[HN Gopher] Auditory console logging: identifying bugs by listen...
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Auditory console logging: identifying bugs by listening to code
execution
Author : electric_muse
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-05-19 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.visor.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.visor.us)
| nybble41 wrote:
| The article says each operation gets a unique note, but I wonder
| how the notes were selected? It would be interesting to apply
| some musical theory to the process so that, for example,
| operations which normally run together form pleasing cords, while
| warning or errors appear more discordant. One could also
| experiment with using different voices/instruments in addition to
| plain notes.
| electric_muse wrote:
| Good question. We used the pentatonic scale, so that there
| wouldn't ever be any dissonance when multiple notes were played
| simultaneously
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale
| justinlloyd wrote:
| It has been around for a while as far as I know, I was introduced
| to the concept back in the '80s. It was called "cat belling."
| Memory leaks and memory pressure, frame rate drops (it was
| especially useful for that), texture loads & swaps, game AI
| processing. We used it for determing if the game was executing
| correctly by how often it passed certain check points in the
| code. Also tracking the number of sprites in play vs the number
| on-screen. You could listen for the rhythm of the various
| sections of the code, in what was to most people, a cacophony of
| noise.
|
| After thought: I should probably try and work some of that
| concept in to my next music track release.
| bmogen wrote:
| Similar idea in neuroscience - listen to neural spikes during
| task/training/experiment to help troubleshoot experiment setup
| and get a secondary source of info before visualizing data[0].
|
| 0. Sonifying and Visualizing Neural Data
| https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~mindyc/256a/final/
| electric_muse wrote:
| Wow. This seems particularly helpful since it allows you to
| process more information when your sense of sight is otherwise
| busy.
| seclorum_wien wrote:
| Back in the day, I'd tee a supposedly quiet log file to /dev/snd0
| on my workstation so I could take a nap under the desk and be
| sure to be woken up when the particles hit the fabric, so to
| speak..
| electric_muse wrote:
| Not familiar with /dev/snd0 -- what would cause the sound to
| play?
| throwanem wrote:
| It'd be an audio device on probably some old Sun or SGI
| workstation. It would expect to receive bytes in RIFF (WAV),
| AU, or some other format the backing hardware is equipped to
| decode. Teeing a log file into it would produce some form of
| horrible noise every time a line was written to the log. So
| if you set up that tee while the logfile is quiet, turn the
| speakers up, and stretch out under the desk, it'll give you a
| very effective wake alarm when the log starts seeing new
| entries.
| malfist wrote:
| This isn't too far from using a logic probe to test hardware
| circuit. It has a tone for LOW and a tone for HIGH, and you can
| listen to what state pins are in, even if they're switching
| faster than your eyes can see the LED flicker, you can hear the
| pitch changes.
| mark_undoio wrote:
| At the National Museum of Computing in the UK
| (https://www.tnmoc.org/) I saw an old minicomputer where, if I
| recall correctly, the low order bit(s?) of the program counter
| had been hooked up to a speaker for some very simple auditory
| debugging.
|
| My memory is that e.g. infinite loops would be easy to identify
| as a persistent tone, etc as repeated small changes to the
| program counter happened.
| convolvatron wrote:
| came here for 'lights on the cm2' and was disappointed. you could
| in fact indentify the application and stage of computation by the
| patterns. it was sometimes useful in debugging, not that you got
| any real information, but if it didn't look right you might was
| well stop and look further instead of waiting 20 minutes for it
| to finish.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There was a rumor about a place that configured OS alert sounds
| as orchestra instruments. So that as folks were working it would
| sound like an orchestra tuning up. Instead of lots of random
| alert tones.
| zanethomas wrote:
| My dad used a transistor radio in a similar fashion.
| polishedbadass wrote:
| This is such a fascinating concept!
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This touches on something I've thought about for years, which is
| what I refer to as "synesthetic computing" for lack of a better
| term. It's the idea that as humans, we are innately endowed with
| these _incredible_ abilities that no computer can possibly match,
| like our ability to understand social situations and hierarchies,
| and our ability to process and understand complex emotions. We
| could potentially unlock whole new models of computation by
| leveraging them. Imagine a data visualization environment where
| instead of just looking at rows of spreadsheet data, each data
| point had a "personality", and was allowed to form "social
| groups" autonomously with other data points. Those social groups
| could then be analyzed in the same way we do with actual human
| social interactions. Their reasons for grouping could be looked
| at emotionally and understood through intuition. And those
| intuitions could even be fed into machine learning models as a
| heuristic for hyperparameter optimization.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Hard to know what to make of such a suggestion, perhaps you
| could flesh it out somewhat.
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| Look into "Calm Technology":
|
| https://calmtech.com/papers/designing-calm-technology.html
|
| https://calmtech.com/
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