mystories

More electrical debugging

2018-03-10T16:14:30Z

I was working on an interface to a radar digitizer, and some things weren't working right. The head person on the effort was a freshly-graduated electrical engineer, whereas I had no degree but many years of hands-on experience. We hooked up a logic analyzer, and everyything looked fine. I wasn't convinced, so I hooked up an oscilloscope as well and watched the transaction that wasn't working correctly. I pointed out a signal that went from 0 volts to about 0.2 volts, then back to 0. "That's not right", I said. It should be 0 volts or around 5 volts, not some voltage in-between. The EE said that couldn't be the problem, 0.2 volts was a valid logic zero. I agreed that while it was a valid logic zero, it shouldn't be changing voltage like that. This is the sort of analog detail you can see with an oscilloscope that's hidden by a logic analyzer. I explained that normally waveforms like that show up when there's "bus contention", when one circuit is trying to pull a signal up and another circuit is trying to pull it down at the same time. For technical reasons, TTL signals like these have more strength pulling down than pulling up, so you get a lowish intermediate voltage. "That's not supposed to happen", the EE said. And he was right, it's not supposed to happen, but that is evidence that it is happening, so our next step was to figure out why. Once he'd accepted that we had a bus contention issue with that particular signal, we were able to quickly work out why it was happening and fix it.

Afterward, he admitted he'd been annoyed that I had been assigned to work with him on EE issues when I didn't have a degree, but seeing how I analyzed a problem showed him the value of real-world experience and the ability to challenge assumptions.

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How fix an impossible schedule

2013-11-11T21:12:51Z

One time, I was working on a big project, and the boss asked me when it would be finished. I said it would be finished in April. He stated that it had to be done by February, or we'd miss the market window. He told me to write down on the board everything I'd need to get it done by February. I put down a bunch of stuff: hardware, test equipment, resources, and so forth. Pretty much filled up the board. He barely glanced at it, and said "Okay, you can have all that stuff. Now can you promise to have it done by February?" I grinned evilly and said "Sure!" Then he said "Okay, we'll have a weekly progress meeting..." whereupon I interrupted him, and pointed to "NO MEETINGS" in my list of requirements. He started complaining that he wouldn't know if we were on schedule without meetings. I pointed out that it was my requirement to meet the schedule, and wasn't my promise worth anything? If so, then the meeting weren't needed. If the meetings were needed to monitor things, why did he try to get me to promise a schedule? "The schedule is: I finish it by February. No meetings needed." He wasn't satisfied, and stomped off in a huff.

Several days later, he came to me, chuckling. He'd just gotten the new roll-out schedule from the government. They wouldn't be ready before April.

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Observation

2013-11-03T14:48:40Z

When I was little, maybe five or six years old, my parents took me to a psychologist? psychiatrist? I don't know. I knew I was being taken to be evaluated, but was a little unclear as to why. From my current vantage point, I realize that I was a deeply weird kid, but at the time, since I pretty much ignored other people to the extent that I could get away with it, I wasn't aware of how different I was. In any case, as part of the process, they put me in a room by myself. Again, I realize now that this was an observation room, and the conspicuous mirror all along the upper part of one wall was a one-way setup, so people could see what I would do on my own.

In the room were a bunch of things I was probably expected to go notice or play with or somesuch. But they were dumb and boring, so I ignored them. However, there was also a row of cabinets along one wall. And I got it into my head that I wanted to know what was in the cabinets. I was bored, and I hating being bored. Maybe there was something interesting in the cabinets. I tried to open one, but it wouldn't open. The logical thing to do would be to give up and maybe try one of the other cabinets. But I wasn't logical, I was annoyed. Stupid cabinet won't open? I'll make it open! I felt as if that cabinet had personally wronged me by not opening. There was no one else around (that I was aware of, anyway), so it was up to me to deal with this problem. So I started yanking at the cabinet with singleminded, raging ferocity. I was a skinny little thing, but I was determined, and focussed my entire raging intensity on this stupid cabinet that would. not. open.

Then it opened, all at once. A metal piece snapped off and clattered to the floor, and the door flew open. And, to my disappointment and chagrin, I observed three things. One, the cabinet contained nothing more than some boring papers. Two, I had broken the latch. Three, if I had tried the door next to it, it would have opened with no resistance, and I could have slid the latch over, and opened the original door with no problem.

