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an ordering bug
Thursday, May 28 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning I focused on a strange issue with my ESP8266 Remote system that I became aware of due to the strange behavior I was seeing when in fast communication mode (that is, using http sockets). This issue seemed to be different from the race condition issue in that it seemed the microcontroller was misordering the array of integers that tell the server what device_features are on and which are off. Eventually I found what was causing the problem: a function called joinStdMapValsOnDelimiter, which was an alteration of a function that had used SimpleMaps, replacing them with "standard maps" (basically, associative arrays). Something about the change to standard maps caused the joined items to, in some cases, be out of the order they needed to be in, and this would, in those cases, cause the ESP8266 to tell the backend that pin 3 was on when what it meant was that pin 14 was on. This showcases yet another way bugs can develop in the code base: a change to an essential function can have strange issues that aren't always immediately obvious, and so the code gets deployed more widely and then you wonder why pin states are being misreported, but only on some devices.
The plan today was for both Gretchen and me, along with the dogs, to drive up to the cabin for a long weekend there. But first Gretchen needed to talk to a woman who rents jungle cabins on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica (where Gretchen wants to spend another long winter vacation). After that call was over, we could pack up the car and go. One of the things I'd added to our payload was some nice sandblasted pieces of bluestone I'd gotten out of the Chamomile just downhill from where the Stick Trail crosses it.
We had so many leftovers in our refrigerator that Gretchen didn't think we needed to stop at a store on the way to the Adirondacks. But then she realized we didn't have any fruit of any kind. This had her wondering if we should stop at either the Cairo Hannaford or that farm stand on Route 32 some miles to the south. Then Gretchen remembered the Carrot Barn, a place to buy plants and produce north of Schoharie that we'd tried to go to once before when it was closed. That was was where we went. They didn't have a lot of great produce and its store featured a lot of carved-up animals. But there was a café where one could get decaf with oat milk, which Gretchen was sure to order (it wasn't great). They had things like blueberries, cheeries, strawberries, asparagus, and broccoli, all of which we got, as well as leeks, tomatoes, and even pineapples from somewhere (which we didn't).
When we got to the gate of Woodworth Lake, I let Gretchen and Charlotte out so they could walk the last mile and then handled most of the putting away of things by myself while Neville snorted around the cabin to read whatever chemical signals wildlife had left for him. I myself went out to look at what new plants had made an appearance. This seems to be the first year that woody shrubs and small saplings are among the dominant plants. Most of these are pioneer speces: some kind of aspen (perhaps bigtooth) and some species of willow. But there is also staghorn sumac and some form of locust whose roots must've been in the fill soil. I'm also seeing a smattering of northern red oaks, some of which I planted from tiny saplings Gretchen had given me from some reforestation service, but others of which seemed to have been seeded some other way. Since there are essentially few oaks of any kind in the Adirondacks and they usually spread slowly (due to the bulky nature of acorns) from where they live, I'm guessing there must've been some acorns mixed in with the fill soil trucked to the cabin. (Some of these red oaks have reddish leaves and don't look too healthy, so perhaps the adverse climate will eventually kill them off.)
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