dreadedmonkeygod . net

After *mumble* years of debugging various flavors of problems, you get a certain intuition. (Actually, you acquire the intuition much sooner than that. But you learn to listen only later on.) Synchronization bugs, off-by-one problems, user input errors, etc. all have distinctive aromas. But my personal favorite is the "some switch hasn't been flipped" smell. It's the feeling that you're doing everything right except for one simple thing. Forgetting to flip the "uplink" switch on a hub, or forgetting to restart a server after making configuration changes both fall into this category.

These proplems are simple. So once you find them, they're easy to fix. But they do tend to leave you with a mood-wrecking "I'm a dumbass" feeling. You get all the frustration of genuinely difficult debugging, without the moment of triumph that usually makes it worth the effort. You're just left soaking in a puddle of pissed-off, muttering, "But I checked that ages ago..."

So, a lesson to all you kids out there that get to play with Oracle's Application Server: don't forget to flip the switch marked "Auto Login" in the wallet manager.