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Does Your Debugger Sing to You?
ZahrGnosis writes "TRN Mag Online is carrying an article titled Programming tool makes bugs sing. '[The researchers] set up software that mapped pitch and melodic contour information to structural elements in the programming language Pascal. "[We] aimed to see if information about the structure of Pascal programs could be communicated using such musical phrases".' They even found a practical application for software debugging."
I'm curious to know what kind of code sounds the nicest when played back over a system like this.
I wish I had that much time on my hands!
I'll program so badly it'll end up sounding like Aphex Twin
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Bug in the program - P.U.!
Somebody wrote it - THATS YOU!
Yes he does. If this isn't -1 troll with in 10 seconds, then moderators are dumb.
Wonder what'll make it sing "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Or even "We All Live In Recursive Subroutines"
I keep hearing a funeral march from my C code...
needs to get laid.
Yes, my debugger _does_ sing as it smites bugs!
namely:
"Another one bytes the dust. Another one bytes the dust. And another and and another bug bytes the dust."
For those of you who need the background music, think Queen, or uh, I guess Weird Al Yankovic
So what happens when the compile fails? Does it start to sound like Windows?
.. do you get Slashcode?
It'll sound like BONO!! WOOHOO!!
But for some reason it all just sounded like Sublime.... No not really, but I do wonder what this would sound like. I guess it's possible to find a pattern in just about anything.. And this is definitive proof.
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
So that's why I get that song every time I boot into windows.
--
Does anyone remember
>They even found a practical application for software debugging
It's good to know that software debugging has a practical application.
Ninety-nine off-by-one bugs in the code,
Ninety-nine off-by-one bugs,
Take one down,
Fix it up,
One hundred off-by-one bugs in the code!
-Joe
Lose = not win
I wonder if they could create an interface that would allow you to fix bugs by dancing?
Gnu Debugger, the real Dance Dance Revolution?
Haha, only parlty serious. Just as we need new ways to "view" information, it could also be helpful to be able to respond in a way that goes beyond the keyboard and mouse.
byroniverse
Sure, this falls in the "neato" category, but how on earth does this progress science or technology?
With the amount of time and funding these people get, SURELY they can produce something that would be a CONTRIBUTION to the science/tech field!
A generalize form of this application was applied to the source for Windows XP (tm) with no startling results. However, when the resulting tune was played backwards, the listener could plainly hear "bill is god" and "linus is satan" over and over.
Have the program hooked up to a heartbeat monitor
beep beep beep beep beeeeeeeeeee.....
Of course, knowing my lug, my code would come out sounding like a fucking Britney Spears song. Arghhh...
Sailing over the event horizon
such as:
C/C++ == classical sounding music
perl == heavy metal
php == rap
vb == boy band
and so on..
if i ran this kind of debugger, it would go thru the effort to say "stop programming!!"
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I can only imagine what for(;;); sounds like...
AAARGGHH... MAKE IT STOP!!!!
I can re-factor my code just by re-mixing the tunes????
The musical sound of Windows blue-screening.
You could even have a nice menu:
Select your musical preference:
1) Death-metal guitars
2) Funeral dirge
3) Cat-in-heat-at-12:00-am
Ohhh, the possibilities....
It would be better than the anguished "NOOOOOO!" frequently heard around the office.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The UPS Debugger Song: "Just One More Hack (and then I'll put it on the 'net)
(Ah, thank you Google, for the historical reference to first puclication!) UPS - The Song!"
So that's why I get that song every time I load up KDE.
If there was a "-1 Not Funny", that'd be my most used mod.
I installed it on Visual Studio and now my computer keeps singing Unforgiven by Metallica, what do I do?
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
My debuger sings and my IDE tells me to kill people.
But wait..... I've said to much.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
See subject :)
Cheers
haich tee tee pee co long slash slash double you double you double you dee oh tee gee oh eh tee ess de oh tee sea ex slash haich e el el oh de oh tee jay pee gee
Back when I first started experimenting with full-screen graphics programming, I went through a phase where I could switch screen modes, but not get anything to show up. This meant that I had no way to print diagnostic messages to the screen to figure out when something went wrong. The solution was to play sounds to track the progress of the program and report error conditions.
