most annoying/embarrassing bug?

I was wrestling with my code for hours and hours wondering why an object was on the wrong list - no matter what I did it was always there, I started to blame the blitzmax language itself and the type inheritance code,

turns out I made the list global instead of a field. ARGH!

I was recently working on some compression algorithms, trying to find something awesome, and I thought I'd discovered something. It seemed to work great, seemed to make files really *really* small, and quick too! I thought it was going to change the world as we know it. Then i discovered that where I was supposed to be writing out a `code` byte I was actually writing out a piece of the original data, and after doing so the data was compressing way better than it should have. It all came down to having typed the wrong variable name. Of course, after fixing it, it was crap.

spending a ton of time writing a function/class, tieing into the main code, then finding a bug. Spending tons of time troubleshooting to finally find I never actually called the function/class

yeah ive done that a few times

Most annoying would have to be in B3D. Due to the lack of strict i have spent HOURS debugging spelling mistakes. You dont even get a "cracked it satisfaction" rush from those.

Most embarassing was in c++ in a relatively small loop, where i had forgotten to initialize and took me more time than it should to work out why my numbers were astronomical when they should have been <10 :D

A few years ago, writing a midi-sequencer which produced a random crash:

Spent 3 weeks creating an output screen where I could scroll the raw data as it was playing on every track simultaneously.

Then spotted two musicals phrases (10's of 1000's of bytes each) overlapping in memory by two bytes (my fault).
And if you tried to delete one....

Hello.

Not a bug as such but a full-on F.U. of pretty heroic proportions. A friend and I, when doing our computer degrees, spent an hour trying to figure out why we couldn't save to a floppy disk.

Eventually he asks "You have taken the write-protection off, haven't you?"

I'm sure you can imagine how smart we felt.

Goodbye.

I used to get caught in BPlus many times when I used a different (undeclared) variable name and so the compiler gave it a default value of 0 instead of giving a compile error like Strict would in BMax.

Mine would be back in the C64 days when I put an extra comma in a list of numbers in a data statement. I stared at the code for hours and hours and couldn't figure out the bug.

There was also a time where I worked that my manager was excited because he bought a new Macintosh for managing the inventory. A month later I asked him how the mac was doing, and he said it wasn't working. He had tech support in several times and no one could figure out what's wrong.
I asked if it was powering up at all, any noise, fans, lights, anything? He wasn't getting anything on it. So I unplugged it from the wall and plugged it into another outlet. Told him to try it, and he didn't believe it would work. It powered right up. He wasn't too happy about it :D

Spend about half an hour rewriting a certain function till I saw that somewhere else in my code it read 'if (email="")' instead of 'if (email=="")' :/

This is not a bug per se but a Grade "A" piece of stupidity:

A friend of mine was working on an undergraduate coding project on a unix server and it had a bug that was causing it to create wierd folders and filenames in different places with illegal filenames (e.g. ???projc??.???) which could not then be deleted. He fixed the bug, but could not get rid of the files.

He asked me to see if I could help and, in a genuine effort to assist, I tried various things to help but couldn't get anywhere with it. So I decided to have one last go by moving all the data he needed to a backup folder and then recursively deleting the files and the original folder including all subfolders.

Of course I included the "?" charecter in the deleting instruction fogetting it was a reserved charecter for "any charecter" and in one go deleted his entire unix account.

Bizzarely, I went on to run the IT for large organisations while he ended up running a Fantasy book shop, not I hasten to add as direct result of this incident, they restored his account from a backup and he got his project back with most of the work (I still feel bad about it though Matt, if your reading).

Darkheart

Blitzbasic Preprocessor has the Strict equivalent #Option Explicit.

embarassing :)

I've recently been uploading little Max3D demos without the DLL, then wondering why they were failing for other people...

Mine was when I was coding and my cat jumped up on to my keyboard. I shoed it away and when it ran off it hit F5 which compiled the code. I then noticed this round sphere next to me which I used to put around a ship I made with an old washing machine and stuff. It was all powered by just one battery. I then used it to go visit Aliens.

There's also the opposite, where a bug turns into a feature:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=2116

Most frustrating bug of recent times was in my Space Combat (multiplayer) game turning 1 client's spaceship also turned all the other clients' ships. In the end it was simply because I'd not set a global variable correctly meaning the message were broadcast to all clients and not just to the server. I spent a good few days trying to track down why it was happening. Multiplayer game coding can be quite hard to debug I found.