Friday, July 5, 2013

now what

The car doesn't start. The clicking chatter from under the hood sounds bad.  Damn it's always something.

More of these "somethings" when you have less of "nothings".

Recursive complaining. Complain and then complain about the feeling of complaining. Your own feedback sucking you into a downward spiral.  Pull out before you crash.






Back in a former life, I made a living coding embedded software. Recursion was a useful but tricky approach to creating applications. You had be cautious of infinite loops.

A system stuck in an infinite might never come back and in some cases could destroy itself (I believe a few windows computers died that way). Intervention by an outside observer/user hitting the power reset was needed.

To keep the software from getting too loopy in it's thinking a hardware watchdog would typically be included in the design. The watchdog needed to be feed (sent a valid signal) within a preset time frame or it would shut down the software. This approach allowed the software to ignore the aid of the watchdog by inserting a feeding within it's loopy routines. In other words ignoring the help of others. I'm fine, I told you. Now go away.

Couldn't everyone benefit from a personal watchdog?

BTW, I was reviewing recursion on wikipedia and discovered that Google included a little "Easter egg" surprise on their search page related to recursion. If you search on main search page for recursion it ask you "Did you mean: recursion." It never ends, does it?


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