"Oh, the program went Boink-Ding and Bloop, but not Clunk... that must mean that palette creation failed!"
"Microsoft - Windows 98 (feat Billy G) (Blue Screen Remix).mp3"
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
it'll take for RIAA to step in here. That code you wrote sounds like Hotel California! *DoS*
If I combine this with the morse code panic patch, I could have my own techno dance studio! Flashing lights and all!
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
What a novelty. First of all, any auditory response is fleeting. If I print a debug message, it persists on the screen until I tell it to stop. Secondly, I can pack far more useful information into a single debug printline than you'll ever get from a sound clip. Third, the language of onscreen debugging is limited only by your reading skills, not by what sound clips you can recognize and interpret.
It's a novelty, and probably best suited for something OTHER than debugging code.
If someone actually does this there will be hoardes of pissed nerds out to eliminate them from the face of this planet....
--Chag
the Windows API sounds like the imperial march!
we can rebuild this sig. we have the technology
*SNIFF* "Hmm...smells like someone forgot a semicolon."
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
...obligitory "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" reference here.
First Altavista creates babelfish.. Now the code into music that is pivotal to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency is a reality. Douglas Adams, may he rest in peace, would be proud.
A singing debugger can't be worse than Britney spears.
actually, this sounds like an excellent idea, and this should without doubt be a basic feature of gdb for example. This also reminds me of my Spectravideo SVI-318 and lousy green, year was 1984, the combination worked at so low frequency that was able to hear and understand what I typed through radio. And it really was very helpful.
I need a fix, cause I'm goin' down
Town to the bits that I left up-town
I need a fix, cause I'm goin' down
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Now all we need is that Reason software, which was written right after that whacko wrote the program to play his company's quarterly results in D minor...
(or was it confiscated by the Pentagon already?)
This might be quite a handy tool,
You could debug programms at closer to full speed and listen to the changes as your code jumps in and out of loops and functions.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The work may eventually give sound a bigger role in computing.
Sound already has an important role in computing: drowning out office noise. I'd hate to stop the flow of music as I program and let in office noise, and then still try to pick out sounds from the debugger. Especially when the people in nearby cubes insist on playing god-awful pop.
--It burns! --It's loaded with wasabi.
Larry Wall (I think... this is in the intro to the llama book...) once said something to the effect that Perl, to the trained eye, looked like line noise with a purpose and a direction in life.... so now it can sound like it too?
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
With all the bugs in M$ products, there cubes must sound like a rock concert!
Later,
Phil
... if there is a bug in your music routine in your game, I guess this will be useless debugging tool.
Seriously...that's one of the funniest posts I've read all day.
I know, cheap shot. Which one of you slashbots wants to reply and tell me that Win98 wasn't written in Pascal?
I don't have a reference to it, but I thought that Admiral Grace Hopper and her crowd had done something just like this generations ago simply by hooking up the accumulator of a Univac to a D/A converter, which in those days resulted in audible frequencies! A quick search on Google found something similar was done on a CDC 3300 (search for CDC 3300 in this page).
Cheers,Richard
And they used continuous tones, or drones similar to those used by bagpipes, to indicate continuous states like loops where many nested operations may take place. "The use of a continuous tone can indicate that the program is inside the loop," said Vickers.
Interesting. Back when I first got into computing I used a BBC Micro. This was a primitive machine by today's standards, with no fan (the 2MHz 6502 CPU didn't get hot), no disk drive of any sort, basically nothing to make any noise except the CPU. In a quiet room you could hear the processor humming. It would change pitch as a program ran - you could tell when you hit an infinite loop because the pitch would change to a continuous whine. It was actually useful - and used - for debugging. Fun days,
Sailing over the event horizon
Programming by sound was something I always used to do on my Tandy 1000 8086 machine, running at a whopping "turbo" speed of 7.16 MHz.
I'd crank up my AM radio next to the machine, run my program, and I could hear each iteration of the loop, I/O requests, screen prints, BIOS calls, DOS calls -- they all had different rhythms and pitches.
In the news, the VC++ debugger has come under fire from the RIAA for producing melodic tunes that sound very similar to several copyrighted materials.
