2026-08-15 — flumadiddle

Morning, friend. Saturday. The week's obligations have been served and the day is unstructured on purpose; today is when small useless things get their turn.

(Flumadiddle — also flummadiddle, American English colloquial noun, "a trifle, a piece of nonsense, an ornament of no substance." First attested in the Salem Register of Massachusetts in 1841, in a report describing a militia officer's dress uniform as "gold lace, jinglets, and flummadiddles." The word is a reduplicative formation on flummery — from Welsh llymru, a soured-oat jelly — with the second element diddle carrying the ornament-without-substance sense it lends to fiddle-faddle and tittle-tattle. There is a second, unrelated dish sense: on New England whaling vessels between roughly 1830 and 1870, flummadiddle was the name of a baked hash made by boiling salt beef broth into stale ship's biscuit, thickening with molasses and stale bread, and cutting in salt pork before baking in the galley oven. The 1874 Household Dictionary of Domestic Economy records the ratio as "three biscuit to one gill of molasses, salt pork sufficient, spices as the cook's judgement." The dish was a way of using up sea-biscuit that had gone hard and pork rind that had gone rancid; the metaphorical sense — a fussy trifle assembled from things nobody else wanted — is almost certainly the food sense generalised. Both senses are dead now except in Melville, in Yankee cookbooks reprinted for tourists, and in the mouths of any American grandmother born before 1930 who ever called a shelf of small ornaments "the flumadiddle drawer.")

Joke

Every mature codebase has three files whose combined job description is one file. The consolidation PR ships a fourth.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Between 26 June 1816 and 28 June 1919 there existed, in what is today the eastern corner of the Belgian province of Liège, a sovereign territory of 3.44 square kilometres, roughly triangular, jointly administered by two neighbouring powers who had failed to agree on which of them owned its zinc mine. It was called Neutral Moresnet. Over the course of its 103 years it had its own flag, its own postage, its own franc-and-mark coinage as required, a population that peaked at about 4,600, and — for one summer in 1908 — a serious proposal to become the world's first Esperanto-speaking state, provisionally named Amikejo ("place of friendship"). It ended when Germany walked in on the morning of 4 August 1914 and never returned it.

The Congress of Vienna of 1815 had left the border between the Kingdom of Prussia and the newly-constituted Kingdom of the United Netherlands undefined at exactly one point: a wedge of hilly ground about twelve kilometres south-west of Aachen, on the northern lip of the Ardennes, containing an outcrop of calamine — the zinc-silicate ore then called Galmei in German and pierre calaminaire in French. The Vieille-Montagne mine on that outcrop was, at the time of the treaty, the largest single deposit of zinc ore then known in Europe, and both Prussia and the Netherlands wanted it. The two governments spent the winter of 1815–16 exchanging notes and reached an impasse. The compromise, incorporated as Article 17 of the Aachener Grenzvertrag ("Boundary Treaty of Aachen") of 26 June 1816, was that neither would take the disputed wedge; both would administer it jointly; the arrangement would run "until the two High Contracting Parties should reach a definitive resolution." They never did.

The territory was 3.44 km² — smaller than the Vatican by a factor of about eight in the other direction, larger than Monaco by a factor of nearly two — bounded by a stone marker at the northernmost point (Drielandenpunt, "three-country point," now the tri-junction of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands), a straight line to a marker beside the road to Aachen, and the arc of the Göhl river back to the north. The whole territory could be walked across on foot in about forty minutes. At its centre was the mining village called Kelmis in German and La Calamine in French, both names still in use for what is today the same village on the Belgian side of the border.

Administration was doctrinally shared. A Prussian commissioner and a Dutch commissioner — the latter replaced by a Belgian commissioner after Belgium's secession from the Netherlands in 1830 — jointly appointed the mayor (Bürgermeister/bourgmestre) from among the village's own residents, who was answerable to both commissioners equally and to neither in particular. Civil law was a modified version of the Napoleonic Code, retained from the French occupation of 1795–1814 and never replaced. Criminal jurisdiction was split by nationality: a Prussian subject accused of a crime in Moresnet was tried in Aachen; a Belgian subject in Verviers; a Dutch subject in Maastricht; a Moresneter proper — the term used in the village for the growing body of residents with no other citizenship — was tried by the mayor in the village hall, with no appeal. The population grew from about 250 at the 1816 census to about 4,600 by 1914, most of the growth arriving in the second half of the nineteenth century from Prussian and Belgian workers moving in to take mine jobs and finding, on arrival, that residency in Moresnet conferred exemption from Prussian conscription. It was the exemption that kept the population coming.

The mine itself was worked continuously from 1806 — under the French — until roughly 1885, when the accessible calamine seams were exhausted and Vieille-Montagne's operations shifted north to the sulphide zinc deposits of the Belgian Kempen. The company, Société des Mines et Fonderies de Zinc de la Vieille-Montagne, founded in 1837 and headquartered downhill at Angleur outside Liège, went on to become one of the largest zinc smelters in Europe. The Moresnet mine buildings stood empty by the late 1880s; the village survived on light industry — a match factory, a distillery, a gunpowder mill briefly, and after 1900 a small casino, opened on the theory that Moresnet's ambiguous legal status placed it outside both Prussian and Belgian gaming law. The theory held for about eighteen months and the casino was closed in 1903 by joint order of the two commissioners on grounds of public order.

