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A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it's only one clank. Hm." Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn't really give a "sense" of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately "hear" that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What's great is that the sound information doesn't take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don't need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

egd 6y ago
At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  -At a former employer, I had coded some embedded devices to spit out their bus address and current error code in morse code using the buzzer in the keypad. Saved me lots of time during initial debugging of new installations, then I'd just disable the buzzer before heading for home. (At least) on one occasion I forgot; years later a puzzled chief engineer calls me and says that his first officer had told him that E209 had a pending IGBT failure while they were discussing issues with the equipment we'd delivered over the din of the buzzers. Would that hypothesis have any possible merit?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor. It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do is digitize the speech, then turn the pin on and off as the wave crosses 0.) Ditto for every device that comes with a chart saying which LED blink pattern means what status. Like the "fast blink" and "slow blink". The LED is blinking, is that "fast" or "slow"?
  - avip 6y ago
    Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980. The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.
      - Piskvorrr 6y ago
        Interesting. OTOH, while old builds here (electromechanical, no microcontrollers, <1990) lack even the basic ping, I haven't been in an elevator built in the new millenium which wasn't excessively chatty. (Central Europe mostly, but the same experience everywhere I went: "ground floor, main entrance, access to train station; mind the door; door is opening")
      - neltnerb 6y ago
        I haven't seen taking ones a ton, outside of hotels and fairly new conference centers and the like.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        I know of at least a few in London office buildings that speak. Especially buildings with large banks of elevators that tends to have "fancier" control systems that manage all of the elevators.
      - andrewshadura 6y ago
        Interesting you say that, literally every lift in a public space that does any sound at all around here announces each floor with proper spoken speech, not just a ping.
      - andrewshadura 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk
- jjeaff 6y ago
  It might depend on the person, but sound can be a powerful way to perceive the world. When I was living in another country and learning the language, I found that the difference between a lot of bad or mediocre language learners and those that were really good, was that those that were good eventually stopped thinking in terms of grammar rules and dictionary words and started remembering phrases by how they sounded. If you say something that is grammatically incorrect in your own language, most native speakers will tell you it just "sounds" wrong. They can't even explain the rules of why it is wrong, but they know it sounds wrong.
WalterBright 6y ago
I used to debug embedded systems by hooking an I/O pin to the speaker, then would toggle the pin level at various points in the program. You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.
- hermitdev 6y ago
  This reminds me of when I was helping a friend debug his home-built computer. Couldn't get a POST message out of it indicating why it wouldn't boot. After a while of searching, discovered it was because there wasn't a speaker connected to the non-existent pins for the speaker (there were no pins, just the soldering points for them). Once discovering that, used a multimeter to read the POST error - no GPU detected. Fun times...
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > multimeter Once I was introduced to an oscilloscope, I much preferred that. I bought a nice one off of ebay for about $60, and another peach of a scope from the pawn shop for $40.
lozf 6y ago
That concept reminds me of "Peep - the network auralizer." - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... - http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html
kedean 6y ago
That's super interesting. I would imagine another benefit of that system is pattern detection. It would be much easier to notice a "beat" happening than with log messages, where you need to put things on a timeseries representation to see those patterns show up.
pnathan 6y ago
That is technically termed sonification, FYI.
biscuittin 6y ago
I'm reminded of this set up at a fusion reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y They put microphones in the reactor and monitors for them in the control room, so they can hear if something sounds wrong.

egd 6y ago

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

lb1lf 6y ago
-At a former employer, I had coded some embedded devices to spit out their bus address and current error code in morse code using the buzzer in the keypad. Saved me lots of time during initial debugging of new installations, then I'd just disable the buzzer before heading for home. (At least) on one occasion I forgot; years later a puzzled chief engineer calls me and says that his first officer had told him that E209 had a pending IGBT failure while they were discussing issues with the equipment we'd delivered over the din of the buzzers. Would that hypothesis have any possible merit?
WalterBright 6y ago
I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor. It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do is digitize the speech, then turn the pin on and off as the wave crosses 0.) Ditto for every device that comes with a chart saying which LED blink pattern means what status. Like the "fast blink" and "slow blink". The LED is blinking, is that "fast" or "slow"?
- avip 6y ago
  Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980. The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.
    - Piskvorrr 6y ago
      Interesting. OTOH, while old builds here (electromechanical, no microcontrollers, <1990) lack even the basic ping, I haven't been in an elevator built in the new millenium which wasn't excessively chatty. (Central Europe mostly, but the same experience everywhere I went: "ground floor, main entrance, access to train station; mind the door; door is opening")
    - neltnerb 6y ago
      I haven't seen taking ones a ton, outside of hotels and fairly new conference centers and the like.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      I know of at least a few in London office buildings that speak. Especially buildings with large banks of elevators that tends to have "fancier" control systems that manage all of the elevators.
    - andrewshadura 6y ago
      Interesting you say that, literally every lift in a public space that does any sound at all around here announces each floor with proper spoken speech, not just a ping.
    - andrewshadura 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk
jjeaff 6y ago
It might depend on the person, but sound can be a powerful way to perceive the world. When I was living in another country and learning the language, I found that the difference between a lot of bad or mediocre language learners and those that were really good, was that those that were good eventually stopped thinking in terms of grammar rules and dictionary words and started remembering phrases by how they sounded. If you say something that is grammatically incorrect in your own language, most native speakers will tell you it just "sounds" wrong. They can't even explain the rules of why it is wrong, but they know it sounds wrong.

WalterBright 6y ago

I used to debug embedded systems by hooking an I/O pin to the speaker, then would toggle the pin level at various points in the program. You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.

hermitdev 6y ago
This reminds me of when I was helping a friend debug his home-built computer. Couldn't get a POST message out of it indicating why it wouldn't boot. After a while of searching, discovered it was because there wasn't a speaker connected to the non-existent pins for the speaker (there were no pins, just the soldering points for them). Once discovering that, used a multimeter to read the POST error - no GPU detected. Fun times...
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > multimeter Once I was introduced to an oscilloscope, I much preferred that. I bought a nice one off of ebay for about $60, and another peach of a scope from the pawn shop for $40.

lozf 6y ago

That concept reminds me of "Peep - the network auralizer." - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... - http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html

kedean 6y ago

That's super interesting. I would imagine another benefit of that system is pattern detection. It would be much easier to notice a "beat" happening than with log messages, where you need to put things on a timeseries representation to see those patterns show up.

pnathan 6y ago

That is technically termed sonification, FYI.

biscuittin 6y ago

I'm reminded of this set up at a fusion reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y They put microphones in the reactor and monitors for them in the control room, so they can hear if something sounds wrong.