Embedded - 422: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes. Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea. Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class! In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore). News Dead spiders are coming soon to a robot near you Continuous ultrasounds: probably not for swimming  Is CERN opening a portal to hell? Scientists claim not.   Transcript Thank you to our sponsor this week!

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, here with Christopher White. It's just us this week. Who knows what we're going to talk about, other than simulators, classes, newsletters, giveaways, J-links, and... Sounds like somebody knows what we're talking about. Whether or not there are too many chips in the world.

Ooh, and t-shirts and lotteries. Lotteries? What are you... Zone of proximal development. What? Okay, where do you want to start there? Let's just go in. I'm too tired. Let's just go in alphabetical, reverse alphabetical order. So zone of proximal development. Sure. All right. I was saving that because it's about origami.

Okay. Well, then go in whatever order you prefer. No, no, we're here. No, no, no, no, no, it's fine. So I wanted to know whether or not there was a term for where I am in origami right now. I can follow instructions. I can modify instructions. I can write programs that follow instructions for things that can be programmatically generated. And I can write programs that slightly modify the parameters

from the instructions. Hyper-parameterseters you could call them. Sure, sure. But I can't create my own. There was a repeating pattern in a book and it was like there were, it was the same set of lines on the paper, but different ways to fold up and down. And it turned out they were mix and match, which totally makes sense, but it didn't occur to me at all. And there's a pattern that I want to make and I can make guesses at how to do it, but I'm stuck on the edges. I can't figure out what's happening in the middle. I can't look at it and see how it should be built. So, you can play anybody else's song, but you're having trouble writing your own song?

Exactly. And the songs that I've written have all been very derivative or, or, or maybe have been very simple. Hmm. And I thought there should be an, a name for this learning stage. I've seen some of your origami books. How do they teach origami? It seems like there should be an improvisational step in each chapter,

but it sounds, the ones I've seen seem mostly like, well, here's this and this and this, and then you do this, and then just lots of examples. Not, here's how you get practice at designing your own patterns. Oh, Robert Lang wrote a book on how to design your own patterns. Okay. But his patterns are straight line where I like curves. Oh, I see. And what he really likes to do is figure out the optimal use of the paper and how to do it if you have so many limbs.

You want to do an arachnid that's holding something that's like two extra limbs. And so he's got a method that's like, you do the tree this way, and here's how it goes about, and here's how you make all of those little legs. And he's really, really good at making beetles and other... Bugs. Bugs. I mean, he's fantastic at everything, but that's not what his book teaches. And then there was this other book that was teaching how to do tessellations. And Lange has one about tessellations.

And Lange-Gerby has one about tessellations that's kind of in the, here's the next step. Right, right. But these are all minute little things. Like, oh, if you want more legs, do this. If you want X, you hear these tessellations. It doesn't seem like there's a, yeah, this is very difficult because. Well, Mitanni has some that are. How do you visualize?

I guess you have to back visualize, right? I have a shape, an object, and what are the folds that approximate this? And so how do you get... And I guess you need the other way too. Like, well, here are these folds. If I can look at this flat piece of paper with these folds drawn on it, well, obviously that's going to be a a platypus there are a lot of people that who can do that who can read crease patterns that's insane it's

something that i try but after about a crane level of origami i can't read the crease pattern but that's a practice thing and it's something i've considered trying to practice but that's always flat line and the curves there's some extra math to go with it so I feel like if I just sat down and really worked on the math it would all coalesce but every time I do that, it doesn't It seems hard to go from math to yeah, math is so abstract

it seems really tricky to say that learning the math more is going to make it easier to... Well, some of the math is on par with logic. Like if you have a curve going this way and a curve going that way... Oh, I see. Then in between you have an up or a down. And so if you add another curve, you have to change where your ups and downs are. And this is all in 3D, which makes it all the much harder. Yes.

Maybe you should start with 1D origami. So you have just a line. Pointillism? No, you have a line. That's two. The line is one-dimensional. Okay, okay. Oh, you're right.

A plane is two-dimensional. Right, so you have a line, and now you just need to make folds in the line to make a two-dimensional object. Okay. So once you get good at that, then you just need to make folds in the line to make a two-dimensional object okay so once you get good at that then you just extend it i'm being completely facetious facetious what did i say facetious yes that's definitely the word so what is what was the term you use zone level something zone of proximal development zone of proximal development what Zone of proximal development. What is that? That's the stuff that you can learn, given where you are as a learner, before you need a teacher. Okay.

