Back to work? Bugs fixed this week

Thanks to Claudiu we are now able to handle billions of pageviews every month on our EC2 infrastructure without delays or hanging servers to now that we got that scalability issue out of the way, its back to features and bugs. We got two similar reports in the last two weeks from Jens and Michael and we started there.

They both reported that when running a multivariate test and they paused some variation manually the test started serving only the original. Somewhere along the last 6 months this bug must have slipped in our code and messed that up. Sorry about that. Now it’s fixed!

The test variations can now again be stopped individually and the other variation will show in the new distributed percentages to the visitors. The confidence calculation will adjust and graphs as well, like it was when we build this feature. So thank you Jens and Michael for pointing this out and you two week patience on our fix.

First Computer Bug Report Ever!

Did you know the word bug for computer problem could date back to 1843? (see Wikipedia). The funniest recollection of computer bug can be found in a log of 1947. It might be partial fiction, but the image of the actual ‘bug’ in the hand written log, is appealing.

The invention of the term “bug” is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is given by this quote:

“In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch’s in a program a bug.”

Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. The date in the log book was 9 September 1947, although sometimes erroneously reported as 1945. The operators who did find it, including William “Bill” Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia, were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation “First actual case of bug being found.” Hopper loved to recount the story. This log book is on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, complete with moth attached.