65535

What do 65535, hot dog stand, yogurt, cords and magnets have in common? Read on ...

How to solve a mystery when nothing makes sense.

Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes or Encyclopedia Brown? We did in my family. My sister used to call me Encyclopedia Stewart because I loved to figure things out that were a mystery, looking for clues overlooked by others.

I am always amused when I hear someone declare, “We may not know what the cause is but we know it cannot be what someone else thinks it is.” Dave Asprey of Bulletproof says it this way: when someone comes to you and says, "That can't happen, therefore, it didn't happen," maybe it's just because they didn't know how it could happen yet.

The solution to the hardest problems I have ever solved were not obvious or even plausible until the solution was finally found. The solution may involve something I thought it could not be, something I had not checked or something I never even thought to check. The hardest problems were intermittent with no obvious consistent cause. But in all cases when the solution was found, all of a sudden it became obvious.

I have a few stories to help you understand what I am talking about.

The Case of the Disappearing Data

Back in the days when computer data was stored on 5 1/4” floppy disks we had a customer with an unusual problem. He could not find a floppy disk that would hold data over night. The customer, a professor at a Junior College, was pretty computer savvy so it did not seem to be human error or misunderstanding. He had tried multiple disks, even different brands of disk. He double checked that the data could be read back from the disk before leaving the office for the night. But in every case the data would not be there the following morning. No office staff were there overnight, no cleaning crew and the office was locked. The fellow I worked with even went to this guy’s office and watched him go through his entire end of day process, including checking the data, and could not find anything wrong. But the next morning, the disk had no data. It remained a mystery.

The Case of the Elusive Hives

Another puzzling situation developed one day as the family was driving out of town. I have never had allergic reactions except to poison ivy. We had just eaten at Red Lobster and I had had my favorite foods, shrimp and snow crab legs. I grew up in New Orleans so I ate seafood anytime I could get it. But this time I broke out in big welts, hives, on my back, arms, chest and legs and my lips swelled to about 3 times normal size. It even split the skin. We stopped for some Benadryl which quickly brought the reaction under control.

For the next year I always carried Benadryl because I never knew when this reaction would occur. At various times, and never after the same foods, I would suddenly feel that itchy sensation and start to break out and take a Benadryl. It probably happened once every month or two. My doctor was also a good friend and we tried many things to see if there was something in my environment or diet that was the cause. I learned to drink my coffee black to see if creamer or sugar might be the trigger. I stopped eating dairy for a while but soon added that back since it did not change anything. I avoided strawberries and other typical allergy foods. I did not even eat seafood for a while hoping that was not the culprit. I tried Niacin (Vitamin B3) which is interesting. Most people get a flush from Niacin which some believe will help lessen allergies. I am most people when it came to getting the flush. But it did not prevent the hives.

Nothing seemed to make a difference. But eventually the breakout frequency of the hives lessened. I finally went through a period of four months with no breakouts. About a year had elapsed since my first breakout.

By now I had stopped testing various foods or supplements and added everything back in, except the coffee creamer and sugar. Adding those things back into my routine did not trigger a breakout. I chalked it up to just going through some kind of phase from turning 30 or something like that.

Then I broke out again.

I racked my brain trying to think about what was different in the last day or two. The only thing I could think of was we had eaten lunch at a particular steak house for the first time in about 4 months. It had been about 4 months since the last reaction.

It could not be the steak, could it? Or the salad? Or how about the free frozen yogurt that was always available? And it had been two days since I ate there. It seemed far fetched.

The following Monday I ate there again duplicating what I ate the week before. Wednesday I broke out! AHA! So I started eliminating things again. It turns out after some experimenting that the trigger was the frozen yogurt from only one of the two frozen yogurt machines. It did something to sensitize me. I never broke out on the day I ate the yogurt but broke out on day three after I ate something, a food that many people are commonly allergic to but not me, on day three. Two-feature problems like this one are some of the most difficult ones to solve. Imagine three or four-feature problems.