It's the stuff that it is possible for you to get to from where you are. And it was funny. I was thinking about it, and then I came across the term in a cognitive psychology book, and it just really fit because it's what I'm proximal to. And if I want to get beyond here, I have to take some steps, and I can't just skip over because, like going to the math, it doesn't connect. It has no scaffolding. Yeah. And you, as you said, with music, there's a common problem here. You can play other people's songs, but learning to write your own is a whole different thing. To a certain extent. I think music is not a great analogy because pretty much anybody can hum and make up a melody no matter how bad it is. Pretty much nobody can sit down with a piece of paper and improvise a folding pattern that looks like anything other than a dirt clod.

Oh. Anybody who's never done origami. Oh. Anybody who's never done music can hum something. If I say, hum a little tune, and it can't be anything you've heard before, just about everybody can do that. Doesn't mean it'll be good. But if I go up to a random person and say, here's a sheet of paper, I want you to fold this into something that looks like a rabbit, they're mostly going to crumple it, you know,

until they're not going to do origami, they're going to do crumple-gami. I don't know. You could, a rabbit's very specific. That would be like a hummy. Oh, that's true. A jazz song in the key of q fold this into something that is recognizable right i still think that's pretty hard i just think it's not not a great analogy even even if it was my analogy i mean it has its limits um

but yeah no i don't there's certainly other things like that. Like, well, I haven't seen that with programming too. Right. It's like, I was thinking about it in part because of the course that I'm teaching and making embedded systems. Because I feel like there is this chasm for many people between I can modify other people's examples, or I can even debug other people's code, but give me a blank page, and I can't go from the blank page to code. I think there's a ton of people who are professionals, who, I mean, most of the time we're not doing the blank piece of paper thing. And I think a lot of careers are made, you know, in existing systems and, and tinker and, and, you know, making small changes and writing small sub modules.

But asking those people to, here's a, here's a blank sheet. I need to, you know, do a project. It's a whole system. I think that's, that's a really difficult thing. I was trying to figure out, is it a matter of only being able to have one technique available at a time? Is it that I can only hold so much in my brain as I'm just getting used to using it? Or if there's some other thing?

I don't know. I would traditionally say you need exercises. You need to design some exercises to get practice doing these sorts of things. It's funny, doing the exercises is hard because there's the exercise of the design part and the exercise of the folding part. And honestly, I need practice doing both. But there's such different parts. Maybe you can break it down, right? Maybe the design doesn't need to be a fully baked design.

Maybe it needs to be a part of design or a simplified. I don't know. I don't know enough about origami. But I think this is a very common problem in every in every you know learning experiences yes i can do some things but they're within these training wheels kind of not that's too well and the training wheels get smaller and smaller but there's still the leap where you jump the shark and then you can be the shark. I don't know.

I not sure this, I don't think, I don't think this is working. No. Okay. So that was zone of proximal development. Would you like to talk about this week's sponsor? Sure.

I hear it is Newark. Once again, sponsoring us. Once again, sponsoring us. Thank you. Newark. Newark is a website to which you

can go to order parts of all kinds. And today we're going to play the guess the part game again, except now I will be quizzing Alicia on the mystery part. And you have to pick a number between...

No, no, I'm just going to go with this one. I'm going to go with this one. So here we go. And you now ask me the the 20 questions i guess okay how much does it cost it costs seven dollars and 66 cents okay american um does it have pins it has it's a package where it goes into like a like a little, what do you call it? A socket thing? So it doesn't have pins, but it has contacts. It like goes into a little receiver thingy. So it has six, I'm going to give you

extra information, it has, it looks like it looks like ten contacts, but it's hard to see from the picture. Okay. Is it a passive? No. Okay. And would it be used in consumer products?

Could be used in very niche consumer products, but it would be more an industrial kind of thing. Is it a sensor? It is in fact a sensor. Does it measure inertial in any movement sort of way? Not at all. Not at all. Does it measure something about the air? It does measure something about the air it does measure something about the air uh who makes it that's a really good question sgx sensor tech which is probably going to narrow

you right down i seem to recall they did a lot of flow controls uh flow sensors okay so we have environmental sensors sensor development kit. Questions, questions. Sorry, I have to check this out. Okay, I have searched. Is it a gas detection sensor? It is, in fact, a gas detection sensor. $7.66.

Is it the MICS5914 gas detection sensor for ammonia, ethanol, hydrogen, propane, and isobutane? better at this than I am. Yes, there are 137 of those in stock and you can detect all kinds of weird gases in the atmosphere that probably are, what do they have in common? I think they're all bad for you if they're in the atmosphere too much. Yeah, it might be explodey. Although ethanol is pretty funny. Why would there be ethanol in the air? So yeah, you can find that on Newark and a quick easy search. Now, do you want to hear about the parts I did not ask you about? Sure. So the part I did not ask you about was insect repellent lotion, 12-hour production, 2-ounce volume. I never would have gotten that.

