back to article Cat discovers GNOME desktop bug

It's a tip of the open source hat today to a cat belonging to one Christoph Reiter, which recently discovered a bug in Linux desktop GNOME. Christoph was running GS 3.18.1 in Debian sid when, for reasons likely related to the familiar "uninvited feline on keyboard" scenario, the following catastrophic sequence was initiated …

  1. msknight

    All bow to our superior feline coding overlords...

    Well, they always were the best at hunting bugs, including spiders...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

    At 14 months old, she discovered a keyboard short-cut that deletes all of FireFoxes bookmarks.

    I lost 6 months of work (yeah, I should have remembered to back up more often).

    She also managed to delete 3 of the 5 "Home" screen pages on my Asus tablet, delete ALL the Apps on them, but not touch a single one of the games I had installed for her.

    She then went on to figure out how to unlock mummies iPhone (yeah, I know), and make international calls with it. We dont know ANYONE who lives in Canada, but there are a number of Canadians who wont answer if they see mummies number displayed.

    1. Naich

      Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

      Your daughter sounds smarter than you, if you let her loose on your computer logged in as you. I gave both my sons their own logins so they could happily wreak havoc without affecting anyone else.

      1. Triggerfish

        Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

        If you ever here "Shall we play a game" come out of your computer speakers while she's on it, for god sake cut the power quick before she gets to the options menu.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Black Helicopters

        Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

        "Your daughter sounds smarter than you, if you let her loose on your computer logged in as you. I gave both my sons their own logins so they could happily wreak havoc without affecting anyone else."

        She was sat on my lap watching funny cat videos, reached forwards with both hands and BAM all my bookmarks were gone; I still dont know which keys she pressed.

        She now has her own (ancient P4) PC and an old Lenovo smartphone to play with,neither is connected to the internet, and the phone is SIMless so she hasnt started playing Global Thermonuclear War with the Whomper yet.

        1. Eddy Ito

          Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

          Be careful, even without a SIM most phones can still dial emergency services.

        2. Allan George Dyer

          Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

          "neither is connected to the internet" - Yet! Who knows what she'll work out tomorrow.

      3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

        Your daughter sounds smarter than you, if you let her loose on your computer logged in as you. I gave both my sons their own logins so they could happily wreak havoc without affecting anyone else.

        That sounds like hubris. Most kids are able to pick up their parents login details very quickly: their young brains are wired to copy behaviour exactly.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

          Most kids are able to pick up their parents['] login details very quickly: their young brains are wired to copy behaviour exactly.

          My granddaughter is a bright one, but I defy her, or pretty much anyone else, to memorize my 43-character passphrase by watching me touch-type it.1

          Not that she ever has the chance to see me type it anyway. When she's around, we have better things to do. Where's jake when I need some curmudgeoning support, damn it?

          1Even someone using mnemonic tricks would have difficulty associating mnemonic devices with the sequence of keypresses that quickly, even if they could accurately observe all my finger movements. It'd be more plausible with repeated viewings - most readily achieved with a video recording, if a suitable angle could be found - but from seeing me type it a few times? Highly doubtful. Eidetic memory doesn't work the way Hollywood would have it, so that's out too.

    2. x 7

      Re: My Daughter is Smarter than a cat.

      "I should have remembered to back up more often"

      I hate to tell you this, but Firefox maintains backups of the bookmarks.....a new backup is created every day. Recovering the deleted bookmarks would have been trivial to do

  3. thomas k

    More proof

    ... that cats are awesome. (as if any were needed)

    1. wolfetone Silver badge

      Re: More proof

      Not to get all "Science vs Religion" on this statement, but I would urge you to watch

      the film Cats & Dogs. On the face of it, it is just a film. But it's so much more, it's proof if ever were needed that Cats are evil and hell bent on propaganda to turn people like you into gibbering wrecks that mindlessly bow down to the feline fascists.

      We have been warned.

      P.S: Dear Reg, please supply a tin foil hat icon. Thanks.

      1. Fraggle850

        Re: More proof

        > Not to get all "Science vs Religion" on this statement

        In the spirit of getting all Science vs Religion: the film to which you refer is obviously a misinterpretation of the facts and no doubt the work of rabid dogbotherers, heretic scum!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Alien

        Re: More proof

        I have long suspected Apple is actually owned and run by cats.

