I’m a programmer, a code monkey, and most of my day is spent scrambling up and down the code tree. Today though I had a really good day. I found a bug yesterday before I left and didn’t think much of it, even though it was crashing the application that I was using *and* the IDE. I transistioned to using my Mac laptop for development last week because my wife is due any day now, and I need to be able to do real development from my house for the next month or so. Anyways, I upgraded to the newest version of the IDE that we use in house, it’s called IntelliJ and it’s quite good, as far as IDE’s go, and to the latest JDK from Apple. Then I tried to perform some basic functions with our application and.. Boom. it crashed. Then I tried to trace it a bit, and the debugger not only couldn’t catch the exception, but my whole IDE application crashed. So I went back and tried to attack it from a different way. Slowly I worked around it until I could find where the problem was. It appeared to be coming from inside some of the java files provided by Apple. This makes it very difficult because while Sun provides the source for it’s java files, Apple does not. So I had to take the files one at a time, move them over to my old windows machine, de-compile them, reverse engineer their code to find out what it was doing. One file, track it. Make a change. Run. Crash. Decompile another file. Look for problems. 5 hours of this. Finally I found the problem, cleverly concealed. Then I reproduced it, made a little test program that illustrated it and sent it off to a friend at apple. Hopefully they’ll fix it. but I feel.. invincible.

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