From 3M. Is that a passive? I think it's active. I think it's active. And they have zero in stock, unfortunately. So that must be a semiconductor. But yes, thank you, Newark, for sponsoring this week's show. And you should go check them out. And if you need parts for things, they have just about everything, as you can tell, from gas detection sensors to insect repellent lotion? Okay, so as long as we're going in an alphabetical way, let's go all the way back to A and the insect and combine those into arachnecromancy? Correct, arachnecromancy. This was actually on my personal list that didn't make it in.

So yeah, yeah, arachnecromancy. Apparently, researchers... He has quotes on that. Researchers have found a way to, what's the word I want to use? Hijack? Expropriate? Zombify? Zombify? Reanimate? Reanimate, that's the one dead spiders as micro claws for for little robot grips so they they they they take the dead spider and then they it's hydraulic not electronic so they they just kind of get in there and they found that they can this sounds like something like a 14 year

old did just messing around and and then like they decided it was a research project. I don't know. Okay, so they take a dead spider. Yeah. And then they pump it full of, I guess, water and it grips or doesn't grip. Yeah. That's horrible. Yeah.

Scientists can effectively operate the spider like an arcade claw machine. Armed with this knowledge. That's what it says, not me. Pun intended. Yeah, they push air in and out. And quote, it happens to be the case that the spider, after it's deceased, is the perfect architecture for small-scale, naturally-derived grippers. So this was, that was Daniel Preston

of Rice University School of Engineering. So yeah, so that's something to look forward to in your embedded systems is, you know, spiders. Spiders. It's not a bug, it's a feature. So I feel bad for having mentioned that to anyone who's listening. So I would like to counter that with another thing I had.

Is this the Hadron thing? The what now? No, no, no, no. No, no. A really cool thing I saw today. This is an article in, I think, Science. I have to pull it up. I'm sorry.

You have to wait for my internet. Why is this doing this? Science. Yeah, science. Here's the link. Bioadhesive ultrasound for long-term continuous imaging of diverse organs. So I have some history in imaging stuff, and so this was very interesting to me. And what it is is they figured out a way to make an ultrasound probe array that can fit into a patch.

So they put the patch on a particular area they'd like to review, and they can gather full motion ultrasound for 48 hours. So like ultrasound is like if I was having a kid and I could just watch it swim around? That's one. Do just watch it swim around? That's one of them. Do you have to swim around? Hang on. Is that how it works?

How would I know? I just, because I don't know. I just. I know they kick, so I assume it's like butter. You think they have a little boogie board in there? And they're kicking around? Anyway, yes. Theoretically, you could watch your...

Junior. Your baby do laps in your womb. But the examples they had were lung and heart and GI tract and things, this various process we were having. They have some examples in the paper where they showed changes in the lung before and after exercise, like immediately before and after exercise

and the heart. So like the diaphragm moves further after you've exercised. It like stretches out for a little while and the heart chambers expand and stay expanded. So it was pretty neat. So yeah, I just like new sensors and things, and this was pretty cool,

and I thought people would be interested in it, probably slightly more interested than spiders. Arachnomecrancy? Arachnomecrancy. That's the word, arachnomecrancy. Okay, so there's arachnecromancy. That's what we're talking about. That's where you use dead things to do things.

Dead spiders, specifically. And there's an arachnocracy, and that's what you don't want. That's where you're ruled by spiders. And then there's an arachnecromocracy, where you're ruled by dead spiders. And you definitely don't want that. That's very, very unpleasant. Uh,

I hear that the large hadron scientists. I'm not, you really want me to. Are not creating. This is really a great episode. A portal to hell. Is that right? I think you told me that was on USA Today. Yes, it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. USA Today article. Wow, we're really tired this week, aren't we? Oh, I am sorry. Sorry, everyone. This is just going to be one of those episodes where we just kind of... USA Today, fact-checked. Scientists at CERN are not opening a, quote, portal to hell.

The claim, scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and opening a portal to hell. And then the article goes on to explain that that's not actually happening. Paragraph heading three, Collider can't open up portals. So that's a relief. I don't know. I mean, it's a fact check, but is it a fact? Here's one of the scientists taking this far too seriously to create a black hole or a wormhole,

even microscopic ones, with our current technology. In the context of our standard theories of gravity, there's a lot of qualification on this. In the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe. So there's a lot of qualification on this in the context of gravity. We need an accelerator as big as the whole universe. So there's no chance whatsoever to create a portal at the large Hadron collider. He said,

clearly hiding things. I didn't actually see. Huh? Yeah. But, uh, yes, but as long as our standard theories of gravity are correct and,

uh, we, with, you know, it's only my, yes, it's a lot of silly are correct. And we, with, you know, it's only in my, yes. There's a lot of silly things on the internet today. So, which is good because my ability to work has gone very, very low. Well, before we get to that, I do want to point out that Scientific American this month has all deep sea creatures and it was kind of cool.