"Whoever wrote the code that produced these tunes, we want to find them and bring them to justice." said Hillary Rosen, of the RIAA. "Neither Microsoft, nor the developer in question, has paid royalties to the artists whose songs they have violated. Renegade debuggers must be stopped, for they pose the greatest threat to the artists' intellectual property we've ever seen!"
<sigh> Fact is often stranger than fiction
Sound based debugging + gesture based computing = a future where we work with computers like that cooky french guy from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Would a multi-threaded program sing 'The ants go marching two by two Hurrah Hurrah'?
On a serious note, this is an intresting way to help with a programs flow. Kinda reminds me of when sound cards got bad interference from the CPU and you could hear the diffrent pitched hums of tight loops.
-magister-
It's going to take a lot to find something dumber and a bigger waste of time than this today.
Britney, the BS boys, and nSync have already been doing this for years. How else can they come up with that crap they call music. The language they use is C# though, not Pascal.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
"Buffer Overflow in C#"
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Is the exact opposite. An app that turns music INTO code. Hard rock could be a shoot-em up. Elevator music would be like spreadsheets and accounting software, etc. Just think of all the time we could save.
Why not fork?
With This code
code to music rendering on obfuscated code. Mmmmm...........
hmmmm?
...for synchonicity? Next thing you know, we'll both have a sofa stuck in our stairwell simultaneously.
I've been looking through my gnu emacs sources, there's some interesting things in here already that people don't know about, like the strokes package where supposedly you just wiggle your mouse around and that will execute your command.
:)
Now I think gnu emacs supports sound, so who knows elisp and is curious enough to set this kind of thing up?
I've noticed several folks who seem to think this is silly, dumb, etc. I don't think it is. Think back to the days (if you're old enough) of monochrome displays. Even the addition of a few colors made it easier to process information by taking advantage of human sensitivity to color in our environment. To say that music, or at least sound, could be incorporated makes sense to me.
.0001 share of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B worth...
Particularly in applications where you're trying to track status over time, having some background that varies with changes can be very helpful (I seem to recall the game Populous using this to good effect to help you get a quick idea of how you were doing overall). In the context of a debugger, having clashing noises that become more melodious as the program gets closer to completion and perhaps also asit comes closer to defined standards seems to bea good motivator.
Just my
Could you run a melody through and have programming structures returned? Metaphors are sunny days.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Man, just 3 more days and we could have had Coda Statement Considered Harmful.
Java == glossy emo pop
Python == British novelty songs
LISP == modernist symphony
BASIC == music from a casio keyboard bought for $5 at a garage sale
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Try it out. If you sing it like Freddie did you can record your own voice and play it backwards and get the same result.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Well, if you're going to go posting lyrics...
....
This came out years ago, I found a printout of it a couple of days back while going through some papers. Picture Weird Al Yankovich singing this to Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (this isn't a Weird Al though, he did "Eat It"):
Boot It
You're processing some words when your keyboard goes dead,
Ten pages in the buffer, should have gone to bed,
The system just crashed, but don't lose your head,
Just BOOT IT, just BOOT IT.
Better think fast, better do what you can,
Read the manual or call your system man,
Don't want to fall behind in the race with Japan,
So BOOT IT,
Get the sys admin to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Even though you'd rather shoot it.
Don't be upset, it's only some glitch.
All that you do is flip a little switch.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Get right down and restitute it.
Don't get excited, all is not lost.
CP/M, UNIX or MS-DOS
Just BOOT IT, boot it, boot it, boot it...
You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two,
The system says your jobs at the head of the queue,
Right then the thing dies but you know what to do,
BOOT IT.
You always get so worried when the system runs slow,
And when it finally crashes, man you feel so low,
But computers make mistakes (they're only human you know)
So BOOT IT,
Call the local guru to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Go ahead re-institute it.
If you're not lucky, get the book off the shelf,
But if you are, it'll do itself.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Then go find the guy who screwed it! Operating systems are built to bounce back,
Whether it's a Cray or a Radio Shack.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Sorry I don't know who deserves the attributes for that.
-- Alastair
99 Ways To Die
...and of course...
Addicted To Chaos
Breakpoint
Disconnect
Family Tree
High Speed Dirt
Problems
Wake Up Dead
Are you all that young?
;-)
...
You could do thais in the early 80's on a c64... Ever listened to a tape drive lading a game, paused it inserted code (free lives, etc) and resumed loading...
