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The Ultimate Debugging

February 23, 2004

by Ben Sanchez, Hardware Engineer

The team and I have been busy debugging since arriving at the observatory a bit over a week ago.  Over the course of the week prior to observing we've found lots of bugs.  Most of those have been of the genus board, with species ranging from Blue Wave to Digital Down Converter or DDC.  There was even one bug of the genus PC, species Programmable Detection Module, or PDM.  There was one however, whose genus and species I'm not at all qualified to determine.  The latter is probably the most interesting for a general audience. (The others are far too technical.)

By now, the concept of debugging has become so familiar to everyone that even non-techies know that it doesnt involve removing creepy-crawlies from some attic somewhere.  My friends, family and loved ones all understand that I look for misbehaving code, circuitry, or the like in some piece of hardware I've been working on.  Exactly where the term debugging came from is not clear.  I've seen references to it having been used by Edison in regard to his phonograph, so it's probably quite old.

The most popular origin story would be the one about a moth found on September 9, 1945, by Grace Murray Hopper.  The winged insect was trapped between the contact points of relay #70, in Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, and surfaced while Hopper was testing a computer bound for the U.S. Navy.  Murray taped the now-famous moth to the page in her log book for posteritys sake and it now can be seen at the Naval History Museum.

The other day I found myself face to face with an actual bugthe multi-legged, squishes when stepped on kindin the machine I was investigating.  I was out in the Mobile Research Facility (MRF), a radio shielded box that houses part of our observing system, where I was hunting a bug of the silicon persuasion when I found one that was more like the kind Grace Hopper discovered so many years ago.  This bug was not bothering our electronics, but I was afraid our electronics, or more accurately their enclosure, would have eventually done some harm to it.  Live bugs don't seem to flourish in a sealed and air conditioned room as well as computer bugs do.  So, after unceremoniously vanquishing the silicon creepy-crawly I was after, I applied a little paper, and a lot of gentle persuasion, to the debugging of the MRF itself.

I wish it were always that easy!