Wednesday, December 18, 2002
The TAHT bug
I filed this bug report today, with Microsoft Corporation. They have the gall to want me to pay them to do that, so I just posted a few places and public newsgroups. I may well go through the process and give them their damn money, just to get some payback for 20 years worth of hassle and 3 months worth of pain.
To whom it may concern:
I woke up this morning to the sight of a giant lobster with wings, buzzing around my head. It beat around my ears and neck until
I managed to kill it. There was no body on my 14 thousand pound pillow, so I think it was just the memory of a nightmare.
I just gave a Christmas speech that made a lot of people feel pretty good about themselves. It's called Uncle Bill's helicopter.
The story is about how good we all felt, when we all chipped in together, to fix our mistakes and solved the Y2k bug. I enjoyed giving the speech a lot, and so did a lot of people. I look forward to giving the speech again.
Read it, or download and listen to it. It should make you feel good. Feel free to pass the url around your company.
I blogged about it.
Now...
Your software has a bug so trivial to you, that you've never bothered to fix it, but it's annoyed me, and members of my family, for years.
This bug respells my last name from "Taht" to "That". The fact that 30% of the correspondence, contracts, and email I get has my name
respelt has been a cross I've had to bear since the invention of the automatic spell checker.
But this time, this bug, has helped cause three months of nearly unendurable agony for me. I've misplaced my nephew. The story about what I've been going through is at http://www.taht.net/josh.html. Why? Every single website that had a recent reference to him, had his last name spelt wrong. It's not all your fault. Some of the misspellings were phonetic.
So I couldn't find him on google. Thankfully, someone more intelligent than I did a better search, last monday, and linked a Josh "That" up with a more recent band, and I'm now a few months closer in time and space to finding him.
I didn't realize just how personal this particular bug had got until then.
I've been sending a virtual helicopter around around the globe in a search and rescue mission for Josh, because you've been doing
an automatic search and replace on him!!
I can think of an easy fix. If you see "Taht", with a single capital letter, in the middle of a sentence, don't automatically respell it. I think this would work in all cases, and not effect the general functioning of the spell checker. It's only a few lines of code that you'd need to add.
If you do nothing else for me, please fix this bug in your software. Every bug, no matter how small, is important to someone.