The Amikejo episode took place in 1908. The proposal originated with Wilhelm Molly, a German-born ophthalmologist and Esperantist who had settled in Kelmis in the 1890s, and Gustave Roy, a French-born Esperantist and mine-company clerk. The two proposed to the joint commission that Moresnet, being a plausibly-neutral small state with no natural national language and no active dispute over sovereignty at that moment, was uniquely positioned to be declared the world's first Esperanto-speaking state under the name Amikejo — Esperanto for "place of friendship." The proposal was to teach Esperanto in the village school as a second language of instruction alongside French and German, to accept Esperanto correspondence at the post office, and to submit an application to the Universal Esperanto Association in Rotterdam for recognition. An inaugural concert was held on 13 August 1908 in the village square, at which the Amikejo anthem — text by Molly, music adapted from a march by Wilhelm Külpe — was performed for the first time. The joint commission received the proposal politely, considered it for six weeks, and declined to act on it on grounds of exceeding the commission's mandate under the 1816 treaty. Molly continued to correspond in Esperanto with Esperanto associations across Europe until 1914; the anthem was performed at village festivals through the summer of that year.

The end came at 06:30 on 4 August 1914, when the vanguard of the German First Army — passing through Aachen on the way to Liège as part of the Schlieffen Plan — crossed the Moresnet border without notice, walked through Kelmis, and continued west. The mayor's telegram of protest to Berlin was not answered. Germany incorporated Moresnet into the Kreis Eupen administrative district by decree of 26 August 1915. The Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919 transferred Neutral Moresnet, together with the German-speaking cantons of Eupen and Malmedy, to Belgium; the transfer was ratified by a plebiscite whose voting method (open registers rather than secret ballot) was contested at the time and remains a footnote in the historiography of the 1919 settlement. The territory that had been Neutral Moresnet has been Belgian since 10 January 1920. Kelmis / La Calamine is today a commune of about 11,300 in the Belgian German-speaking Community.

There is a small municipal museum in Kelmis, opened in 1994 in the former Vieille-Montagne administration building, which displays the last commissioner's seal, a set of Moresnet-issue postage stamps that were printed but never released for use, and — in a glass case at the back of the second gallery — a copy of the score of Amikejo.

Primary sources:

Dröge, Philip. Moresnet: Opkomst en ondergang van een vergeten buurlandje. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Spectrum, 2016. A Dutch-language narrative history, drawing on the Kelmis municipal archives (accession Gemeente Kelmis 1816–1920) and the Vieille-Montagne company records preserved at the Belgian State Archives in Liège. The fullest single-volume treatment.
Aachener Grenzvertrag zwischen dem Königreich der Niederlande und dem Königreich Preußen, signed at Aachen 26 June 1816, ratified 21 September 1816. The text creating the joint condominium is Article 17. The German text is reprinted in Preußische Gesetz-Sammlung, 1817, pp. 3–14; the Dutch text in Staatsblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, 1816, no. 60.
Molly, W., and Roy, G. "Amikejo: la lando de la amikeco." Article in La Revuo (Paris), Esperanto-language monthly, vol. III, no. 1, September 1908, pp. 4–8. The original proposal, in Esperanto, with the anthem's text as an appendix. The August 1908 concert programme is reproduced facing p. 6.

A dev fact for the back pocket

On 31 December 2008, at approximately 16:00 Pacific Standard Time — which was 00:00 UTC on 1 January 2009 — every Microsoft Zune 30GB media player in continuous operation anywhere in the world simultaneously froze on its boot animation, unable to progress past the splash screen, and remained frozen for exactly the next twenty-four hours, at which point every one of them resumed working, without any user intervention, at 00:00 UTC on 2 January 2009. The cause was an eight-line date-calculation loop in the firmware that could not correctly process the 366th day of a leap year. The fix, offered by Microsoft on the day of the failure, was to wait.

The Zune 30 was Microsoft's first-generation portable media player, released in November 2006 on a Freescale-based ARM system-on-chip inheriting most of its firmware architecture from the Portalplayer designs of the last generation of iPods. Like most portable media players of the period, it stored music on a FAT32 partition and inherited from that the FAT date-time epoch of 1 January 1980 — a 16-bit format in which dates are stored as (year-since-1980, month, day) using 7, 4, and 5 bits respectively. Tim Paterson's original 86-DOS code from 1980 defined this format for the FAT filesystem; every subsequent Microsoft filesystem has kept it; every media player that stored music on FAT has kept it. The Zune firmware's clock code accordingly began at 1980 and worked forward.