        1. Fraggle850

          Re: More proof

          There was a documentary in the '70s about a feline takeover threat in London, not heard anything since so I suspect it was successful and therefore covered up by our feline overlords. Fortunately there is still some footage around:

          https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr6CyU-Ev_M

    2. Dr. Mouse

      Re: More proof

      ... that cats are awesome evil. (as if any were needed)

      FTFY. The cat was not trying to get a bug fixed, just to crash it's owner's slave's computer to get fed/attention sooner.

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: More proof

        Dr. Mouse eh?

        Might we imagine that you have prior.. issues with our feline overlords?

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: More proof

        that cats are awesome evil

        I don't understand the distinction.

    3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: More proof

      > ... that cats are awesome. (as if any were needed)

      even the ones that now have additional metal installed and a distinct lack of tail.

      I'm sure the other cats point and laugh when we are not there..

  4. Fraggle850

    That's nothing

    I gather Microsoft had whole teams of monkeys coding for Windows 8, hence Ballmer's famous monkey dance;

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RINizGmhrYo

    1. Stoneshop
      Holmes

      Re: That's nothing

      Not monkeys, or we should have seen several Shakesperean works come out of Redmond by now.

      1. Robert Helpmann??
        Childcatcher

        Re: That's nothing

        Not so much. The Internet as a whole has debunked the myth of monkeys reproducing Shakespeare long ago. In fact, where Shakespeare added words to the language, our fellow online denizens have created emoji, downplaying the need for literacy. Sure, people make poetry with them, but there is really no comparison.

      2. Fraggle850
        Joke

        Re: That's nothing

        > should have seen several Shakesperean works come out of Redmond by now.

        There has been one: Comedy of Errors (aka Windows Vista)

      3. Mark 85

        @Stoneshop -- Re: That's nothing

        How do we know that they're not there? Hidden in assorted dll's and misc. files within the bloat that is Windows?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That's nothing

      "I gather Microsoft had whole teams of monkeys coding for Windows 8, hence Ballmer's famous monkey dance;"

      That cant POSSIBLY be correct.

      Monkeys would have produced far better coding.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: That's nothing

        "Monkeys would have produced far better coding."

        Depends. On whether the monkeys are also part of management or not.

        Oh what the hell, it's friday - have fun !

      2. kend1
        Joke

        Re: That's nothing

        Losing their top coders, might explain the drop in quality. "US Government Promises To Retire All Research Chimpanzees"

        http://www.newsy.com/videos/us-government-promises-to-retire-all-research-chimpanzees/

    3. a_yank_lurker

      Re: That's nothing

      Monkeys would do better job than the trash out of Slurp.

    4. Bitbeisser
      Devil

      Re: That's nothing

      No, he was already nuts before that...

  5. DrXym

    I wish they'd get rid of that sliding screen lock thing

    I can see how having to slide a screen up would be a useful intent in a touch screen or whatever but it's a really dumb metaphor in other scenarios. When I lock a Windows 10 machine all I have to do is push any key and start typing my password. In GNOME I get a misleading "slide to unlock" message and it's only if I'm psychic and know the keyboard shortcut that I can bypass it.

    It should die, or at least be smart enough to only enable "slide to unlock" when the person actually has a touch device, and sets it as their primary input (e.g. toggling into a tablet mode).

    There are a number of other annoyances around GDM, screen lock, flickering etc. I hope that as X is shown the door and more control comes under KMS and Wayland that some of these will go but it is a little jarring that they exist at all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I wish they'd get rid of that sliding screen lock thing

      What shortcut do you need? You just start typing the password and it will slide automatically.

      On a related note: This article should have been posted on a caturday!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dog ... kernel

    I see what you did there.

    Too early in the morning to think of a witty reference to my pet distro.

  7. Blofeld's Cat
    Thumb Up

    Hmm...

    I have always found that explaining the operation of my non-working code to one of the cats allows me to quickly find where I have cocked it up. This process is referred to as the "CAT scan".

    The technique also works with dogs (the "Lab report") and random strangers ("user testing").

    1. Fraggle850

      Re: Hmm...

