chapter
8
Keep an Audit Trail
“There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, A STUDY IN SCARLET
War Story. We were debugging a video compression chip that was supposed to generate smooth-motion video, compressed to a small number of bits, to be sent over a phone line for videoconferencing. Smooth motion requires many frames (or pictures) per second; we wanted thirty. While working with a very early prototype, I found that occasionally, for no apparent reason, the frame rate would suddenly drop from thirty frames per second to about two. It wouldn’t get going fast again until I restarted the chip. Now, it was perfectly reasonable that this new chip had ...
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