So there I sat, in the all-too-familiar aftermath, realizing that I had broken something that was not mine, and worse, that it had been utterly unnecessary. I sheepishly hid the broken piece of latch inside the cabinet and hoped nobody would notice it until I was gone. No one said anything about it, so I figured I had gotten away with it.

Years later, I realized that they had probably been watching the entire time, and knew I had broken their cabinet.

Still more years later, I reconstructed the sequence as best I can, figuring my parents had come to them, explaining that their little boy had some emotional issues, and the mental health professionals were trying various things to try to figure out what was wrong. Well, that little episode must have given them something to chew on!

I still feel abstractly bad about breaking their cabinet lock for no real reason, but such things aren't that expensive, and I get the impression that they were being well paid for their services. I wonder if they billed my parents for that lock (my dad would have given them no end of grief if they had tried). I can't help wondering if my parents were there too, watching me flip out and break a cabinet, cringing as other people saw my antics, but secretly glad someone could see that they weren't exaggerating my fitful behaviour.

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Blinded myself with science

2012-10-29T19:38:22Z

When I was little, I saw that it was possible to make windmill-driven generators. I figured this would be pretty neat, so I made a tower, and topped it with a pivoting arrangement of an electric motor serving as a generator and bearing, along with a set of blades cut out of cans, and a tail fin to make it point into the wind.

I took it outside to give it a spin, and it spun around nicely, and even pointed into the wind, but didn't spin enough to generate any measurable electricity. I played with the blade pitch, curvature, and washout, to no avail.

From time to time, I'd haul it out into the yard and try again, whenever it seemed like a windy day.

One day, I saw a lot of wind, so I eagerly grabbed it and ran outside to see if I could make some electricity. Sure enough, it started to dimly light a flashlight bulb! Success! Then one of the blades got bent straight back by the wind! The whole spinning rig commenced to wobbling wildly, and one by one, all of the blades got bent straight back. I was there in the yard, trying to straighten the blades and think of a way to reinforce them without taking too much time when my mom showed up at the door, yelling "You get inside right now! Don't you know there's a hurricane!"

Oops...

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Kill the Cities!

2012-07-10T01:27:19Z

The first computer I owned capable of putting graphics on a screen was an Atari 800. Since it was built by a company known for video games, it had attachments for joysticks, paddles, and the like as well. It was a dandy platform for gaming, in its day.

Naturally, I decided to try to write my own computer games. There were several of these, but a perennial favourite among my friends was one of the simpler ones, dubbed "Kill the Cities". In this game, you would be presented with a 3 × 3 array of red and green rectangles, which were the "cities". You had a crosshair to aim with, which you could move about the screen, and push the "fire" button to shoot. You had unlimited time, unlimited ammunition, the cities didn't move, didn't have shields, and didn't shoot back. A single shot within its boundaries would destroy a city. If, under these difficult conditions, you actually managed to wipe out all the cities, the game would print out "You win! You hear that? They're CHEERING for you!", accompanied by a hissing noise.

As I wasn't yet expert at dealing with graphics, there was a bug in the game that some found more entertaining than the game itself: the crosshair would erase the cities as it moved about, so a player could eventually render all the cities invisible. This made the game even more challenging!

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Karen and the bat

2012-07-08T16:15:54Z

One evening, I was reading in bed with my sweetie at the time, whom I'll call "Karen". I noticed some movement in my peripheral vision and looked up, to see a bat fluttering around the room. Apparently my expression changed, as Karen asked me, "What?" "There's a bat in the room," I explained, "look up." She looked up, squeaked, and pulled the covers over herself. "Get rid of it!", she commanded. "How?", I said. The bat certainly looked harmless to me, I guessed it had blundered in via the chimney, as I had not closed the damper after the last fire. "Shoo it away!", she told me. I doubted this would work, bats are very acrobatic, and their sonar lets them avoid objects as fine as spiderwebs. But I gamely stood up and waved my hand around where the bat was flying. The bat effortlessly avoided me, and continued to flutter around. "That's not going to work", I explained, calmly. "DO SOMETHING!" ordered Karen. So I went down the hall, opened the window, came back, pulled a blanket off the bed, and used the blanket to progressively block off sections of the room, then the hallway, so the bat's erratic path tended to lead it down the hall, and, eventually, out the window. I closed the window, climbed back into bed, picked up my book, and continued reading.

