A program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon

The first story isn't so great. I mean, a program that was used to estimate the phase of the moon had bugs that depend on it. Oh my!

The second story is great.

Once a coworker found a bug that would not happen in the mornings - a timestamp was being rounded instead of truncated so in the afternoon it would round off to the next day.

Another similar anedocte: http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp

A bit off-topic, but am I the only one who always sees character encoding problems on that web site? Check this out for a particularly egregious example:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/BNF.html

Are you using Safari?

Even if not, your browser is ignoring the encoding tag. Change the encoding to ISO-8859-1 or ISO-Latin-1 or ISO Windows or whatever your browser calls it...

Firefox, same problem on that page, changing encoding solves it.

no it doesn't. the page does NOT have the encoding tag. so this is a matter of different defaults. safari, ff, and chrome have utf8 as the default. I guess IE has Western or smth

I liked the CERN story at the end. Imagine having to factor that into your experiments.