I don't usually manage to read that, but I was trying not to work. Yeah, that's going around. Okay. Well, I guess that brings up the next thing. If you won the $1 billion lottery that is currently... What? You can buy tickets for, what would you do? I feel like we're slowly turning this podcast into only murders in the building.

A billion dollars. So you're asking me if I want a billion dollars. Well, actually, I meant to ask you 10 million, but then we got talking to about a billion because that's one of the— Is there a big difference between 10 million and a billion? I think that, yes, there are a few orders of magnitude. Yeah, but just lifestyle. I mean, honestly, if I had a billion, I would give all of it away until I only had about $6 million.

$6 million. It's very specific. I don't know. So, I think that would be one of the worst things to happen to a person who went a billion dollars. I'm telling you, you give the lottery ticket to a shell company, and then the shell company is the one who gashes it out, because you do not want that sort of price. I don't want to give a billion dollars to an oil company. They've already got billions of dollars. What? No, not the shell company. A shell company. I would be tempted to get rid of as much of it as possible, but then it's really hard to get rid of that much money, it turns out. I know. I watched Brewster's Millions.

Yeah, now imagine Brewster's Billions. I mean, I think you're getting at how would I change my day-to-day life. Yeah, okay. So let's go back to the 10. It would be very difficult for me to go to work anymore, which is probably not a great thing. How is that different from now? Excuse me? I mean, it's not that you don't go to work.

It's just that it's very difficult. No, no. It would be like, the word difficult is different. It would be impossible to get me to care about anything that some other person wants me to do. Oh, yeah. And I guess that makes me sound like a mercenary who only needs money, but I don't think it's quite that.

It's that I'm tired. No, it's that I have to motivate myself. And money is one way to motivate myself, but there's also the guilt of not earning money, like not contributing to the family finances and stuff. And I do enjoy work. I like working on the projects I work on, but it would also be weird to, you know,

be basically a senior software engineer who's a billionaire on a bunch of random teams. I think companies would be suspect i don't know i i don't think i and the other thing is like okay well i'll go work on music but then it's just purely a vanity project right and which i guess it is anyway but but like who wants to see like keanu reeves' band? I mean, I like Keanu Reeves, but I don't know. It's weird. Like I said, it's a terrible thing. I think it would really alter your brain

in ways that aren't great because for better or worse, I don't know. You shouldn't ask me this question. This is an existential crisis. I haven't even won the billion dollars yet. Yeah. I mean, like if the billion dollars yet. Yeah. I mean, like, if I was doing music, I'd have to, like, do it anonymously.

Because I wouldn't want to be, oh, it's that billionaire guy. Look, he bought himself a studio and he's making records that nobody cares about. So anything I did that was creative would have to be completely anonymous for me to feel good about it. Because I want its value separated.

Because as soon as you make a billion dollars, you're a public figure just because you're famous for being famous. Okay, go back to like the six million so that you're not a super famous public figure. Yeah. Six million? And so it's not necessarily

that everything is a vanity project. Well, for six million... But you don't have to acquire any money. For six million, exactly, I can become bionic. So that's very, very tempting. Although that was six million in 70s money, so it might be more now. Six million is enough where I would very judiciously take just a few projects. I don't know. I don't know. I mean. I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't like thinking about this because it makes me sound greedy or weird or something. I don't like money. We should abolish money like Star Trek.

Yeah, I always wonder. I always wonder. Wonder what? Wonder about the people who clean the bathrooms of the people who have to put together the starships. No, that's what transporters are for. I never considered that. Excuse me, I have to go to the transporter now. Exactly.

Exactly. Okay, so, okay. Same question for you, billion dollars. Here's a check, a novelty-sized check for a billion dollars made out to Alicia White. Well, like I said, a billion dollars, I couldn't. Yeah, I mean, you can barely do anything without these anymore. It's too much. I would want to cure malaria and cancer and I don't

really need to get off planet. But I do think a billion dollars is going to get you off planet in a very pleasant way. I mean, it's things I would want to support. And I think malaria eradication is probably very high on my personal list. Hunger, of course, that's a harder problem because there's politics involved. But like if a billion dollars was enough to do any of that, why hasn't it been done? That's the thing is that you kind of have to, you can't just throw the money and walk away. That's what I'm saying. You have to make a foundation, and suddenly you're running a foundation is what's happening. Yeah. So, a billion dollars, I agree, that's too hard. But for a smaller amount of money, like six million.