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My own comic book artists!

2012-06-01T17:37:27Z

I was at a convention once where Insight Studios had a panel with three of their artists, Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley, and Frank Cho. Cho was delayed, so we had these comic artists sitting up there, asking if the audience had any questions. It slowly became apparent that most of the audience had just come to see Cho, and hadn't even heard of the other artists, and nobody had any questions (other than the inevitable "how can I break into comics" one). So I decided that I essentially had the entire panel to myself, and started firing off any bizarre questions that came to mind. So I started in on Hempel, asking him "Hey, you're an inker - what are you doing with clean fingernails?" He gave me a huge grin and explained that he'd been on the road for a couple of weeks with little time for drawing and it was a big surprise to him that fingernails could be clean. Still nothing from the rest of the audience, so I went again. And again. And again. Goofy, off-the-wall stuff, and we all had a good time with it. Eventually, Cho appeared, and the audience then had plenty of questions, so I just sat back and enjoyed myself. At the autograph session afterward, the artists actually thanked me for being so entertaining and not letting the panel just languish - they also all gave me really nice drawings with their autographs!

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Yeah, that's a great reason to get married

2012-05-31T18:40:33Z

A while back, I was talking to my insurance agent's daughter, discussing my auto insurance rates. She pointed out that I could lower my rates significantly if I got married. I thought this was a goofy thing for her to be pushing. So I asked her if she'd marry me. "Marry you? To lower your insurance rates? That's ridiculous!" I replied "Exactly. Let us never speak of this again."

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My turn to fix things!

2012-05-31T02:57:54Z

I used to work for a computer company, and one of our customers in Jacksonville called to say our computer couldn't communicate with any of the other computers on base. The company dutifully flew me down there to troubleshoot in person. I did some tests on our computer, and everything checked out, but sure enough, it couldn't talk to any of the other computers. I asked the folks there if the other computers could talk to each other. Nope, nobody was talking to anybody. Was it possible the other computers were all broken? I asked if I could get access to the other computers. They said it was okay, and I logged in to one of them to investigate. It was misconfigured, so I reconfigured it. Sure enough, it could then talk to our computer.

I proceeded to go through the rest of the other vendors' computers, fixing them one at a time. When I was done, all of the computers could talk to all of the other computers, which caused the customer to believe that I had been right all along and the other computers had indeed been the broken ones - the ones whose own vendors had been unable to fix. Our company came off looking really good, fixing all the other vendors' computers after the other vendors had been there and simply blamed everybody else (as I too had, originally - but I had been right!).

The customer said to let them know any time I felt like a trip to Jacksonville, they'd be glad to invent a problem and request to have me come down to "fix" it.

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Can you really be that dumb?

2011-12-16T03:56:16Z

I went to Wendy's to get a burger, and asked for it with ketchup only. The woman in the kitchen grabs a bun, scoops up a big glob of mayonnaise, and slowly smears it on the bun. I explain "I wanted that with ketchup only." She tosses the bun, gets another one, and, to may amazement, grabs an even bigger glob of mayonnaise, and even more slowly, smushes it onto the bun. "I SAID, ketchup ONLY. ¡Solo ketchup!", I complain, more loudly. The manager overhears this and comes over, takes the bun from her, flings it into the trash, says right to her face "KETCHUP. ONLY." So she very slowly picks up another bun, and right in front of the astonished manager, scoops up a staggering amount of mayonnaise, and proceeds to very slowly slather it onto the bun.

Completely gobsmacked, the manager shoves her out of the way and proceeds to neatly assemble the correct burger in a few seconds, and hand it to me with a disbelieving expression on her face. I assume that person didn't work there much longer. I can only wonder how she made through Wendy's rigorous hiring process in the first place.

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I'm on the yearbook committee!

2011-12-10T05:52:35Z

When I was in school, and manifestly unpopular, I still enjoyed going around and taking pictures. My Polaroid One Step had a slow lense and a large image area to expose, onto slow film. It took a lot of light to make a good picture, so I had a powerful flash. Some people would object to me popping in to take random pictures, so I started telling people "It's okay, I'm with the yearbook committee." I got away with this for a while.

