Embedded Curmudgeon Column MTE June 2013 The web is not tomorrow’s chip-wrapper By Chris Hills

Chris Hills, our Embedded Curmudgeon muses on writing without thinking, asking without looking, on how what should be permanent is all too often transitory and how what should be transitory has become permanent.
Due to the publishing schedules, and to the number of events and conferences, I have to write each Embedded Curmudgeon before the last one has been published: producing a printed page is always slower than the web page. Also, due to the Editor’s insistence, there are two stages of proof reading to correct my legendary spilling. So the ideas and text are, unlike much of the web and other instant media, not written in haste and regretted at leisure. Couple fast writing with the lack of face-to-face contact to read face and body language, not to mention the tone of voice (when are we going to get a convention for marking a comment as “sarcasm”?) and you begin to see why you can get so much more out of conferences and trade shows than web forums. There is a lot more to transmitting information than just the text.

It is why you should pause before writing, and read twice before posting. Despite more communication being through text we seem to have lost the art of writing. In fct wid txt spk i c it is gting wrs dy by dy. Lol c u l8r m8s.

Many web forums work seem to be full of people writing but not listening, as you can see when the same questions get asked time and time again. The Internet is good for research in that a lot of data and information (and data is not the same as information) is available for anyone who can use a search engine, including forum archives. So why are the same simple questions repeated? However the September that never ended - the watershed in 1993 when AOL members joined the rest of us in Usenet - has only got worse.

On forums you see questions that you would get from week one, year one, students in September being asked by people who are apparently qualified working engineers! I saw one very basic question asked by someone who had the title of “Senior R&D Engineer”. Many questions are put and answers given without any context. How can you say “pic14” and “CortexM6” when someone asks, “What is the best MCU?” without any context? I keep seeing the answer of “Ubuntu” (or similar) when people ask “What is the best RTOS?” Linux is not an RTOS. If you don’t know the target or application how can you specify an OS? Even with a miracle, you are never going to get Linux on 8- and 16-bit systems. And then there are people simply pushing their favourite solution without looking to see how appropriate it is.

Equally misleading is the “useful technical advice” seen in technical forums, provided by marketing people who don’t declare their company interest as they cut and paste from the company marketing literature, and post and run to avoid any technical discussion.

Wikipedia, where you have no idea how knowledgeable or misguided the authors are, is notorious for this sort of helpful editing from marketing teams. I know of one page on Wikipedia where the people involved in creating the actual subject being discussed were stunned at the level of inaccuracies and misunderstanding in the page.

Then there is the vast increase in sales and marketing emails, where less should be more. Some companies send out news/product emails weekly - although it can seem to be daily! So pause before you send out that company email blast or hit the forums. (Declaration of interest - my company produces a newsletter, but rarely more than 9 times a year and tries to cover technical, non-product related material.)
On the Internet, pause before you reply. Then pause before you hit send. This is applies to both questions and answers. It can take longer to write a question than use a search engine and if the answer from the search engine does not make sense the odds are that neither did the question!

The importance of pausing was rammed home to me in the space between writing the initial draft and the final draft of this column. We are thinking of putting some corporate video on Vimeo, a video hosting system like YouTube. Like much social media it will link to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. I did not fully read and double-check all the implications and tick-boxes. So now my over 500 LinkedIn contacts know I have joined the Vimeo Erotic Performance Art group! (What? Well as a photographer I shoot the occasional Blue Lily Burlesque charity events.)

So you really need to see what connects to what and how you set the permissions. How many councillors have had to resign due to a “private” message on their social network page that “only goes to a couple of trusted friends”?

I note that Computing magazine had an article by MacAfee explaining that you need [their] anti-virus software, as 52% of system threats are external. What is more of a worry is the fact that the single largest internal group of threats, (25%) was “internal accidental” with 5% being “unknown”. The remaining 20% are from malicious staff members. It is unknown and accidental threats that cause documentation, source code and files in general to get lost, erased or shredded. Then there is data that is not backed up, that gets flooded, dropped/smashed, or even, when stored on USB sticks, that become clean and shiny after a cool wash and a fast spin.

Customers regularly call me when old project documentation is missing, or only survives for another version. Sometimes there are 8” or 5.25” floppies that are no longer readable, or the label is unreadable, or they are corrupted, or there is not computer with the appropriate disk drive, or the OS doesn’t support the drive – all things that could have been avoided by backing up from one generation of storage to the next. With the decrease in the costs of all things technical and the increase in capacity, backing up should not be a problem. You can even scan that dog-eared and hand modified circuit diagram. (I had one of those sent to me recently and we were able to manually recreate the circuit in a modern CAD package.) Documentation seems to evaporate from old projects but, as noted above, this is mainly through internal problems and not external viruses.

Google owns the Deja News Archives and now has EVERYTHING posted to Usenet since 1972. (Though, as a friend pointed out, if they also have the binary groups Google probably has the world’s largest collection of (illegal) porn!) Couple this with the very leaky Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn forums, and you have to assume that, in contrast to your project documentation, anything you write on line will be remembered forever. Apart from the UK courts prosecuting online posters on the same grounds as anyone publishing in a magazine, employers and competitors are also searching the net. So think before you post. What will your current employer think of your post?

More to the point when, in 1, 2, 5 or 10 years’ time you are looking for a new job as you couldn’t  find the documentation for last year’s project, what will a prospective employer think?

 

 

 

Author Details and contact

 

Eur Ing Chris Hills BSc CEng MIET MBCS MIEEE  FRGS   FRSA is a Technical Specialist and can be reached at This Contact

 

Copyright Chris A Hills  2003 -2013
The right of Chris A Hills to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

 

 

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