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Thursday, March 28th, 2002 01:46 pm
In my zombielike state I am at least productive. THE BOOT LOADER WORKS!
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 03:43 pm (UTC)
What did you do? This sounds like a good story. :-)

I didn't know you were a techie. What do you do?
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 03:50 pm (UTC)
I write embedded software - specifically a real-time OS - for a telecommunications chip. I should probably refrain from making a big point of the company name, since I gripe about my employer way too much on LJ. :-) I do love the technical part of my job.

The boot loader sits in an off-chip EEPROM, gets slurped into memory as soon as the board comes out of reset, turns on I/O, and waits for the real OS to arrive. When the real stuff shows up, it puts everything in the right place etc and jumps through a magic number. I just had to redesign the whole mess for a different chip. Took way too long. I'm proud of the fact that it essentially worked first try, though. Gnarly piece of crap to just work first try.
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 04:55 pm (UTC)
Oh, that's even cooler than I imagined. Somehow I took it that your boot loader was messed up as a user, which doesn't often happen, and that you fixed it, which happens even more rarely.

But this is cool. Yea for geek girlz! ;-)

The stuff you do is all greek to me. I consider C a "low-level" language. ;-) You hardware types scare me and I hold you in awe.
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 05:08 pm (UTC)
Oh, that's even cooler than I imagined. Somehow I took it that your boot loader was messed up as a user, which doesn't often happen, and that you fixed it, which happens even more rarely.

That's way too studly for me. I don't have the patience to understand systems designed by other people, much less fix their buggy code :-)

The stuff you do is all greek to me. I consider C a "low-level" language. ;-) You hardware types scare me and I hold you in awe.

Fortunately the hardware is well-documented and I don't have to write much assembly. People who actually MAKE hardware... I hold them in awe. On the other hand, I also hold anyone who can make a decent software user interface in awe, too, no matter how high-level the language. In short -- competence in whatever area is GOOD. Um, except for advertising. ;-)

What do you do?
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 05:15 pm (UTC)
My understanding and feelings about low-level systems are perfectly encapsulated by the fact that I implied you were a "hardware" person. Even if you don't make it or even use assembly, at least you only have a couple of layers of abstraction between you and 0-5 volts. I'm more comfortable with about 12 levels of systems below me that I just expect to work.

I develop web applications with mod_perl / Oracle on Linux right now for CitySearch.com . Specifically, I'm in charge of the real estate site (http://realestate.citysearch.com/).
Thursday, March 28th, 2002 05:19 pm (UTC)
Ooo cool! Pretty maps! Decent ui! Nice houses... um.... mumble... I feel broke now :-)