Software bugs and nerd humor

I recently came across a heisenbug: a software bug which disappeared or changed its nature when I added debug output into the program. The Wikipedia article explains other interesting types of bugs as well, such as a schroedinbug, bohrbug and phase of the Moon bug. Phase of the Moon bug links to another article, Time formatting and storage bugs. This article unfortunaly omits the favorite example of many: the Ubuntu bug #248619 where OpenOffice.org would not print on Tuesdays!? Matt Zimmerman writes that it's a great example of the aforementioned concept of bohrbug.

Related to bugs, the Global Nerdy blog recently compiled a list of New Programming Jargon. The list contains such gems as hindenbug ("A catastrophic data-destroying bug. Oh, the humanity!") and Loch Ness Monster Bug ("A bug that isn’t reproducible and has been sighted by only one person."). :)

Tools for web developers

A handy tool for web developers is Dynamic Drive's Gradient Image Maker. Creating gradient images is a basic thing that a web developer has to do and there's no need to fire up Photoshop for something like that. Microsoft Paint can be used to create gradients, too, but a dedicated tool beats that hands down. :)

Another nifty tool, possibly for selecting the colors for your gradient, is Iconico's ColorPic. It can be used to pick a color anywhere from your screen. It's got an adjustable magnifier, you can nudge the mouse cursor pixel by pixel using the arrow keys, and you can select the average color of a small area of pixels in case selecting the color of a single pixel is not desired!