Six million. I don't know why that's the cutoff. I don't know. Did you just pull that out of your mind? Maybe, you know. That just seems like the amount that it would take to never have to worry about it again. Okay. Depending on what you'd like to do. If you want to buy six houses and, you know...

In California. In California, you're going to need a few more. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, if you want to have your existing lifestyle and not worry about work, then I don't know. I would only take some projects and it would be mostly things that I thought were environmentally important. Okay. I don't know.

Or maybe I would just do my own personal projects. I mean, I don't mind having origami being a vanity product. This is why I think just having, you know, just being completely independently wealthy is not all that healthy. Because it's... Your drive has to come from somewhere.

Your drive has to come from something, Your drive has to come from something, and so you're going to have to replace it. And so you're going to have to... Yeah, I mean, like I said, for better or for worse, some drive comes from being compensated monetarily, and if you take that away and you have all you ever need, then you're going to have to invent drive from something else. And I've never been particularly good about self-motivation.

Other people are probably better at it. But then I don't want to be that, I don't want to be that super rich guy, you know, doing, who won the lottery, doing, you know, I want to secretly win the lottery. I want nobody to know

that I actually have a volcano lair. Oh, I see. I didn't, how much do those go for? And bionic legs. Because that's the thing. If you blow all the money, then you're back to square one. You can do whatever you want.

And nobody cares. So if you blow all the money on bionic limbs or Planet Hollywood franchise, you're set. I think we should move on. I think it's funny how money makes us value ourselves that's not great yeah all right let's go on uh oh walkway um uri shakade uh was on the show not too long ago he has the simulator for arduino as we talked about but he has been expanding it quite a lot in fact i used it for my making embedded systems class because he did a Raspberry Pi with C interface

so it wasn't buried underneath the Raspberry Pi obfuscation layer that looks like Arduino. It was the C SDK. And you can attach LEDs and little tiny

logic analyzers and all kinds of stuff. It was pretty cool. My students use it because I made them do a homework involving console commands. Serial console. Serial console commands. And Ari is looking at what to do with it now. I mean, it's educational technology. He wants to make professors' lives easier. And now, what do embedded systems and robotics professors need in order to make that a part of their curriculum? And he's looking at ESP. It already does ESP32. It already does the Raspberry Pi Pico.

And he's looking at having to do an ST32 ARM Cortex something. That's great. And while the website still looks Arduino heavy, the goal is to do more C and to make it more useful for educational projects. Okay. So if anybody has ideas on how that can happen, please, we're happy to hook you up with Uri, or you can contact him directly on WOKWI, W-O-K-W-I. We've talked about it a lot, but I still encourage people to check it out because it's really neat. And those sorts of things are real accelerators for getting work done,

especially these days when boards are hard to come by. I don't use it enough. And I think it's interesting from a microprocessor chip design perspective, because he's actually simulating those. But the boards are cool too. So I think there's a lot that can be done there. Speaking of classes. Oh no. Is summer almost over? Summer is almost over. That's a lie. It's July. Okay. It looks like August 27th is when my new Making Embedded Systems class is starting at ClassPert.

Enrollment is limited to 75, and it should be a work expense. If your boss needs convincing, send a message to Classpert or to me, and I will figure out something that says, yes, this is totally something you should do for work. It's a professional development thing. It's cheaper than some conferences. Okay. Although it's still pretty expensive. There are a few scholarship seats. I like how you said that. There are a few scholarship seats, but like how you said that. There are a few scholarship seats,

but Classpert is handling the process this time. So if you believe that you should qualify for a scholarship seat, talk to them. And let's see. That was where the Chris Hobbs Talk turned podcast came from. We got a lot of comments from that show. Seemed to resonate with people. Oh, and it's still July, so the newsletter

giveaway ends on Sunday after this show drops. So July 2022, at the end we are going to choose some lucky newsletter subscribers to win fabulous prizes. Three prizes. And you just need to be a current subscriber when we chose, when we chose?

When we choose. When we choose. So sign up for the newsletter, which is pretty lightweight and once a week. And we don't sell your email. We don't do anything else with your email. Um, cause honestly, what would we do?

I don't have time for that. Uh, so yeah, so sign up for the newsletter. Uh, and you know, we're thinking about making, making the newsletter do other things at some point.

So it's, it's, it's fun. Plus you get kind of an immediate, uh, breakdown of the latest episode with the notes and stuff so you can decide if you are interested in listening to it or not. Yeah. It's a little heads up on the episode. Or whatever the opposite of heads up is.

