Cynthia said:
What is a bug, what does it do to your computer and how
do you do a debug? How often should you debug?
Thank you for your help.
A bug is a defect, often a problem that arises under a particular set of
circumstances. The term itself comes from the 1940's when computers were
large and used vaccuum tubes; because of the heat they generally ran at
night. They also attracted insects, which would fry in the circuitry.
This required debugging in a quite literal sense, and the term stuck.
IIRC, the term was actually coined by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
Current formal debugging often requires special versions of the software in
question (and perhaps Windows itself). These 'debug' versions have full
symbol tables so that an external program, called a debugger, can keep track
of what's happening where in the program execution. Usually you can step
through it as well. These versions are usually not available to the
general public, as they are very close to source code, aside from being
highly technical.
A more general or casual form of debugging is really careful observation and
testing to determine the full circumstances under which the problem
develops. This includes the hardware installed, the full system
configuration, installed programs, running programs, running services,
memory load, disk condition, etc. This can lead to either a solution (a
genuine fix) or a workaround (an arrangement under which the defect does not
manifest).
You generally need to engage in a debug if you are running (or writing) a
program that fails. There's no other occasion under which it's necessary.
You can *test* a properly operating system (to ensure that it WILL operate
properly), but you can only *debug* one that is failing in some way.
Software houses often run "bughunts" during development, in which a larger
group of people hammer on an in-progress work to try to find defects in a
short period of time.
You may be seeing the debug messages from the Java console or HTML pages.
Generally, you don't have a lot of opportunity to fix the defects that
invoke these messages (unless you're writing the code or simply need to
update yoru browser), so you can turn off the debug function in the browser.
HTH
-pk