Until I happened across a room of pretty girls, and took their picture. The old "yearbook committee" trick of course failed, as this was the yearbook committee. Oops.

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Busted (sort of)

2011-12-07T01:31:40Z

At one point, I had set up a web server on my home machine in order to test something out. I had the internet link up, and was chatting with folks on IRC, when a friend of mine asked "who is cat9?" I didn't understand the question, and he explained that he had seen my server up, and had been browsing, and wondered who the girl in cat9.jpg was. I eventually figured out he had connected to my home machine instead of my public web server, and had found this image on it. So I explained that it was Christina Ricci, in a publicity still from the remake of That Darn Cat. Then he asked "do you know her?" No, I don't know her, I'm just a fan.

After that, I put it out of my mind and did other stuff. But then he came back. "You're sooooo busted! I found this picture of you and Erin Murphy! You're hugging, you obviously know her!"

He had convinced himself, from one pic I had from a meet-and-greet, that I was close personal friends with all sorts of stars. Yeah, right. I should have shut down the web server when I realized it was externally accessible. But there's nothing I can do about peoples' wild flights of fancy.

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Once more, with FEELING!

2011-12-02T00:10:03Z

When I was a kid, we had an old tube television that occasionally had issues. One day, it started acting up, with a bonus of visible flames behind the channel indicator! So I went to the kitchen, told my mom "the TV's on fire", and went out to play.

Later, it developed that I hadn't really succeeded in getting my message across, and the TV had continued to burn for a while. It was explained to me, that when something is important, it's not only allowed, but required to distract a busy adult and get their full attention to tell them.

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Mine's faster!

2011-12-01T02:23:04Z

One day, someone came in to work with a coffee mug with a picture of a Vax on it. The next day, some else brought in a Cray mug. "Mine's faster", he bragged. The next day, someone else brought in a mug with an F-4 fighter jet, explaining "yours don't even move, mine's actually fast!" So I brought in a mug with a SR-71 on it, figuring I had won that war. The next day, someone brought in a space shuttle mug. Oops.

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Low-level SCSI debugging

2011-11-20T04:27:46Z

I was working on a contract where we were going to sell SCSI connected floppy disk drives. We got a drive in, but it didn't work, so they assigned it to me. I added in some debugging code, and it looked like the drive was wonky. The computer would send a "read" command, and the device would respond "OK". This confused the computer deeply, as it expected the drive to either return a block of data and "OK", or an error. Just responding "OK" didn't make sense. All the other devices on the bus worked just fine.

The hardware engineer on the project rented a SCSI analyzer, which also insisted the drive was misbehaving. It clearly showed the read command going out, and the "OK" status coming back. So we ordered another drive, and when it arrived, it did exactly the same thing. Monitoring other devices showed the expected behaviour: send a read command, get data, then get the OK status.

I, however, did not trust the SCSI analyzer. It operated on the assumption that everything was operating according to specifications, and was designed to show what data was going back and forth, not investigate weird protocol violations.

Accordingly, I went and rounded up a logic analyzer, which just shows the raw signals, and does not interpret them at all. It is more effort to figure out what's going on from the raw logic levels, but the logic analyzer doesn't hide anything either. And sure enough, when I puzzled out what the logic analyzer was telling me, it became clear what was happening. The computer would put the read command on the bus, one byte at a time, assert the strobe signal to indicate that the command byte was ready to read, take away the byte, and wait for the "ack" (acknowledge) signal back from the target device. And this is wrong. What it should do is leave the byte on the bus until it gets the ack back. The SCSI control chip in the computer was very simple, and did not do the signal sequencing itself, depending on its device driver to do so. And, looking at the device driver source code (fortunately, we had access to it), it showed the same sequence of events: put data on bus, assert strobe, take data away, wait for ack. So I swapped two lines in the driver, so it would put the data on the bus, assert strobe, wait for ack, and then take the data away.

And lo, the SCSI floppy disk drive started to work perfectly! The remaining question was, why did the other devices work? My theory is that the other, fancier, devices had hardware SCSI interfaces that latched the incoming command bytes immediately upon strobe, so they didn't care that the data went away immediately afterward. Whereas the floppy drive implemented its SCSI interface with a microcontroller. The strobe signal would send an interrupt to the microcontroller, which would then go read the data byte off the SCSI bus. Unfortunately, by the time it got around to it, the data was gone, and the bus terminators had pulled the data lines back to their idle state of zero. And, sure enough, a SCSI command block of all zeroes is a valid command: "test unit ready", for which the correct response is simply "OK".