Okay. You posted a link to me about a Wall Street Journal article where a semiconductor shares sink as chip stockpiles grow. Now, chips are not available. Well, I don't know what's happening. I wasn't able to read the article because I'm not going to go past Wall Street Journal's paywall. But I just thought it was an interesting classic argument of you can't win there are no chips you can't build anything there are too many chips so nothing's valuable it does sound like for certain classes of chips inventories are turning around and now there's what happens with these sorts of things sometimes is everybody goes oh my god there's not enough chips and then so they spend months ramping up production and then there's plenty of chips

and nobody needs all of them because they've already adjusted their demand and stuff. So now there's too many chips. So I don't think we're at too many, too many chips yet, or if we are, or that's for, not for everything,

not for everything, but it does seem like that might be in the in the medium term future is a glut of chips which will be pretty hilarious after all we've been through so okay let's see what else is on this list had some listener stuff we did profos profos i don't i don't know. Sent us a lot of things, one of which was about Ada. And the AdaCore is the place you want to go. AdaCore.com. Did he have a question about Ada? And that will show you the list of boards that Ada can run on.

There are many arm boards. I do not believe this pick board that Profus has asked about has Ada for it. But many, many arm boards do. So if you want to play with Ada, I would suggest adacore.com.

And we've had a show about Ada in the distant past. Yes. And that was episode 158, Programming is Too Difficult for Humans. And it was Fabienne Chouteau was on of AdaCore. So we've talked to AdaCore about Ada. And it was a good episode.

So I encourage you to check that out if you're interested in Ada, which is sort of this under-the-radar language that's been around for a long time, and it's used in niche places and has lots of interesting safety features, and it just kind of doesn't seem to get a lot of mainstream attention,

but it just keeps chugging along. So, yeah. Let's see. What else does Professor say? I would like to commend your producer on this quality of the sound. Voices are always clear and loud enough so that he doesn't have to max out the volume and still understand us. Thanks very much. I appreciate your comment. so that he doesn't have to max out the volume and still understand us.

Thanks very much. I appreciate your comment. A new t-shirt design is coming. Yay, t-shirts. So is that going to be like a fall campaign again? Yes, let's go with fall. Okay. That's a nice broad.

I'm not sure when it's going to happen. Cool. When was the last time we did t-shirts? This is the one I'm not sure when it's going to happen. Cool. When was the last time we did t-shirts? This is the one I'm wearing. It was during the dark times, but I think it was like the first year. So it's been a couple years. So, yeah, I think the t-shirt's two years old.

Okay. That's the Titles Run Amok t-shirt. Titles Run Amok, right. Okay. Let's see, I have some introsshirt. Titles run amok, right. Okay. Let's see. I have some introspection on podcasting, which you always hate. Grant suggested that when talking about software development, that he has an equation that has often been written in his cubicle whiteboard when we all had those. It said software equals source code plus tools plus process.

And as a way to underscore the idea that software development is not just about writing source code. Nothing gets done without tools and nothing gets done well without processes. I like that, but I feel like there's some missing missing uh variables in the equation design review design process review is part of process but i think design source code tools process and maybe people what kind of software do you write that you mash up people. That's horrible. That's worse than spiders. Title. Yeah, yeah. No, but,

and I think, you know, a lot of the stuff falls under process, but I do feel like you don't get software without people. But yeah, no, I like that. And there's, everyone would love software to just be source code because that's the fun bit. But you can't get there without the other stuffs. All right. Well, then I am almost done.

Your J-Link isn't supported any longer. Right. There's that. What's going on? I probably should have emailed Seger before I put this in the list. Oh, okay. Well, if it's something that you're not sure about, then. No, no, I'm sure about it. Oh, okay.

Well, then that's bad. So my JLink Pro with Trace, so it's the top of the line model, was built in 2017. Okay. How long should the support go on for? For something like that, at least a decade. So it turns out that it's not supported anymore. And I was disappointed because it was one of the expensive ones. And I haven't even used the trace functionality for it.

I got it for future use and then I never needed it. So I'm still waiting for the future use of trace functionality. It'll be so cool when I need it because then I can just magically debug huge amounts of things that right now I'm not using it for that. Sometimes I'm barely using it for multi-core VS Code GDB monstrosity. So what do you mean by not supported anymore? It doesn't work anymore?

Oh, it works fine. But I had an issue, and I was pretty sure it wasn't the J-Link. But I wanted to clear all of its local parameters, because it was storing some parameters. And I wanted, you know, factory fresh each time I ran my test. And I emailed and asked, and they told me how to do it, but then they said, your J-Link isn't supported any longer. I don't think it's getting firmware updates anymore. Okay. And I think if a fancy new processor came out, it

wouldn't support it. And so this actually led me to, so there's the whining associated with that, but you know, I kind of understand. You can't support things forever. Well, but you know. And chips change. But I feel like a tool like that, you know, my

impression is there's nothing changing on those for J-Links. J-Link, it's tool like that, you know, my impression is there's nothing changing on those. J-Link's a J-Link. It's worked like that forever. But I guess they're changing stuff. But it just feels like tools like that should not have consumer product lifetimes. That all got me thinking about how do you balance getting tools, balancing the expense versus the future-proofing. Like, I've never used my trace functionality. And on Slack recently we talked about whether to get a salient or a digital and analog discovery, and get four, eight channels or 16.