      Mmm, rubber ducks too apparently:

      http://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/

  8. Matthew Smith

    Just wait till Linus finds out

    Get off the @!!@?% kernal and get in your @!!@?% kennel bitch!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    True thing happened

    My cat purred into my PC's microphone while I had a voice dictation app running on Word. The app translated the noise as "Is interesting". I made the bugger do it twice more just to make sure that it wasn't a fluke and every time the result was the same.

    1. Valeyard

      Re: True thing happened

      mine would just translate as "food please"

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

        Re: True thing happened

        How did you train it to say "please" ?

        1. MiguelC Silver badge

          Re: True thing happened

          Feed me Seymore!

          https://youtu.be/gPNhVYWAdvw

  10. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    What?

    "Readers with experience of parrots debugging Windows, or pet hamsters sniffing out potentially fatal Flash vulnerabilities are invited to share."

    Everbody knows that

    1. one should use moles for debugging Windows

    2. hamsters are best used in Python-related issuses

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mouser mat

    Did you know that a Logitech optical mouse still works on a long haired grey cat? This is useful when you find the neighbour's cat asleep on your mouse mat...

    (It didn't seem the slightest bit bothered by my actions).

  12. sawatts

    of course cats are IT literate...

    you don't believe that "humans" put all those cat pictures on to the internet do you?

    and why do you think its called a "mouse" anyway?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: of course cats are IT literate...

      It is also clear that they clearly like cheeseburgers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: of course cats are IT literate...

        Datz cheezburger, fool, and now yu canot haz won

      2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: of course cats are IT literate...

        > they clearly like cheeseburgers.

        Particularly without that annoying bready bit.

        Moar protienz!

  13. VinceH

    So a cat discovered a bug? Pah.

    RISC OS users who inhabited a particular usenet group many, many years ago (almost certainly none from that particular group on this forum) would remember that my pet tarantula was responsible for developing most of my software.

    Spidz has long since passed away, which may or may not explain why I don't get anywhere near as much programming done these days.

    1. Steven Raith

      Helped with lots of web technologies, yeah?

      Sorry, sorry, I'll go back to what I was doing....

      Steven R

  14. Lars Silver badge
    Flame

    Beware of cats

    My cats have destroyed several laptops and keyboards. first they tear out the odd key and then they piss on the keyboard. Such a lovely warm place to mark for themselves.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Beware of cats

      Yu iz not treetin dem rite. Only time we pizz is when we pizzed

  15. Alistair
    Windows

    Catputer issues.

    Friend of my SO brings over older PC. "always shutting down on its own" and "makes so much noise".

    Dell box. One of those disasters where the CPU fan is on the outside face of the chassis with a plastic "cone of static death" back to the cooler block on the cpu.

    We found the three missing cats in there. Amazing what airflow does for cooling.

    Thus; cats purpose to computers is to engineer early thermal death.

    1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Catputer issues.

      > Thus; cats purpose to computers is to engineer early thermal death.

      My old Dell 2950 has survived about 8 years in a house with 6 cats. Mind you, I remove the front and hoover out several hamsters-worth of cat hair every 6 months or so. And make sure that the cat tray isn't in the same room..

  16. Camilla Smythe

    Grrrrr...

    Today,

    http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/11/12/microsofts_1st_major_win_10_update/#c_2696270

    The associated miscreant creeps up behind me whilst I am doing some mechanical drawing in LibreCad,

    Leaps up on the desk and smears his Fat Fluffy Body all over the keyboard. Again before I get to hit CTRL|ALT|L so that's an hour of, complex for me, work gone. Yes, blah blah blah.. I did try to recover it but for shit.

    Now it's sleeping in one of it's multiple sleeping places presumably prior to vomiting a fur ball all over it, along with associated stomach contents, or somewhere else so I get to clean the crap up.. and preening its arse and penis.

    The shit will probably ask to go out to shit in someone else's garden after I have gone to bed and will be tapping on the window to come back in three hours later.

    BASTARD!

    It's like having 'A Boss' who is a deliberate fuckhole and should know better so you toss the job but FluffyBum is truly clueless/unaware and you have been adopted.

    1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Grrrrr...

      It's all just designed to show it loves you.

      Or, or correctly, designed to show that it owns you, body, soul and bank-balance. And before you know it, that one, lonesome, friendly male cat has turned into six friendly cats-of-both-genders-but-thankfully-neutered-otherwise-we-would-be-knee-deep-in-kittens.