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Now THAT is some precision shedding!

2011-11-18T02:09:49Z

My family had long joked about cats' ability to shed contrasting fur on things, for maximum visibility. One day, I saw one strand of fur on a chessboard, straddling two squares. It was dark on the light square and light on the dark square. I pointed it out, exclaiming that the cats had really outdone themselves on that one, producing a two-coloured strand, and aligning it with the border. No, my mom explained, it was probably just a grey hair, and just appeared to contrast with both colours. So I turned it around, and it vanished!

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Nethack

2011-11-17T03:43:15Z

Once upon a time, there was a text adventure game called Rogue. You'd explore a dungeon made of punctuation marks and fight monsters represented by letters of the alphabet. It was actually rather diverting. Later, another, more advanced version came along, called Hack. Then it got refined by a gaggle of people spread all over the nascent internet, and was now called netHack. The source code was freely available, and many people contributed to it.

My roommate and I decided to extend it too. Accordingly, we invented new character classes. The first one was a "bulldyke", which started out with max strength and max armor. With this character, the first few levels of the dungeon were a cakewalk. Things got trickier when you got down to where you had to deal with rust monsters and other things where armor and strength by themselves, weren't enough.

The next new character class was the "asshole". This was a very weak, nerdy character with the useful built-in ability to identify magic items. Instead of attempting to divine what various rings, scrolls, potions, and wands did by using them and hoping you could work backward from their effects to what they were, or finding a scroll of identify (and identifying it), and running the risk of unremovable cursed rings, the character automatically knew what all these items were, how many charges were left, etc. In apposition to the bulldyke, you often wouldn't survive the first few levels with this character, but if you did, you would have accumulated enough useful magic items to be rather formidible.

Frustrated with the fact that you could only wear two rings at once, we invented the diabolical "ring of extra finger". At first, this seems utterly useless. It takes up a finger, and grants you an extra one, producing no net gain. And a cursed one uses up the finger it's on, as well as taking away your other ring finger, leaving none! But a blessed ring of extra finger grants you two extra fingers, for a total of three usable fingers. And that can be an amazingly handy thing, especially if you're an asshole with an assortment of useful rings.

Then we went for another character class, the "guitarist". This class, while not the sort of standout the others were, absorbed a great deal of creativity, spread over months. To go with the guitarist, we added more weapons, guitars and picks. At first, we just tacked "guitars" to the end of the list of weapons, not realizing that wasn't quite what we wanted to do. It turns out that weapons (such as arrows) listed after "rocks" came in multiples instead of being found one at a time like swords. So you'd go waltzing along, and find ten guitars! When you'd read a scroll, you'd get messages like "your 10 guitars glow blue for a moment."

After fixing that, we tweaked the game mechanics such that if you wielded a pick, and used your guitar on a nymph, there was a chance she'd scream and throw her panties (yet another new item) at you. And, yes, you could put on the panties. It was not obvious how, until you attempted to put on a helmet, whereupon the game would inform you "you are already wearing something on your head!"

We even bothered to set up theology for our new character classes, adding gods for chaotic, neutral, and lawful guitarists. And, like with the existing ones, praying to the wrong god would bring you bad luck.

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What did I do?

2011-11-15T13:40:44Z

Shortly after I started my first programming job, I hung a poster in my office of some faeries flying around. As it happens, said faeries were topless. A few days later, I noticed that someone had cut little bikinis for them out of Post-Its. This was fine with me, so I left them there. Slowly, I noticed that the company librarian, who had previously been friendly, had become quite cold and standoffish. I didn't know what to make of it. Weeks passed. Eventually, I found out what had happened. The librarian had made the Post-It bikinis as a joke, but someone found out about it and, as a prank, left a note in her office telling her to stay out of my office and don't touch my things, and signed my name to it!

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The advantages of shamelessness

2011-11-06T13:08:11Z

At one programming job, I'd travel with my boss to fix things on-site frequently. My boss was fond of buying mens' magazines at the airport and hiding with them until the time came for the plane to leave. At that point, he didn't want to be seen in public with his girlie magazine, so he'd just give it to me. As I have no shame, and I knew the person I'd be sitting next to in the plane was him anyway, I'd just kick back and enjoy my bounty.

