Debugging

chapter

14

The View from the Help Desk

“It is always awkward doing business with an alias.”

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE

War Story. I was dealing with a customer, Giulio, who was in Italy. Giulio was trying to interface our videoconferencing board to someone else’s ISDN communication board. He explained to me that the interface on the ISDN board was similar to the interface on our board, but it required some cable changes and a few changes to our programmable protocol hardware. The programmable changes affected whether pulses were positive or negative, which clock edge to sample data on, and other hardware communication things that make for bad data when they’re not set right.

We had bad data. Being the expert on ...