Man I thought Slashdot was for CURRENT news
But seriously, why? Why do something like that?
(* Bug in the program - P.U.! *)
That's it! Associate *smells* with bugs.
Stack_overflow_error ==> Dirty_Socks_Smell
That will encourage programmers be more careful. Then again, single programmers are probably use to all those smells anyhow.
Nevermind.
Table-ized A.I.
I sometimes sing to my debugger:
---
Hello bluescreen my old friend,
You are my program's bitter end.
All my random poke and peeking,
Didn't stop the memory leaking.
And the Interrupt, I set so long a go,
did never throw...
My only option... is viloence.
Slam the mouse in to the desk.
Pound the keys and beat my chest.
Do what I say not what I mean,
Open the window, thow out this machine.
And as it falls, and crashes on the street
Debugging complete
my only option... was violence.
Krispy Cream is people
...windows makes a sound everytime you start it up, click on something, shut it down etc..?
...right next to your debugger spins a 3-d model of a sofa in a stairwell...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
that the VS.NET debugger will play everything in C#?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
"The worms crawl in,
The worms crawl out.
The bugs play pinochle
On my shout."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
R2D2's voice may be due such a bug-to-tone translator. That is probably how my code would sound under the Bug-A-Phone.
Better fix that bot.
Table-ized A.I.
When the bit was toggled, a click was generated.
Experienced programmers could tell what kind of computation was taking place by listening - differential equations, row reductions etc
Would a program that is functionally identical have similar themes executed in different languages ? Could the ears detect dissonances as bugs ? The idea that being able to listen to a program allows some of the most powerful processing algorithms in our brains to work on a problem WHILE you are working on another section is fascinating . Most people who aren't tone deaf can mentally process a tune, and can tell instantly when its wrong.
Steve
"Memory, you have used up all your Memory"
Table-ized A.I.
With Palladium, I suspect that there will be more variety. Normally, it will still be "Money" at about 120db, but if you click on an mp3, you'll hear the "Dragnet" theme and sounds of wailing police sirens followed by the Monty Python ditty "There's Nothing Quite as Wonderful as Money".
Sigs are bad for your health.
For those of you who would like to read more about this, a copy of the research paper is here, and the project home page is here. Enjoy!
the first Dirk Gentley book...
the big project was a piece of software that would take any set of numbers and convert them into a song...
the Japanese were supposedly using it to create Anthems from their financial books.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
I would love some help in debugging C/C++ code.
But debugging pascal, they might as well have a dead man singing.
This is just sig!
Look... I don't want my bugs to sing... I just want them GONE!
"Born Free".
Sigs are bad for your health.
Researchers from the University of Northumbria in England are tapping the auditory sense by allowing programmers to listen, rather than simply look, for software bugs....
Techie unemployement pressue seems to be doing to computer scientists what cyclitron shut-downs did to those "Higgs Boson discoverers".
Table-ized A.I.
As a researcher in protein folding I can tell you from experience that neural nets have a lot in common with the way humans think (sometimes) and one property they both seem to share is the more related the input data is with other things, the faster the learning rate. Many know this as associativity. These researchers are trying to associate different pitches of bugs with different structual elements, and I think that is great, because now debugging will be faster because we can relate things to pitch as WELL as text, and think in terms of bugs much faster. Now we just need a visual language where the shapes of the objects are dependant upon those objects' methods and members...
--"You are your own God"--
Yes, my debugger sings, but Simon belittled its abilities as 'third-rate COBOL', so it went into a tizzy and crashed my system.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
ninety-nine little bugs in the code,
ninety-nine little bu-u-u-gs,
fix a bug,
compile again,
one hundred and one little bugs in the code!
The next verse went from 101 to 105, then from 105 to 113, then from 113 to 129, and so forth, adding a new power of two on each loop.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Hmmm...
Well the first computer I ever had free reign of was one of those Commodore Pet computers with the little tiny calculator keyboard. Little memory, little keyboard, no disk, and I still managed to learn a little assembler to pep up my BASIC programs.