I mean, do you buy for years or do you get the cheapest possible because the next thing is going to be better? Well, until you said this today, I would say buy for years, but now I'm going to buy the cheapest thing possible because it's going to be obsoleted anyway.

That doesn't make sense. Yeah, I don't really know what to do. The problem is, like, speculatively buying stuff. Like, oh, I might need Trace someday, so I'll spend the extra money for it. Well, at the time, I had wanted Trace on two separate projects, but had suffered

without it. But the hardware engineers have to put it on there too. Right. And that was always the stopping point. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like with the salient question, it's like you have to kind of predict what you're going to use it for. And I have a 16, and I've used 12 maybe twice,

and I didn't really need all 12. So eight would have been fine. We have the 16 and I've spent all year using the 12. Oh, right. This year you've been using the 12 a lot. But at this point we have a 16 channel oscilloscope. So you could have used that. Is that going to decode a bus for me? Yeah,

it actually will. It's pretty cool. Oh, all right. It's not as handy. I mean, you have to actually lift it from my office instead of just picking up the sailor. But the point being, I mean, that doesn't change anything. You had to buy a 16-channel oscilloscope. Yeah. So if you're only ever going to be doing SPI or I squared C and maybe a couple of GPIOs, and you can be pretty sure that you're going to only do that, then yeah, I get the least expensive one. I just wish stuff was more expandable.

But if you're going to be doing parallel ports. If I got the 8-channel and someday I needed 16, I could just buy another 8 and plug them together. But you can't do that. but you can't do that. But you can't do that. Or it's twice as expensive or you get a subscription model and that's how your seats are heated. My seats are heated.

Did you hear about that? Yeah. Sorry. It was random. I don't think there's any solution. And if, if you're working a job where, you know, you're going to be in trouble if you

don't have a tool within a couple of days then you should have something that that's got more than you think you need at the moment over engineered yeah but that's pretty rare and if you're working at home on your own projects you're probably going for cheaper and under definitely definitely get the cheapest stuff, yeah. I don't know. I'm very upset about the J-Link. That's very surprising. I mean, it still works.

Was it like, did you buy it at the end of its lifetime? It had already been around for five years? No, I don't think so. Anyway, Seger, we're sorry. We don't mean... I'm not really mad at them. I'm just disappointed. I'm not angry.

I'm just disappointed in you. It's so mean. It's fine. I've run out of topics. I mean, I had to dig deep to get the spiders. You have been talking about the spiders all day. I mean, they're funny. I mean, it's horrible, but it's...

Oh, man, don't but it's... It's... Oh, man, don't watch the video. It's horrible. It's not... I mean, it's just a spider. I mean, I had a content warning last week. I feel like we should

have another one today. I will put warning contains spiders in the show notes, or you will. Warning contains spiders. As though when you listen to it,

the spiders will come out of your ear pods and into your ears, infiltrate your brain. We'll just make that the title. Okay. So a little bit of podcast. Sure. Naval gazing. Sure. Fine. What parts of the podcast do you like to do? I like the part where I have finished posting it. That then knows the half an hour afterward where I'm done and the podcast is out. I don't like the first 10 minutes because that's the part where I think, did I screw something up? Did I edit something wrong? Did I accidentally put the soundtrack for Star Wars on the podcast instead of the podcast?

Did the tweet go up or was it too long? Did the tweet automated tweet go up from the tool that doesn't tell you if it's too long before you edit it? Yeah. That kind of stuff. No, I like, I like talking to people who are enthusiastic. Those are the times. And that's not to say, I don't think the show is good when we have guests who are more academic or you know presenting something more informationally um but for me when when talking to people i really enjoy when people are really into what they're doing and you can tell

um and i think second i like these episodes where we just kind of banter back and forth because it's sort of relaxed and we don't have to be as on top of things and paying deep attention to, you know, figure out what the next question is for the guest and stuff like that. Yeah, and I'm not taking notes. So all of those things that we listed,

I don't know if they're going to be in the show notes, honestly. I mean, I probably can come up with a spider one, but... I've got the, well, yeah. Anyway, but that's totally different from what makes a good show. What I enjoy does not necessarily make a good show. What I enjoy doing for music is probably does not make it most i mean there's an overlap but a lot of times you know nobody wants to hear a drum solo i don't want to hear a drum solo but i enjoy playing drum songs so yeah i like the shows that are the drum solos of podcasts how about you i like i like talking to people i like when people are excited or when I get to talking to someone and it goes into, I don't want to say a flow state, but we go into this conversation where we're both really talking to each other and not talking for an audience. And I'm learning stuff and I'm sharing stuff and it's fun. I like the episodes where I giggle. And I like the cyber stalking.

