Max Gladstone's Blog, page 27

The Troubleshooting Saga, Part 2

Bugs work like villains in JRPGs: they appear, cackle madly, you 'defeat' them, and then (at the dramatically appropriate moment, natch), they return, cackling madly, flapping one wing, haloed by the death of the world.

Okay, analogy got away from me there.  Anyway: last week, while zombified by lack of sleep, I typed up an account of my attempting to troubleshoot my game console using, basically, Morse code: pressing the power button and listening to beep patterns.  After an hour and a half of forum crawling, button-pushing, and prayer, I finally saved the machine, though of course I didn't know what I did right to fix it.  I knew what had gone wrong, though: the machine didn't like it when I turned the power off and on again abruptly.  Easily done.  I moved the Playstation off the surge protector that I turn off and on a lot, and the problem did not recur.

Until last night, of course, when Steph and I were watching Samurai Champloo.  2 minutes from the end of an episode, of course, our power blew–one of those half-second outages that does nothing but ruin electronics.

Start up the Playstation again, and: no image.  Again.  Reset video interface: no image.  Attempt to boot to safe mode: no image.

About an hour later, I figured out what had actually happened, and how to fix it, which, again, boggles my mind with the confusion of this mixed-up world.

There's a computer in our television.  Of course there is.  Why would I not expect there to be a computer in our television?  There's a computer in our coffee maker, for the love of Pete.  (Who's Pete?  Don't distract me.)  Anyway, when game console and television start up, they talk to one another:

Playstation: I have a 1080i signal here.

Televison: Great bro i can handle that send that up.

Playstation: *sends signal*

Thing is, the computer in my television can crash just like any other computer.  And when it does, it refuses to actually listen to anything anyone else says.

Playstation: 1080i signal, coming at you.

Television: Awesome, 480p.  Way to go!

Playstation: I said 1080i.

Television: Dudes, we have a RGB antenna signal coming in!  Get ready!

Playstation: *sighs*

Turns out that the problem wasn't in my Playstation at all.  It was in the TV.  Of course, the only way to reboot the TV is to manually unplug it from the wall, because just pushing the power button on the remote sends it into vampire hibernation mode, where it sips off the grid and gradually increases its Generation until it will rise as a giant television flesh-tree lich thing to conquer New York.  (Or was that a Vampire: the Masquerade mod?)  Anyway, once TV and Playstation were unplugged for a while, the picture returned, with no harm done!

Except for the harm I'd caused my Playstation's file system by rebooting the dang thing so many times.  Turns out the villain was the narrator all along!

On the one hand, I've spent more time troubleshooting my TV and video game console this month than I have actually spent watching movies or playing games.  On the other hand, I feel like I've learned something through this process.  On the gripping hand, I'm starting to think that John Prine's had it right all along.

Troubleshooting Blind

I read Bret Victor's rant about touchscreens and interaction in late November, but kept running through my mind this morning as (bleary and zombified from lack of sleep) I replayed the events of last night.

The evening started out pleasantly, a nice opportunity to unwind after a busy month.  Time to sit back and watch some more Leverage, with a nice single malt (I'm working through a bottle of the Caol Ila 12 at the moment).  So I turn on the television, and turn on the PlayStation, which is our set-top-box-cum-DVD-and-Blu-Ray player (And Also It Plays Skyrim!).  Usually pressing the on button rewards me with a little rising swell of violins, cellos, and violas, like an orchestra tuning, as the screen fades in to present a space-age looking green wave interface.

I pressed the button.  No orchestra music ensued.  Nor any space-age green wave interface.  The machine seemed to be working, but no picture or sound appeared on my television.

Seemed is the key word here.  For those of you who haven't made the acquaintance of a PlayStation 3, it's a black lozenge which looks like it might uplift a race of proto-humans into sentience / beating the crap out of one another while Also Sprach Zarathustra blasts brass in the background.  No, I'm being unfair: the machine does have two buttons, one to eject the disk, and the other to turn the entire system on.  There's a blue light beside the 'eject' button and a green light beside the 'on' button.

These are the only two means the device has to accept input or offer feedback: two buttons, and two little LED lights.  When God's in his heaven and all is right with the world (and NERV), the system accepts input through wireless controllers, and offers feedback through my embarrassingly large television–plenty of bandwidth.  When all is not right with the world, though, you can't trust the system and the controller to communicate with one another, and you can't trust the system to talk with the TV either.  The aperture for information from the PlayStation shrinks from 40″ of television to those two pinprick elementary-school science project LEDs, and the control surface shrinks to those two buttons which may or may not work.

How does one troubleshoot a tiny Monolith?  Apparently Monoliths respond to trigger point massage: press a spot, and hold, and wait for tension to ease.  Beeps, changes in the light from the LED, all these things can be indications that what you're doing works–or doesn't.  I spent an hour sitting on the floor in my living room sipping Scotch and pressing the power button, over and over again, in different combinations, listening for different beeps and wondering if I'd miscounted the number of seconds between them.  In the end, I connected the PlayStation to a different power source, pressed both buttons at once, waited as the machine coughed up a hairball, and eventually was rewarded with a picture.  I don't know if the two-button trick had anything to do with my success; David Hume would observe no causal connection, but then, that's Hume for you.  If post hoc ergo propter hoc holds, then anything I did in that hour might have contributed, including staring at the machine with one eyebrow lofted and a dour expression on my face.

This isn't unique to the PlayStation–I'd be in a similar spot if my laptop screen suddenly died.  The funny part for me is not that our world is full of technology that is hard to comprehend or troubleshoot, but rather that (once things start breaking) the path for interaction between my brain and the colossally fast computer inside that mini-Monolith is so limited that when things go wrong I'm reduced to pressing buttons that might not even work, and it's reduced to blinking occasionally at me with tiny heterochrome eyes.  And when we manage to agree on something (a task, say, like 'boot up to the home screen'), neither of us is quite certain what we've done that's worked.  That's where we are, when interfaces fail.

Two people could end up in that situation.  Or two nations.  Or a goddess and her faithful.  I'm remembering the Asimov book, The Gods Themselves, in which two universes (ours and another) are endangered by a theoretically infinite source of energy that bridges their worlds.  For much of the book, neither side thinks the other is sentient, and so they treat one another as technical problems.  Any life that evolves out of technology might not be recognizable to us, not because it will be inherently alien, but because it won't have been designed to interface with us meat-bags.

Weird world we live in.

Locus Reading List

Locus's 2011 Reading List, assembled based on the recommendation of Locus contributors, editors, and reviewers, has me glancing at my To Be Read pile and wondering if I can't stack a few more on the top before the whole edifice collapses.  I'll have to stick with buying ebooks for a while, though, since our little apartment is fast becoming crammed with books and textbooks.  Law schools ought to include the estimated cost of new shelving in tuition.

As of a few days ago, the copy-edited manuscript of Three Parts Dead is back at Tor.  Now I get to breathe easy for a little while, which, for me, means pressing on with research & writing for my next book.  Cryptography, cybercrime, economic collapse, warfare, and tradecraft–obviously, I'm writing a tender coming-of-age story about some kids trying to find themselves after college.  After a fashion.

No, seriously.