When I came out to the Silicon Valley to go to college in 1978, I left the PET behind, but still checked out the computer shops when I had free time (anybody remember The Byte Shop in Palo Alto? Computerland in Los Altos?). One of the things that I found pretty entertaining at a Commodore shop was a guy that was debugging by putting a little AM radio next to the computer. If you tuned to the right frequency (and I'm embarassed that I don't remember it), you'd hear the sound of your code executing as static. If you had the right loop coded, you would hear a burst of static when it executed, and this guy would drop in the little flag routine as a debugging aid. By putting in a marker like that in the different long-running repetious sections,you could actually tell where your code was running, or if you were stuck in an infinite loop.
Kind of cool back then, although I have to admit that I don't remember writing anything that ever took 2 minutes to execute. Well, intentionally anyway...
David Fung
Strangely enough, I developed a similar application and ran some Open Source code through it.
The resulting melody was "Please, release me... let me go...."
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
My compiler normally sings to me. It goes something like this
There may be trouble ahead
duh,dda,da,da,duh
but while there's magic, and music, love and romance
let's face the music and-
FATAL ERROR 102: There is no error
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Is anybody else reminded of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (first novel)?
Any spoon would be too big.
I'm a programmer who uses Hypercard extensively in the development of my website www.public.iastate.edu/~ntandon (cheap plug) and I use a debugger that emits high pitched noises when a bug is found. It continues until I fix the bug. This is what I call eXtreme Programming.
They could get network traffic to produce musical tones? Imagine the sounds made of a server getting Slashdotted....
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
This puts a new meaning to using DevStudio to put together a program composed in C#.
Now if only someone would find a practical application for Pascal...
And the brethren went away edified.
I wonder how well a musical debugger would illustrate the functionality of Don Knuth's Dancing Links.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
While this is pretty innovative, there are some new problems that are introduced. Written code is ... how can I explain this? The metaphor is that of a physical sheet of paper. It occupies space on the page, you can scroll up or down, etc. While it is really just a long stream of bytes, the way it is presented is visually, and 2-dimensionally.
.wav.
With music, it is more a temporal presentation. It's a little difficult to jump ahead or back by a certain amount and be sure of where you are in the code. Well, you would have to listen to it a few times, at the very least (OK, so it is no different from code you have never seen before.)
It is a different presentation method, and so has different benefits. Personally, I think the musical phrases they use for the different language structures are far too long and complicated. I am imagining it taking 2 minutes to go through a simple program... Also, the audio should have been a compressed format... mp3 or ogg or *something* other than
Anyway... A nifty idea overall, I guess. I'm probably jealous that I didn't come up with it first. It's basically text to speech, only not speech...
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
This really reminds me of the video game Rez by Sega. In Rez, every sound effect folds into the background music (silence at first, but it builds as a stage progresses). Plus, in the game you play a hacker's avatar infiltrating computer networks and destroying viruses.
I know most of the replies here have been jokes, and I know I'm gunna sound like the regular "that isn't so special" nitpicking that often goes on here, BUT!
"Sound also offers a new paradigm for exploring data, he said. "Its ability to transmit multiple streams in parallel -- consider the different instrumental parts of the symphony -- and its ability to transmit in time-based rather than spatial domains offer us new ways of interacting with data," he said."
The eye is the ultimate parallel processor. You distinguish many things all at once, in many different places. While sound offers a similar feature, after adding many "instruments" all you ahve is mush. And as to transmitting in time-based rather than spatial domains... hasn't this guy ever seen a movie? That is both spatial and time based! That offers an additional dimension that sound just can't match. What i want to SEE is code turned into movies, with backrounds according to loops like in this, with objects according to variables, all moving and interacting with each other and with different colors. I bet that would be far more effecient for debugging purposes.
There were also programs designed just to place music on the radio with their EMI.
All the complaints against simply copying proprietary software ideas are because we don't make things like this.
This, to me, seems extremely innovative. If useful structural and/or syntactic information could be conveyed as music(I don't know how well it works), this could become useful. Even if it never becomes useful, doesn't this make an extremely interesting programming project? Doesn't the idea of coming up with some kind of code-structure parser seem like an extremely interesting project? If open source coders code because we like to code, why hasn't somebody made something like this yet?
To be fair, there's a few comparable projects that are equally innovative; the one that comes to mind is the ASCII renderer for Quake.
