Let's say that double-clicking on Poker Copilot's "Position Summary" screen crashes Poker Copilot one time in 100. To find this bug, I'd have to use the screen a lot. Many times to cause the bug, and many times more to reproduce the bug. But if 100 people used the Position Summary screen in one day, chances are that the bug would rear its head at least once most days.
To help track down some obscure issues like this, I added a Crash Reporter to Poker Copilot 2 a couple of weeks ago. If Poker Copilot crashes, the Crash Reporter springs to life, notifying the user, and offering them a chance to send the crash report to Poker Copilot international headquarters. Location: my home office.
The crash report sends the error message plus a snapshot of the state of Poker Copilot. (For the techies: a stack trace and thread dump, plus assorted system properties.)
I'm now getting several crash reports a day, and lordy me, are they ever helpful. That hypothetical once-in-a-100-times bug I described above? It wasn't hypothetical at all. It was very real, and with the help of crash reports I mercilessly murdered it.
The Poker Copilot Blog
Tracking the development of Poker Copilot, Mac OS X software for poker analysis and statistics.
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Poker Copilot's Crash Reporter
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About This Blog
In May 2008 I started working on Poker Copilot, initially as a product to help me with my own poker playing. Soon I joined a "30-day Challenge", where the participants each aimed to launch a software product in 30 days. As a result of this challenge, Poker Copilot version 1.0 was launched in July 2008.
This blog tracks the ongoing development of Poker Copilot. Who would find this blog interesting? People interested in 1-person software development, in Poker, or in both.
Contact me via email at steve at pokercopilot dot com.
This blog tracks the ongoing development of Poker Copilot. Who would find this blog interesting? People interested in 1-person software development, in Poker, or in both.
Contact me via email at steve at pokercopilot dot com.
Blog Archive
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2010
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March
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- BlazingStars Reaches 1.0 Milestone
- PokerZebra 0.2 Demo
- Poker Odds Calculator for Mac: First Prototype
- PokerStove for Mac: Coming this Weekend?
- Hold'em Manager Inspired by Poker Copilot UI?
- All-in Equity Value Chart in Progress
- Tournaments and UltimateBet
- Poker Copilot Update for Absolute Poker/UltimateBe...
- Rational to Use Poor Passwords?
- Problems with UltimateBet/Absolute Poker
- Poker Copilot Review in Italian
- Should He make an iPhone App?
- Bonsoir Poker Copilot French Speakers
- Poker Copilot Hidden Features 2: Tournaments
- Cyberduck FTP and me
- Thanks, Joel
- Poker Copilot 2.34 Available
- Is Poker Copilot's Bankroll Chart Accurate?
- Poker Copilot 2.33 Available
- Poker Copilot 25% Off for 1 Week
- Poker Copilot Special Today Only
- Feel-Good Email of the Day
- Steve Jobs' Favourite Adjectives
- User-Contributed Replayer Design
- Email of the Day
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February
(17)
- Exporting from Poker Copilot
- What I'm Reading
- Support Backlog Cleared == Good Feeling
- New Poker Copilot Article
- Congrats to Aidan Doyle
- Another Reason Why It's Good to Have a Solo Intern...
- Poker Copilot Assistance in French?
- Poker Copilot Support Back Online
- In Memory of Annette
- The Best Name Ever for a Computer Language
- Poker Copilot Hidden Features 1: The Charts
- Poker Copilot continues its conquest of the Indian...
- Poker Copilot Update 2.31
- Removing Features
- Forgetting what the aim is?
- Invoice Creator for Freelancers
- Don’t give money to Haiti?
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March
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2009
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June
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- Poker Copilot: One Year Old
- Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update
- Poker Copilot 1.76 Released
- A Lousy Poker Copilot Week - And a New Feature
- Stuff from Aidan + Posterous = Instant New Blog
- Food, Inc
- Poker Copilot HUD always on?
- Sub-Millisecond Query Optimisation
- Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update
- Multi-table HUD demo
- What's Poker Copilot Missing that Hold'em Manager ...
- Finding Memory Leaks in Cocoa + Objective-C
- FastSpring and Credit Card Fraud
- Does Poker Copilot have Ongame Network Support?
- Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update
- Poker Copilot Tutorial in French
- Mac-ify your Full Tilt Poker
- Why does Poker Copilot talk to the Internet?
- Poker Copilot's Crash Reporter
- Sentence of the Day
- What I've Been Reading
- Obscure Sentence of the Day
- Cha-ching!
- Statistic of the Day
- Hero Stats for Current Table Only
- Poker Copilot 1.74 Released
- C is to Java as Java is to what?
- Competitors for Google?
- Poker Copilot goes Cyrillic?
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June
(29)


8 comments:
My little snitch
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
shows me a couple different place PC connects to. maybe one day you could go into some detail.
The Crash Reporter - the only feature of copilot 2 I am actually able to use. ;(
"The Crash Reporter - the only feature of copilot 2 I am actually able to use. ;("
Haha! Mine crashes as soon as I turn on the HUD. It looks great though and I can't wait to get a working version.
Steve, any plans to support HORSE? PCP is completely befuddled by PStars cash and tourney HORSE games. I can send some HHs if it will help.
Did you use a 3rd party framework for this, or did you roll your own?
I rolled my own crash reporter.
No plans to support HORSE yet...
Could you provide any tips on how you wrote your crash reporter? Does it just send stack traces to you, or is there more information from key data structures?
@Orthene
If you know something about Java, here's what we send:
* Thread.getAllStackTraces()
* System.getProperties()
* Some additional Poker Copilot specific properties, such as version and hand history folders
Thanks! I had never run into that method, that'll be a big help.
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