Posts Tagged ‘Fail!’

Although I mainly like google, especially for their Android stuff, I also must say I really really dislike their account managment. About a year ago, I installed google talk. For that you needed google mail. My common nicks where all taken, so I picked a stupid one. After using google talk a bit, I tried to disable it…no chance. I had a hard time finding the delete button of the google mail account too…but somehow I managed to do it. Everyting fine again.

Last weekend I logged into Android Market on a mobile phone and somehow the old stupid email nick got activated again. And not that that would have been enough, it also replaced my google account name, showing up in e.g. all the google code pages…that sucks hard! Again I tried deleting or deactivating all the apps which use the name (google mail and talk) – with partial success. Yesterday evening, my old nick appeared on google code again. Today, the stupid one once more…and now after some more clicking around – nearly getting crazy – the old one again.

We’ll see how tomorrow turns out…way to go!

It looks like one of the features I was most looking forward to of Adbobe Flash CS5, namely it’s possibility to compile flash apps for the iPhone, is not going to work. The reason is, that Apple seems to have changed it’s license agreement, which disallows Adobe’s way of doing things

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

I can’t say how much that sucks. Would have been to good to be true. On the other hand, I still believe in the power of mankind, and that Adobe will find a way to succeed!

This could rather be a post on I Get Your Fail, a very entertaining site by the way. I started to note down stupid mistakes which took hours* to resolve, so here are the first two:

Case 1: happened @Level Master 2000, Qt/C++:

if( something = 0 )
{
    //...
}

Eventhough I debugged over this several times, I just kept wondering why something suddenly is null, and of course, being new to Qt, I claimed it to be causing that…what else should I say: I’m sorry Qt, for being so mean!
A colleague of mine told me, that in such cases, some people prefer to write 0 == something, cause if you forget the second “=”, you get an error. I’ve tried to adapt to this way of coding, but it somehow looks really weird, and I can’t say for sure if I can continue with this style…(more errors to come! =) )

Second case: I recently did some C# programming again, loving to use properties. But if so, it can be evil to use them before they are initialized / assigned to (well, actually this applies to all members, not only properties):

//In a constructor...
someotherthing = something * NumTiles
 
NumTiles = numTiles

So in that case, using NumTiles before being initialized, resulted in NumTiles returning zero, which led to someotherthing being total nonsense…and resulting in me going crazy!

I’m curious about the next time(s) I’m gonna stumble over myself again – it’s only a matter of time, I’m sure about that.

*: Ok, not maybe real hours, but at least it feels like so…