Now, who wants to make the graphical version?(the one that inputs several code files and outputs a level for Quake III) Apply the idea of music parsing to other fields? Imagine editing a saved game by changing a C to an E#. Imagine a load monitor that plays a symphony when the server is empty and nothing more than a scale on a piano when full? Even if you don't come up with such an original idea yourself, you can still take inspiration from it and apply it to your own endeavors.
This is not as strange as it sounds. (pun intended) I've seen precursors to this, and have actually experienced something similar about 25 years ago.
I see this research as an interesting step that continues along that path.
As for me, I'm much more a visual person than auditory. I'd find it much more valuable if I could "see" my program execute. Once in a while, I've messed things up with my postscript printer and the listing came out at what appeared to be 1 point sized text; at 300 DPI, that worked out to being about 5 dots high. At times it was almost possible to make out the words, but realiistically, it was too small to be legible. But it WAS sufficient to show the structure of the program, especially since I consistently use indentation. If different colors were used to denote different structural items (conditional, loop, assignment, key words, etc.) AND there was an indicator that would highlight each statement as it was executed, then I'd be able to see the actual flow of the program. I could tell what functions and subroutines were executed most often. Hmmm, this seems like such an obvious idea... does anyone know if such a tool already exists?
On another note, It would be interesting to combine visual profiling of a program with a touch screen -- I could use different gestures to debug my program! Double-tap to zoom in/out on text; single tap to set a breakpoint on entrance/exit of a subroutine, etc.
You hear "what a hypocritical dumbass leeching thief". hrm wait, I don't think that is actually a song.
Why does this make me think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Pizza?
Twinkle
And to whoever mentioned dancing, I've seen Richard Stallman dance too. Thanks for the image. Really.
You'd better hope your debugger doesn't start singing this ditty.
I use sound all the time to debug, I just put my code live and if I hear swearing down the hall I know theres a bug.
-G
You'd have thought that people smart enough to do this would be smart enough to encode low-fi monophonic music in MIDI instead of WAV, for pete's sake.
My debugger is mute, but my comuter says "Ding!" every time there is a sign of Microsoft developers NOT doing their job of debugging. . .
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
You might try switching to Metrowork's or Borland's IDEs, as Visual Studio has been shown to cause homicidal rages in some cases.
Oh wait, it's win32 programming that does that. Nevermind...
I hooked up the innards of the DEC Ultrix C++ debugger (then called "Ladebug" internally)to a homebrew FM synthesis toolkit to do exactly this. The debugger allowed tracepoints to be hooked to particular instruments and note values. It was cool.
I am actually doing some research on this fall. This is the LISTEN project that we are working on at Purdue University. Check out some of the music that was created. I'll be working on a port to JAVA. Pretty cool stuff. I think you can listen to a BubbleSort and a Selection sort compiled into music. http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/apm/listen.html I think this could be very useful determining the flow of your code. Multi-threading would be even more fun to find solutions. Whatcha' think?
Didn't Douglas Adams come up with something like this in one of his weird detective novels?
I believe it was an musical or singing accounting package.
Nice try folks, but Douglas Adams had you beat back in the late 80's.
I guess if the debugger gave relevant tones to the extent/severity of the bug(s), running it over the windows sources may give you the 1812 overture....
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
If you have access to an old Apple ][+ try this from the Applesoft prompt:
CALL -151
300: AD 30 C0 E6 B8 D0 02 E6 B9 4C B7 00
B1: 4C 00 03
3D0G
Then run any old BASIC program that doesn't trash that section of RAM. Or, just type in a few things at the command-line like:
FOR I = 1 TO 5000 : NEXT
It's an old trick to hook into the CHRGET routine in Applesoft BASIC so every time a token is fetched it tweaks the speaker. It really did help to debug things.
Okay, it is hard enough for some managers to understand what we code mokeys do in the first place. Imagine trying to explain to them that something is just out of tune with the code and you need to work on it.
Of course I would probably find myself trying to get the melody right and then having to explain that their POS system now tracks internet uage patterns because it sounded better.
But seriously, I think it would be cool to hear your code. I don't think this would really aid in debugging, but it might give some insight into one's design patterns.
What could it sound like?
Try "Patterns" by Speedy J, on the Public Energy album... absolutely insane!!!
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!