A tip: sometimes you install stuff from source and library search order makes analyzing which library you are actually using a mess. A useful tool is ldconfig -p that will print the cache of the dynamic linker for you allowing you to understand which libraries are actually being used.
It happens often that I forget to change the default character set of a database to utf8 and so find out late in the development cycle that many of my fields are based on non utf8 character sets (mostly latin1). Then I go in and modify each field in turn using ALTER TABLE [table] MODIFY [...]
I recently found some issues with the openjdk Ubuntu/Debian default Java implementation. Specifically I had issues with their web start support (javaws). I found that the Sun implementation of Java did not have such a deficiency and the Sun implementation is available through the regular Ubuntu/Debian package sources. I installed the Sun implementation and wanted [...]