      Not that I know from experience. The nym is purely a coincidence.

      1. Camilla Smythe

        Re: Grrrrr...

        LibreCad is 'free as in beer' SHIT. Whilst the cat will survive some idiots are due 'Hamster Fate' involving two planks and a foot.

        1. Camilla Smythe

          Re: Grrrrr...

          What an absolute Broken Piece of Fucking Shite...

          http://forum.librecad.org/Copying-from-one-document-to-another-one-td5550173.html

          http://sourceforge.net/p/librecad/feature-requests/94/

          The above relates in particular to LibreCad and generally to all of the previous Software and Hardware Shite that PersonKind has managed to bollocks up since its inception that has anything to do with computahs.

          You are all soooooo clever with your broken SHITE.

          Go kill yourselves along with your legacy.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Grrrrr...

            Sounds like you're having a bad day of it. :(

            What are you trying to get done in LibreCAD? (apart from now making a CatEnder :D )

          2. Justin Clift

            Re: Grrrrr...

            Open Source CAD tools are definitely a pain point which many would benefit from being fixed.

  17. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Mushroom

    More proof that the GTK is shit

    I bet this wouldn't have happened with QT!

    1. channel extended

      Re: More proof that the GTK is shit

      No its not QT. It seems as if some of the Adobe people write for the GNOME's. GNOME has gone to pot since version 2.x . All flash with plenty of crash. BTW i've had GDM fail with an error message of 'Oop's something failed!! Cannot start.' talk about you're lack of information, almost seems like MS.

    2. Christian Berger

      Not quite

      The problem is not which tool kit to use, but using a complex tool kit at all. That's why, traditionally, such screen savers and screen locks didn't use a tool kit at all, they were written with raw X11.

      Once you have some graphics tool kit you will always have features you want to have in a normal application, but not in a screen saver. Thinks like accessibility functions or spell checkers.

      The big problem however is that screen savers used to be secure before the Freedesktop tried their hand on it.

  18. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    I have it on good authority that rats make good coders but bad PDAs.

  19. Alistair
    Windows

    @ Camilla

    and what's your opinion of yED?

    /grabs cat for defence.

  20. Petrea Mitchell
    Coat

    If this bug-finding approach could be scaled up somehow...

    ...this could bring a new meaning to the phrase "tiger team".

  21. akeane

    So what?

    I have a squirrel who debugs kernels

    I told him he would be rewarded with acorns, but the ingrate complained they were just a stripped down BBC micro...

    Also never hire a wasp to do gui dev, they are hopeless!

  22. hi_robb

    Erm

    I'll bet the Gnome team aren't feline furry clever right now.

    /Gets coat *short haired one*

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Erm

      The Gnome team aren't clever on their best days. That's why it's the way it now is, and most have switched to other things.

      1. x 7

        Re: Erm

        "Gnome team aren't clever"

        If you want clever you have to ask the pixies or fairies. Gnomes are stupid, though occasionally one gets a good reputation as a gremlin, or by pretending to be a troll.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Erm

          Gnomes are stupid, though occasionally one gets a good reputation as a gremlin, or by pretending to be a troll.

          Aha, that explains their desktop then.

  23. x 7

    Nice cat video

    the only good cat is a..........

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRuXzyqYSw

    I wish all cats were like this one

  24. MAF
    Linux

    Solution can be entered at the command-line

    Bug easily fixed with following script

    cat cat >> /dev/null

  25. STrRedWolf

    Didn't find the Linux Kernel Panicing Cat?

    With actual photos, this time. Timo from the Kernel list was able to find a crash/panic bug using a "feline input weight." https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

  26. Number6

    Well behaved cats

    The cats around here are pretty well behaved. One is sleeping on the desk, another on the floor the other side of the desk and the third is not in her usual chair. They don't wake me up at stupid o'clock for food (I leave dry food down at all times and feed them tinned food once a day when I get in from work) and the one that likes to sleep on the bed seems to manage to remain there comatose from before I go to sleep until after I wake up. I will gloss over the furballs, mainly because if I'm not quick enough, the dog cleans those up.

    I do lock the keyboard when away from the PC though, I don't trust them that far, and they don't appear to have cracked the password yet.

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