Cries in the distance
But I am working today
So not my problem
Tag: work
6 April 2011
- Up early; to work.
- Driver work continues, but no real progress made. Vendor people are working in parallel, so with luck one of us will find the answer soon.
- Excited about the Gnome 3 release. Been using it at home for a while from the Ubuntu PPA. I’m told the experience is better on other distributions but I have it working well enough for now. I’ll probably check it out on my laptop when it hits Debian Unstable.
- Home to play some more Mass Effect 2. It’s becoming an addiction already. I hope that the weather gets nice enough soon to draw me away.
4 April 2011
- Up and to the bus; lots to do.
- Progress on driver performance continues. Seems every change brings incremental improvement, yet I still haven’t fully fixed the problem. Dialogue with the board vendor is helpful, and I believe convergence on a solution is imminent.
- Stopped by the PennDOT center across the street from the office and replaced my driver’s license. New picture is every bit as dorky as the old one.
- Home; informed of a party this weekend for my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Should be a great time, as my family’s parties tend to be.
- Dinner was feta cheese omlettes and salad lovingly prepared by my wife, who then lovingly encouraged me to get ready to go to the gym.
1 April 2011
- Up and off to work.
- Still fighting with driver performance. Moving buffers around did not have the desired effect. Running low on options and time, as customer has a looming factory deadline. Have to look at DMA settings and see if some improvements can be made there.
- Home then out to dinner. Tried the new How Lee. It was much more crowded than I ever saw it in its previous incarnation, which might be explained by the transformation of the food from “random greasy Chinese-ish food” to “only sort of greasy Chinese food that maybe had some thought and effort behind it”. Also some may have been there to view the men’s room artwork.
- Returned to the Squirrel Cage (a.k.a. Squirrel Hill Cafe, a.k.a. the bar I frequented throughout my early-to-mid-20s) for the first time in a few years. It’s one of the few bars that still allows smoking, which is why I’d been gone so long. It’s still smoky, but the beer selection is still solid. Unfortunately for it there are now more options with equal or better selections and no smoke. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.
31 March 2011
- Up and off to work.
- Work continued on the audio driver. Trying to hunt down the buffer allocation code to move a buffer into on-chip RAM but the Linux SoC audio code is made up of layers of indirection which complicate things like this.
- Made some pasta with tofurkey sausage and mushrooms for dinner. Turned out to be surprisingly tasty.
- Watched The Third Man from Netflix. Really good movie. The kind they just don’t make anymore.
25 March 2010
- Up and off to work.
- Some more driver issue help from the chip vendor. Exploring potential issues further on up the stack. Lots of register value dumps being exchanged.
- Lunch at DiBella’s again. Ordering process went more smoothly this time. Unsure if it’s me or the staff that has benefited from experience.
- Left for Michigan after lunch to spend the weekend with my in-laws. Nephew is at the age where he’s getting too big to toss in the air but that’s the one thing he’s most interested in.
24 March 2011
- Up; to work.
- Made good progress with the audio driver. Overcame a serious hurdle involving the FIFO through a combination of helpful suggestions from the vendor and my own random bumping around in the code. Unfortunately this epiphany didn’t happen until around 9 PM. Even more unfortunately, fixing the FIFO did not solve the larger bug. Sent some driver code to the vendor along with some register dumps to get more eyes on the problem.
- Had a surprisingly productive engineering meeting in which we ate pizza and had explained to us some of the machinations of the executive staff.
- Came home to an exceptionally understanding wife. Took the garbage out and contemplated ways to show appreciation for said understanding.
22 March 2011
- Up; to work.
- Enabling the FIFO in my driver helps, but not quite solves my problem. Also the FIFO behaves in ways contrary to the vendor’s documentation. I’ll have to send ask said vendor to clarify where (presumably) I went wrong.
- Attempted lunch at NOLA in Market Square defeated by ridiculous line. Oh man did it smell good in there though. Chipotle was the consolation lunch.
- Home then to the gym in an attempt to make up for the delicious yet gut-expanding dinner from yesterday. Will probably need to go back (without eating in the meantime) to fully work it off, but progress is progress and the food was damn-well worth it.
14 March 2011
- Up pretty close to a reasonable time. To work.
- Not much accomplished at work today, I’m afraid. Everyone appeared to be in a drunken stupor. I blame Daylight Saving Time.
- Home, ate some Pi Day Pie that Emily made yesterday. Scrum-diddly-umptious. Pumpkin.
- Plumbing project to replace the trap under the bathroom sink went the way of most plumbing projects. Multiple trips to Lowe’s later and we still have to brush our teeth in the kitchen.
10 March 2011
- Up on time. Off to work.
- Continued wrestling with GPIO problem. Got it sorted, but there still seem to be some corner cases to deal with.
- Greg stopped by on the way back from a customer visit and he, Andy, Justin, and I had lunch at Madonna’s. Tough to find a better burrito Downtown.
- Picked up a growler of East End Drayman’s Heather Ale and a bottle of the beer they can’t call Eye Opener Coffee Porter after work.
- Fake meat tacos for dinner. Delicious.
- Still wrestling with the LMDE installer. Turns out the only flash drive I have that’s big enough to hold the installer has some bizarre partitioning scheme on it that chokes unetbootin. The DVD drive in my laptop is way too flaky to install from a disc so the great struggle continues.