House work

So, I'm sitting here working on a bug (yes, I know... we try to nip them as quickly as possible) and I realized that hunting for bugs is a lot like House.

That is, House the television series here in the U.S.

I recently watched an episode of House since it was recommended by my uncle who's a radiologist. What a great show!

The show always begins with a patient who has a crazy combination of symptoms and then the diagnosticians get to figure what's the cause of it. They use an approach called differential diagnosis to come to their decision.

It's like that when tackling bugs. A Curio customer is experiencing a particular problem. I mentally list several possible causes of that problem. Then I have to ask the right questions, perform some experiments, etc, to gradually whittle the diagnoses down until I get to the remaining diagnosis.

Of course, I have the advantage of a debugger. But many times I encounter situations where the debugger isn't particularly useful. Specifically, when dealing with a bug I can't reproduce on my machine.

So, now House DVD's are in my Netflix queue. You can also catch some episodes on Hulu if you are so inclined.