The Case of 65535

I was the lead developer for a software product at a job I had about 15 years ago. The software had been released for a while and was doing well, I was working on the next phase adding features, fixing bugs and so forth. The software depended on daily downloads of data from customers that would integrate into our software to allow the customers to track building projects over the internet.

All of a sudden, the development servers would no longer download new data. The error message was “Error: filename already exists.” Well, that should be easy. Just find the filename matching the file being downloaded and delete it so the new file would download.

But no file with the name of the file being downloaded could be found on the server. What? For a week we tried everything we could think of but nothing would stop the error message to download the needed file. We called the Microsoft hotline and paid the fee for support. They were also stymied. They had never heard of this before. Finally, our server admin reinstalled Windows and all of our software and the error went away. Not our favorite solution but, hey, we could finish development now.

Then a month later the problem reared up again, this time on the user acceptance testing servers where software goes through quality assurance testing before it is released (or some say escapes.) We went through the same drill, we looked for the problem filename but after a 3 or 4 day search, we ended up having to re-image and reload the server.

Now we were nervous. A pattern was emerging. First development then UAT. The production server was next and we hoped it would not show up there. Customers depended on their information daily and we could not afford to take a week to find the cause of the issue nor take the risk of reinstalling everything on the production server from scratch if the problem showed up there. A month or so went by and we stopped thinking about it.

It showed up on a Wednesday.

We tried everything. We stayed late. We came in early. This was the production server. None of our customers could work. We needed a solution that did not include a risky three day rebuild of the production server.

We combed through manuals and internet posts and support calls and looked through thousands of files on the server. Late Friday we were about to bite the bullet and re-image the server over the weekend when the server admin called me and told me he had found something but he really did not see how it could be related to our problem. He had found a folder full of temporary files. He told me last file in the folder was named TMP65535. Heads turned all over the office as I yelled, “You found it!”

For those not as geeky as me, that number has significant meaning. It is 2^16 (2 to the power of 16) if you start counting at 0. The largest number you can count to using 2 bytes (16 bits) on a computer. 111111 111111 in binary. The largest number of filenames that can be stored in a file folder in that version of Windows. We deleted the temporary files in that folder and voilà, problem solved. The error message had been right but it was not obvious how it could be right - until now. We thought the file that already existed was a file with the same name as the file being downloaded. It turned out to be the name of a temporary file created in the background by the download program to temporarily hold data during the file download process. But a bug in the .Net software was not deleting the temporary files after the download. So they remained until the temporary file folder was too full to allow another file.

Not obvious. Until we knew the cause, then it was obvious. Microsoft even refunded the $195 support fee when we called and told them the solution since we found it before they did.

The Case of the Yellow Hot Dog Stand

Another issue occurred years earlier when one of my customers wanted to add a new Windows 95 Server to their Windows 3.1 network. Yes, I know this dates me. Windows 95 was new at the time. The installation went smoothly and everything was working when we left. The central printer was attached to the Windows 95 server and everyone could print to it. For about a month.

Then they called for support. They could still print to the printer from the Windows 95 server but none of the Windows 3.1 client computers could print across the network to the Windows 95 printer anymore. My brother-in-law spent about three days trying to figure it out. Finally he decided just to reinstall Windows 95. That fixed it.

At least it stayed fixed for a week. Then it happened again. We asked the customer if they had installed anything else on the server or changed anything that may be causing the issue. They said no. So my brother-in-law went over there to see what he could find. Nothing seemed to be different. Nothing except that the default Windows color scheme had been changed. The customer liked yellow and had changed the color scheme to one supplied by Microsoft called “Hot Dog Stand” consisting of yellow, red and black. Garish, at least to us, so it stood out. He then realized that on the previous occasion the color scheme has also been “Hot Dog Stand.” So the customer had changed something, because the default Windows 95 color scheme was in blues and gray. But it was not anything that either we or they thought could cause the printer issue. On the outside chance, not believing it would make a difference, my brother-in-law reset the colors to the default color scheme.

