Finding Bugs in Facebook is Like Shooting Fish From a Bicycle

There is rarely a day when I get on the computer and don't find a bug somewhere on the interwebs. Most days, it's big, huge, glaring Kafkaesque monstrosities. It always amazes me how other people don't seem to care.

But I digress - content will be the proof. Today I spent a couple of hours on the computer, and finally, just now, decided to start blogging the bugs I find. Some of them are very ephemeral - they are caught by alert development teams and dealt with handily. Some are edge-cases that you know result only form a very specific coincidence of state attributes - these are the more fascinating ones to me - like the one last week where when the final set of photo albums for a given facebook user amounted to less than a whole multiple of the 5 thumbnails in the strip, selecting it through the 'last' link would cause the display to be properly truncated to 2 (or whatever the case might be) album thumbnails, and scrolling left from there would not restore 3, 4, and 5 thumbnails. The display would be ratcheted back to 2. For a bazillion-dollar valuation, stuff like that should be kept to a minimum, but it is not. There is, in fact, a little parade of daily bugs in facebook, and a pretty steady stream in the browsing graph of any user.

We become inure, move on, perhaps wonder if we really saw that, and just move on. Well, not anymore - at least sporadically, we'll catalog what we come up on. It might also be good to see how the half-life of some of these is.

So for tonight - what happens when you have an interesting editorial in a newspaper from a 'developing' internet culture? Such is the case over at the Pakistani Daly Times, where I'm guessing an enterprising young staffer decided to overcome a pesky problem. Some old-fashioned, cigar-chomping newspaper editor said: I want the date to look like a proper date." Showing slashes in a date on a friendly URL without a corresponding directory structure would require some parsing and routes.rb or mod_rewrite, but instead, this clever intern decided to use back-slashes, because, though marginally and improperly, they do fly...

So the fascinating article's URL ended up looking like this. OK - bad programming, a small problem. Now, if you go to that article and try to share it on Facebook, you will find that the link does not work - the URL gets cut off by Facebook at the first back-slash, right after "2010".

So there it is - let's see whether Facebook picks it up & works around it, the intern at the Pakistani Daily Times gets a sound thrashing, or both.