer to fix the problem. We demonstrated the
problem, then my "fix", and whilst the drive was still smoking, he
removed the covers, and the origin of the smoke was obvious. 

Debugging in a bygone era...

-- 
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

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Two-line Buttons Art Shapiro <arthur-temp-3@cox.net> - 2012-04-28 17:06 -0700
  Re: Two-line Buttons "Richard Cornford" <Richard@litotes.demon.co.uk> - 2012-04-29 03:17 +0100
    Re: Two-line Buttons Swifty <steve.j.swift@gmail.com> - 2012-04-29 08:06 +0100
  Re: Two-line Buttons "Evertjan." <exjxw.hannivoort@interxnl.net> - 2012-04-29 07:15 +0000
  Re: Two-line Buttons Art Shapiro <arthur-temp-3@cox.net> - 2012-04-29 07:04 -0700

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