Boom! Every one could print to the Windows 95 network printer again. Who would have guessed? Now we knew, leave the color scheme on the server alone. Some bug in changing the colors somehow affected the network printer driver causing the problem. We still did not know the bug, but the solution was now obvious. Leave the color scheme alone.

The Case of the Terminal Braid

One of our customers was the Alabama Band Fan Club. Yes, that Alabama Band. “40 Hour Week”, “Can’t Keep A Good Man Down”, “Song of the South” and “Mountain Music” were just a few of their number one songs. We installed a multiuser minicomputer for their T-Shirt business that used Wyse green-screen terminals that connected to a multi-user computer server. Some of you are wondering what those are but they were state-of-the-art back in the late 1980’s. The Wyse terminals connected to the computer using RS-232 serial cables with blazing data speeds of 2400 or even 9600 baud. Occasionally, a power surge would blow out one of the communication chips on a Wyse terminal so we kept a supply of those chips (1488 and 1489 chips) in stock, ready to replace them when that would happen. It was much cheaper than buying a new terminal every time. It made sense for us because we sold and maintained a couple hundred of those terminals.

We thought that a surge must have caused the problem and brought the terminal back to the shop and replaced the chips. Sure enough when we returned the terminal it could connect to the computer.

A week or so later it happened again. They had some rush orders to get out, so the tech we sent out just replaced the terminal with a spare we had in stock while we worked on their terminal. This time before replacing the chips we tested their terminal in our shop but they were not blown. The terminal worked in our shop. Strange.

We just left our spare terminal with them for now instead of making another trip. For a month everything worked. Then the spare terminal on loan to them stopped working. So I went down to see if I could figure out what was going on. As soon as I walked into the room I knew what it was.

Around this time, we started to notice that the only thing that seemed to be consistent was the problem only occurred when a particular employee was operating the terminal. But that did not make any sense. Yet. Now that I saw the workstation I knew what the problem was.

It turns out she was a neat freak. She had been on vacation for the last month The terminal continued to work the whole time she was gone wile someone else was keying in data. It stopped working the day after she got back from vacation. Why?

Because she did not like cables hanging loose behind the desk, she took it upon herself to make them look neater. What I saw when I walked into the room was that she had taken the power cables and the RS-232 cables going to the terminal and braided them together so they would be neat. But braiding the power cable with the RS-232 cable blocked the data flow in the RS-232 cable. She did not know this would happen. Not many people understood what might block electrical frequencies. Since none of the cables were shielded, the electrical fields from the power cable interfered with the electrical signals in the RS-232 cable blocking the signals from getting to the computer. Now the problem was obvious. I unbraided the cables and all was well.

The funny thing was that every once in a while she just could not help herself and would braid them together again and of course the terminal would stop working. But now everyone knew what to do to fix it.

With enough information, the right information, non-obvious solutions become obvious.

All of these experiences, plus a few more, have been going through my mind during this “plandemic” over the past two years. Many things have become obvious but there are still a few mysteries that don’t have a solution yet.

There is an agenda. Many of our trusted agencies and institutions have been captured to a degree that none of us would have considered possible three years ago. There have been many lies told to us, there have been many laws broken, there have been many freedoms trampled. We have just not seen enough yet to completely figure it out. But people have been awakened and are standing up against the tide of fear and tyranny used to remove our freedom and prosperity. We need to stand firm, identify and punish the bad actors, take back our institutions and fix it so we cannot be manipulated this way again.

One more thing

There was one more visit to the professor at the junior college - the one with the floppy disk that would not hold data overnight. This time we arrived at the very end of the day. Once more he stepped through the whole backup process. This time it was his actual process because he was leaving for the day. Still nothing gave us a clue why the data would not stay on the disk overnight.

He did the backup, checked it to verify that the data was backed up on the disk and could be read. The data was there. Verified. With nothing left to do for the day he gathered his keys, and we both stood up to leave. As he walked to the door, he picked up the disk from the desk and passing the metal file cabinet by the door he grabbed a huge permanent magnet stuck to the side of the metal cabinet and slid the disk under it to hold it to the side of the file cabinet.

Mystery solved!