Tim C. took pride in his work. He debugged Clockaburra, a timetabling and management suite, used in Australian high schools. Oftentimes, it was a simple problem that could be reproduced after a quick phone call from a client- usually a vice principal or the secretary. It’s when a bug can’t be reproduced that things get tricky, but Tim had the solution for that as well.

Class schedule

One day, he got a call shortly after lunch from a Mrs. Harriet, the vice principal of Charles Perkins High School. “All of our mathematics classes have disappeared from the schedule,” she said. “It just happened this morning.”

“What was the last thing anyone did to the schedule before the error?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” Mrs. Harriet said. “There’s a few of us who use it. It could have been anything, really.”

This was, of course, the worst-case scenario. Tim had to go with Plan B. “Okay, I’m going to need part of your registry tree.”

Step-by-Step

Standard procedure of quality assurance is to recreate the reported environment as closely as possible, then isolate all the variables which could cause the issue until you find the root cause. Due to Clockaburra’s architecture, the easiest way of recreating the user’s environment on his machine was to get the client to send him the registry tree for Clockaburra in a .res file.

“Oh, I’m not sure I could do that,” she replied. “I wouldn’t know how.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” Tim said. “I’ll walk you through it.” Although it nearly broke his stress ball, he managed to guide Mrs. Harriet through the process. Then he walked her through attaching the file to an email, which was a bit of a puzzle for her. The email arrived, titled, “VERY IMPORTANT FILE”, with a .res file attached. The file was a surprisingly large 5MB, but Tim assumed they must just have an unusual installation on their end. He updated his registry with that file and rebooted.

Identity Crisis

Tim blinked. His screen displayed a login that read Charles Perkins High School. Above that was an image of Charles Perkins in his football kit. He tried his credentials and was met with an “Invalid Username” error.

His phone rang. It was Mrs. Harriet, who was eager to get all of those mathematics classes back on the schedule.

He laughed nervously. “It’s… uh… well underway,” he said. “I’ll get back to you with a full report once we have it fixed.”

Things not well underway, it was his turn to call his tech support, Bennelong.

“This is a first for me,” BEnnelong said, after taking one look at Tim’s new login screen. “What did you do last?”

“I was updating my registry with one a client sent. She sent me the tree for Clockaburra which shouldn’t have-”

Tim remembered that the .res file Mrs. Harriet had sent was a chunky 5MB. She had sent her entire computer’s registry, not just for Clockaburra. His computer was tricked into thinking it was hers.

Academic Discretion

Bennelong used System Restore to get Tim’s system back to just before the call with Mrs. Harriet. Tim isolated the Clockaburra registry tree in the file, and soon pinpointed the issue as some invalid settings. Mrs. Harriet- or someone else- had blindly mis-configured the application in the most creative way Tim had seen yet. He returned Mrs. Harriet’s phone call late that afternoon with instructions on how to fix the problem.

“That took quite awhile,” she said. “Nothing serious, was it?”

“It was more of a snafu on my end,” Tim admitted. “I actually had to call tech support to get me out of a jam. I’m very sorry for the delay.”

“Well, I won’t tell if you won’t,” Mrs. Harriet said. “We all have our moments.”

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