I’m now back home after a couple of weeks of lots of traveling. I first was 4 days in London, visiting my sister, then was 5 days at home, sick with a flu most of the family got while in London, then last weekend to beautiful Salamanca for a conference at the University. Back home on Sunday, still a bit sick, and on Monday flied back to Stansted for a 2 days visit to Michael, for some debugging and bug fixing fun.
So, in this 1.5 days of fun action at Michael’s, I’ve learnt a few useful bits:
- Some useful tools, like LD_DEBUG, pmap, fuser, c++filt
- Technique: this was the best part of it, since Michael is what we could call a superhacker, so watching him debugging stuff to look for a problem’s cause is very helpful (even though you can’t read everything he writes, since he does it so quickly ), and he has some nice habits in his technique that should help me a lot, now that I’ve learnt them, in my bug hunting work.
- I had an idea about writing scripts using lots of these tools for our users to use them for reporting super-useful bug reports, so will be writing a little bit about that as soon as I start looking at it.
While visiting Michael and his wonderful wife and daughters, I had the opportunity to meet my sister and family on Tuesday for dinner, since they were visiting Cambridge that day, where they will be moving soon, so I will have the opportunity to visit both my family and Michael (for more debugging and technique learning fun) more often.