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Adjectives end in -ly?

2011-10-16T22:31:02Z

When I was in school, I was told in class that adverbs generally end in -ly. "Really?" I asked. "Are you sure? Ugly, lovely, friendly, silly, elderly, wily, curly?" Having anticipated this, I had memorized this list, waiting for the right moment, to see if I could pull it off. Sure enough, the teacher looked briefly confused, then said "Oh, right, it's adjectives that tend to end in -ly." And the class dutifully wrote it down.

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You didn't tell me!

2011-10-10T02:15:00Z

My friend D'Glenn invited me to come help some folks make a movie (Star Wars 4½ - A Time Of Reckoning). No problem, sounds fun. So we drive out there, meet the crowd, and it's five good-looking young women! Later when he and I are off by ourselves, I whisper "You didn't tell me it was five gorgeous girls!" He whispered back "I didn't KNOW!"

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The silver bush

2011-10-09T13:18:12Z

One day I came home to find that one of the bushes at the end of my driveway looked funny. Almost as if its color had turned more pale. When the light caught it, it looked like it was shiny too. So once I parked, I had a closer look. The entire bush was covered with silk. That was odd. So I kept examining it, and then realized it also contained a huge hornet nest approximately the size of a basketball. But there were no hornets around. The nest was empty. Then I understood what had probably happened. Some spider had found the bush, set up a web, and caught a hornet. So she stayed there, nabbing hornet after hornet, having plenty of nice meals. And, like tribbles, if you feed a spider, you get more spiders. I'm guessing that some of her family hung around and also set up shop, enjoying the constant stream of food, eventually covering the entire bush with their webs. As more and more spiders accumulated, the process would accelerate, the hornets being consumed faster and faster.

Somehow I had missed the entire process, only to happen upon an abandoned nest and a bunch of webbing. As spider webs are somewhat ephemeral, I suspect they had just finished eating all the hornets, and moved on when the food supply ran out. Thanks, spiders!

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Fame, of a sort

2011-10-08T15:15:47Z

When I was in high school, I'd write silly programs that would attempt to do crude animations by playing with the text characters on the screens. There was one that drew a "diving board" made of underscores, and the cursor would bounce up and down on it, and then fall through. Another made a boxy plane, labeled "747", shudder across the screen. All of these were available to the other students using the county's computer system. And all of them would proudly proclaim that they had been written by me.

A few years later, I was signing up for classes, and the woman at the registration desk paused in her task of busily keying in my information. She looked up at me, and asked "Are you THE John Rehwinkel?" This caught me off guard, as I was unaware of being famous at all, or anyone else with my name for that matter. So I asked her what she meant, and she explained that she remembered the name from the silly animations she'd seen on the computer at high school. It was a good feeling.

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A guest story: teasing stoners

2011-10-08T15:08:31Z

My good friend maugorn would occasionally find himself confronted with some loser having a bad drug trip. So he'd offer them some "help". In a soothing voice, he'd start saying calming things:

Imagine you're in a pleasant meadow, the wind gently rippling the grass, the sun warm on your face. In the distance, you see a letter A. The letter A comes toward you (at this point, his voice would start to get louder and scarier). The A opens its mouth and it SHOWS YOU ITS SIX INCH LONG RAZOR SHARP STEEL FANGS!

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Falling. With style.

2011-10-08T15:02:22Z

When I was a kid, I didn't have a particularly good sense of balance, so I fell down a lot. Due to this, I got pretty good at controlling my falls so I didn't get injured. We went on a class trip to the state house, which has a sweeping spiral marble staircase. Sure enough, I slipped (with a little help from some bully) near the top. After a few stairs, I realized I had a choice. I could stop tumbling, or I could keep going. I figured it would be more impressive if I kept going. So I flailed down all three flights, ending up in a tangle of arms and legs at the bottom. The bully actually looked somewhat contrite.

Years later, in college, I was coming in out of the rain into a large lecture hall. Sure enough, I slipped on the stairs. Again, I figured I'd just go with it, and tumbled all they down, stopping when I got to the lectern. Whereupon I stood up, took a bow to scattered applause, and went to my seat.

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