Saturday, April 01, 2006
Un-Frozen!
Just in case you haven’t noticed, there is a patch available over at the main Font Runner site for the insidious start-up freeze problem.
It is very hard to debug a problem that you cannot see. Font Runner had never locked-up in front of me – until the other night.
I had spent a great deal of time going over everything that happens at startup and looking for problems. I closed a few potential holes, but nothing really significant. I was just shooting in the dark and I certainly couldn’t release a patch with a few insignificant changes and claim the lock-up was fixed. I forged on with Font Runner 3.0 work hoping I would eventually stumble onto something.
Finally, the problem occurred on my computer and, almost unbelievably, took only a few minutes to fix.
A classic story, I suppose, and I know this sort of thing happens in software development every day. No matter what project I’m working on, when I get a bug report, I’m happy when I can reproduce the problem.
