% METHOD: Bug reporting for sharing observations

% REMEMBER:

% WHAT: Sharing the experience of trying to solve a hard-boiled software noir.
% HOW:
% WHEN: It is difficult to take notes while working on critical infrastructure, but the sooner notes are compiled, the more vivid the report.
% WHO: Bug reports are often presented in a dry format intended for insiders only. But they do not have to be dry. On the contrary, they can have a rather convivial format.
% URGENCY: Embracing moments of breakdown as opportunities to demystify the workings of software and the practice of software debugging.
% WARNING: 

% NEWPAGE:
% EXAMPLE: - 

On monday morning, with the Walk-In Clinic about to open, Etherpad had stopped working but it was unclear why. Where did the etherpad _live_? What could be done to bring it back to normal operation?
A detailed bug report was filed, starting by looking around the pi's filesystem by reading `/var/log/syslog`  in `/opt/etherpad` and in a subdirectory named `var/` there was `dirty.db`, and dirty it was.

> After some getting used to the various commands to navigate
> in hexedit the unwanted zeroes were gone in an instant.

> Martino asked about the trailing '`.`' character and I checked a
> different copy of the file.  No '`.`' there, so that had to go too.  My
> biggest mistake in a long time!  The '`.`' we were seeing in Martino's
> copy of the file was in fact a '`\n`' (`0a`)! 

> We still don't know why exactly etherpad stopped working sometime
> Sunday evening or how the zeroes got into the file dirty.db


% SOURCE: The example was extracted from an e-mail sent by J. Hofmüller to the Technogalactic Software Observatory mailinglist. The full text is on the following pages.