On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 01:11:00AM +0200, Carl wrote: > Wow, I feel silly. > > In the process of making sample code I found the problem: I have > been reading the output with a text editor instead of a hex editor. > To think I spent hours on this problem... *face palm* [...]
No need to be embarrassed; it happens to the best of us. IME, some of the most frustrating, hair-pulling bugs that take hours (or days!) to get to the bottom of often turn out to be dead-easy trivial mistakes that got overlooked because they were *too* obvious. I remember an embarrassing occasion where I got so frustrated that the compiler is adamantly producing wrong code when the source code is *obviously* correct, that I reinstalled the entire GCC toolchain, C library, the entire works, only to find that it *still* didn't help. Finally I discovered that it had nothing to do with the compiler / libraries at all. It was a trivial typo substituting , for ; in the wrong place in my code, thus subtly changing its meaning while leaving only a few pixels difference in the appearance of the source code. I spent the better part of a day finding this problem. *sigh* Or another occasion where I got so frustrated when a code change deep inside some complicated algorithm mysteriously had no effect on the output whatsoever, even after inserting printf's into the code and verifying that the new code did actually get run. Many hair-pulling hours later, I suddenly realized that I had been looking at the wrong output file -- that containing stale output from an earlier test run before the code change. *face palm for 5 full minutes*. T -- Why do conspiracy theories always come from the same people??