Okay, that's not the right word. Research. The word is research. I like learning about people. And I don't mind scheduling them, but it's fun to try to figure out what to ask them that they'll be interested and surprised by and yet not horrified by. Lately, the transcripts have been such a chore. I don't even do them. The show notes are a chore too, but they're not that bad, mostly because I don't do a great job with them. I was kind of disheartened to see how good

the Dan White's Filament Games, they did a podcast blog post for us, and their show notes were better than ours. So that was a little sad, but it's not like I changed ours. I mean, the show is the audio. Right. I don't know that people spend a lot of time reading the show notes.

I mean, the important thing in the show notes is to have links for things we've discussed that have links and the topic. And I feel like anything beyond that is, I mean, I guess if people are searching for things, and the show notes have terms and things that people are looking for, and that gets them to a show, that's good, but with the transcripts being available, I don't think you need to do any better on the show notes. Unless people complain, I mean, people can tell us what they think, but... And I don't like marketing, which I think we've already established. I think we both don't like marketing. Which is why our show size will remain at this size,

and I will just stop worrying about it. And I don't particularly like editing, but such as it is. I don't like editing these days because logic has become extremely unstable. So, you never know when it's going to decide that 20 seconds of some, of just one person's audio is just going to be muted until I've mixed it down entirely. Do you think logic is owned by Zencaster and the other ones that want to do the editing for you?

No, I think Apple owns the logic. Do you think Apple is being paid by Big Podcast to make their product horrible? I doubt it. I doubt Big Podcast has enough money to get Apple to answer an email. Yeah, anyway. So, yeah. I think I enjoy hearing that people enjoy the show, so that's always helpful.

But I don't know that it's going to change that much. No, I don't have huge plans for big changes. As we might be losing our social media person and transcriber, I'm starting to wonder about transcriptions. I really like them, but that's a lot of work. Well, we can talk about that when the time comes. We'll talk about that offline. But now is your chance to say, oh, no, I love the transcriptions. Yeah.

So tell us if you use them. All right. Is it time for some Winnie the Pooh. Yeah. So tell us if you use them. All right. Is it time for some Winnie the Pooh? Yeah. Okay. So thank you for chatting with me, Christopher, and for editing very quickly because it's like, I think, a half an hour until we're supposed to release this. I've got an hour and a half. And thank you for listening because, you know, we do appreciate you. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers for having lots of interesting conversations that I then can use for things like future proofing engineering tools.

We didn't even get to talk about chained debug configurations. I wanted to hear all about that. Let's wait until it works. Oh, it's much more fun to hear about it when it doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, it works fine on my system. much more fun to hear about it when it doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, it works fine on my system with my unsupported J-Link, but on your brand new J-Link, it doesn't work. So let's wait a little bit on change configurations.

We'll go through that saga another time. Okay. Did I say thank you to the Patreons for having interesting topics? I think so. I remember hearing that. If not, you just said it now. All right. Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie had, or I'm sorry, Pooh, as he prefers to be called, had decided to catch a heffalump by digging a very deep pit so that the heffalump would fall in. Piglet said this was a very good trap, but supposing it were raining already? Pooh rubbed his nose again and said he hadn't thought of that. And then he brightened up and said if it were raining already, the heffalump would be looking up at the sky, wondering if it would clear up, and so he wouldn't see the very deep pit until he was halfway down when it would be too late. Piglet said now that this point had been explained, he thought it was a cunning trap. Pooh was very proud when he heard this, and he felt that the heffalump was as good as caught already.

But there was just one other thing that had to be thought about, and it was this. Where should they dig the very deep pit? Piglet said the best place would be somewhere where a heffalump was, just before he fell into it, only about a foot further on. But then he would see us digging it, said Pooh. Not if he was looking at the sky.

He would suspect, said Pooh, if he happened to look down. He thought about it for a long time and added sadly, it isn't as easy as I thought. I suppose that's why heffalumps hardly ever get caught. That must be it, said Piglet. They sighed and got up. And when they had taken a few gorse prickles out of themselves, they sat down again. And all Pooh was saying to himself, If only I could think of something. For he was sure that a very clever brain could catch a heffalump.

If only he knew the right way to go about it.