Shark Tank: For debugging, there's no time like the past

Programmer pilot fish and co-worker are debugging a piece of software,
looking
for that most elusive of glitches: the intermittent bug.

"The program crashes several times one day, but the next day works fine,"
says
baffled fish. "We can't figure out what caused the crashes the previous
day."

Fish's co-worker suggests setting the computer's clock back to the
previous day
to see if that will make it crash again.

"It's easier to play along with his hare-brained idea than to explain that
changing computer clock settings won't make software crash," fish says.

"We set the clock back, and the program started crashing again."

Turns out, as they discover after more experimenting, the program crashes
only
on Wednesdays in September. Which is how they track down the programming
error.

"Wednesday is the day with the longest name, and September is the month
with the
longest name," fish says. "Our software printed the date into a too-small
text
string, and on Wednesdays in September it overwrote the end of the
buffer."