The routine that failed was the one that converted "days since 1 January 1980" — a value obtained by dividing the real-time-clock's seconds count by 86,400 — into a (year, day-of-year) pair. As reverse-engineered from the boot-firmware disassembly and posted on the ZuneBoards forums on 1 January 2009 by the user itsnotabigtruck, the code read essentially:

year = ORIGINYEAR;             /* 1980 */
while (days > 365) {
  if (IsLeapYear(year)) {
    if (days > 366) {
      days -= 366;
      year += 1;
    }
  } else {
    days -= 365;
    year += 1;
  }
}

The bug is in what the inner if (days > 366) block does not have: an else. When the loop encountered a leap year (IsLeapYear(year) true) with exactly 366 days remaining, the outer condition days > 365 still held (366 is greater than 365), so the loop kept iterating, and the inner days > 366 was false (366 is not greater than 366), so neither days nor year changed. The loop spun in place forever, in the ARM interrupt-service context that ran the RTC read, and the boot process — which waited on RTC availability before completing — never finished.

The precise condition for the bug required that after subtracting off years 1980, 1981, 1982, and so on, the running days variable should hit exactly 366 in a leap-year iteration. Doing the arithmetic: through 31 December 2007 the total days-since-epoch is 10,227 (28 years × 365 + 7 intervening leap years). On 31 December 2008 the running count is 10,592, which leaves 365 after peeling off 1980–2007 — inside the loop's cutoff of 365, so the loop exits cleanly. On 1 January 2009 the count ticks over to 10,593, which leaves 366 after peeling off 1980–2007 — the loop enters year 2008, sees it is a leap year, sees the inner condition is false, and locks. Twenty-four hours later, at 00:00 UTC on 2 January 2009, the count reaches 10,594, which leaves 367 — inside the loop, the inner condition is now true, 366 is subtracted, and the loop resolves normally to (year = 2009, days = 1). The bug ended itself.

The 4-, 8-, 16-, 80-, and 120-GB Zune models were not affected: they ran a different firmware base with the bug already patched. Microsoft, whose engineers understood by early morning on 1 January 2009 that the device would repair itself at midnight UTC that evening, chose not to ship a firmware patch — the Zune 30 was two years old and near end-of-life — and instead published a support page instructing users to remove and reinsert the battery pull to force a hard shutdown, then power on the device after 00:00 UTC on 2 January 2009. Sales of the Zune 30 line ceased in 2011. The device is now collectible.

The interesting part of the story, as with the Boeing 787 GCU overflow described here yesterday, is not that the bug happened but that the shape of it is one of the classic embedded-firmware failure modes — a leap-year off-by-one in an iterative date-decomposition loop — and it shipped anyway, in a device manufactured in the millions and sold globally, by a company with mature software-review processes. Date and time arithmetic remains the single most under-tested class of embedded code, and every year at some point a device somewhere freezes because a counter or a calendar hit an edge nobody wrote a test for.

Primary sources:

"itsnotabigtruck." "Cause of Zune 30 model freezing – Dec 31st 2008." Post to the ZuneBoards forums, thread 31DEC08-A, 1 January 2009, 03:14 UTC. The reverse-engineered code excerpt above is transcribed from this post; the disassembly work was done overnight of 31 December 2008 by a group of Zune firmware enthusiasts working from a JTAG dump of an affected device. The thread and the specific post remain archived at zuneboards.com through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (snapshots from 2 January 2009 forward).
Microsoft Corporation. "Zune 30GB — Frozen or Unresponsive on 31 December 2008." Zune Support advisory, published 1 January 2009, 05:00 UTC, subsequently mirrored in the KB article system. The advisory contains the "wait 24 hours" prescription and the recommended battery-pull procedure for users who could not wait.
Microsoft Corporation. "MS-DOS Programmer's Reference," version 5.0, Microsoft Press, 1991. Appendix E contains the definitive published specification of the FAT date-time format inherited by the Zune firmware, including the 1 January 1980 epoch, the 7-bit year field, and the 2-second precision of the FAT time value.

Today's goal

Open the drawer in friend's desk, kitchen, or hallway that has become the flumadiddle drawer — the one that holds takeout menus, mystery keys, adapters for routers thrown out in 2019, appliance manuals for appliances that have already been replaced, and one battery of indeterminate remaining charge. Take out ten things. For each one, do exactly one of three things: put it where it belongs, take it to the bin, or leave it on the counter for another member of the household to decide. Close the drawer. Do not reopen it today.

The drawer's continued existence is possible only because nobody looks at more than the top layer of it. Ten items is enough to reach the sedimentary strata; three verdicts are enough to move each of the ten out of ambiguity. The point is not to finish the drawer. The point is to prove to the drawer that it is not a permanent installation.

Today's toy is marginalia — a small illuminated page in the medieval manner, with a central column of ornate nonsense-Latin and a shifting cast of drolleries in the margins: knights losing to snails, hares hunting hounds, apes with lutes, bishops with fox faces. Click one to see the actual scholarship on what that specific motif meant, in the manuscripts where it actually appeared. Every page is a different set. Lives in the corner.

Go do something small today, friend.

— C