The Joy of Code (or maybe not): When Things Go Wrong

This post mixes technical and non-technical issues. The non-technical among you will probably find many parts of this readable, and sympathize with the many things that seem to go wrong when one uses computers. The technical among you will probably wonder why I don’t write unit tests for my quick hack scripts (or maybe why I don’t write better unit tests) and will be amused by the particulars of some issues.

Okay, it was supposed to be an easy evening. I had a few minor changes to make to the instructions I had written to get students started with processing. I was going to check in on how students in the class were going. And then things went kerflooey. (Note: I didn’t think kerflooey was actually a word. However, it seems to appear in dictionary.com.)

First, a student wrote and said that they were having trouble uploading images to our daily sketches discussion. Now, that communication actually worked well: they used Slack, and I got a quick notification. However, Canvas is not so friendly about uploading an image to a discussion. If you click on the Include Image button, Canvas asks for a URL. (Or is that an URL? I suppose it depends whether you pronounce it you are el or earl.) The dialog box doesn’t seem to provide an upload feature. So, I looked into the issue. Here’s what I found is the workflow for including an image on your computer in a discussion post in Canvas.

1. Click on the Account button on the left.
2. Click on Files.
3. Click on Upload.
4. Select the image file you want to upload.
5. Go to the discussion board.
6. Click on Reply to start your entry.
7. Click on the Embed Image button. It looks like a small mountain with a rectangle. On my setup, it’s the fourth button in the second row.
8. Click on Canvas.
9. Click on My Files.
10. Select the Image.
11. Fill in the alt text.
12. Click Update.
13. There is no floor 13.
14. Cross your fingers.

Isn’t that obvious? One of my other students had a much better solution: I use imgur to host screenshots, then get the url from the imgur upload and attach it that way. (Okay, it’s not really that much different.)

So, once I’d figured out those instructions, I Slacked the instructions to them. (Is Slack a verb? And can we use it in the past tense?) But I thought I should also reply to the post on the discussion board. And when I went to look, it had disappeared. Did my posting as a sample student destroy it? Did I click something wrong? I wasn’t sure, but I had other work to do, so I put the question aside.

Next, I went on to finishing the first set of instructions (those mentioned above). As I wrote in an earlier post, I’ve designed a workflow that makes it relatively easy for me to write in the environment in which I normally write (Markdown in vi!), and convert it and upload it to Canvas. But, lo and behold, my automated workflow didn’t work if there was a space in the file name or directory name. (Yeah, that’s something I should have checked.) The individual tools work fine; but when I automate with Make, it doesn’t generate quite the right commands.

Given a choice between rethinking how I used Make and renaming the file/directory, I chose the latter. That took a few minutes. (Not long; renaming is easy on Linux systems.)

Then I discovered my next failure in design. I’d written a post-processor for Markdown that lets me include other files. But it turns out that the use Markdown and then post-process workflow didn’t work if the file name had underscores in it. (Why? Because Markdown treats most underscores as emphasis marks, and rewrites them.) So I had to spend a few minutes thinking about a good approach and implementing that approach.

So far, so good. I’d now fixed my workflow by changing file names and fixing my code to handle additional situations. That was almost fun. And then …

Whenever I tried to to upload the instructions to the course page, I got a segmentation fault from malloc. (The real programmers are probably groaning now.) But I’m not programming in a language in which I’m managing memory; I’m using Perl. I shouldn’t be getting segfaults. So then I had the joy of trying to figure out which Perl library I was using was generating the segfaults, or whether I was using a library incorrectly. Was it in the creation of Web requests? Was it in how I was submitting the Web requests? After about thirty minutes of experimentation, I discovered that the JSON parser was crashing. What’s going wrong? It could be that Canvas is returning incorrect JSON. It could be that the parser is buggy. It could just be the wrong phase of the moon. I don’t know. What does one do when they have a broken parser? I could write my own (something I regularly ask my 207 students to do), or I could think about what I was trying to extract from the JSON and write some clever Perl regular expressions to do that. I chose the latter. Some time soon, I should probably revisit the JSON parser I was using and submit a bug ticket. But not tonight. I have work to do.

Okay, back to the discussion board. Why had my student’s posting disappeared? Another fifteen minutes of work, and the answer became obvious. I had accidentally created two discussions with the same name. One had my student’s posting. One did not. Trying to figure out how to merge the two took another few minutes.

In the end, what I planned to be thirty minutes of work ended up being somewhat over two hours of work. Did I learn anything important? Let’s see … I should probably write tests for my scripts and think about edge cases. I don’t think that approach would have caught the segfault, but it would have let me fix the spaces and underscores problems earlier. (I’m not sure it would have saved me time overall, just time tonight.) I should more carefully check all of my links on Canvas. But since Canvas pages are slow to load, that’s a bit tedious. I suppose someone will tell me that I shouldn’t be using Perl. Or, maybe, I shouldn’t be so creative in how I do things. I should just give in to Canvas and use its workflow. But probably not. At least I had fun solving one simple programming task tonight.

I’d like to say that all of these problems were due to the rationale I give my students when they have difficulty: Computers are sentient and malicious. But I really think that most of these problems were human error (bad design at Canvas, bad coding by SamR, careless Web siteup by SamR, possibly bad coding by the person or persons who wrote the JSON Parser).

p.s. To continue the theme of this essay … When I first posted this essay, the instructions that I copied and pasted from my Canvas post were formatted badly. It appears my normal quotation marks were turned into smart quotation marks (aka curly quotes), and those don’t render correctly as part of an HTML page. It’s clearly not my evening.

Version 1.0 of 2016-09-05.