Bad Habits

1461284795 and I am still awake.

Right in front of my trusty Fujutsu.

Terminator uptime is 13:36. Terminator is my old Asus barebone, an old AMD Duron still doing its job without complaing too much. Its job is giving my local network of machines a way to access internet.

I am tired. My throat hurts.

My eyes are tired.

I will soon shutdown Terminator. Sooner or later it will be permanently be shut down and its place will be taken by a Raspberry Pi. Its fan will not spin again.

I am sorry, Terminator, but you don’t have an ISA slot so you won’t start a new life as a GPIB gateway. That will be the job of an even older HP Vectra. I am sorry I cannot afford a PCI GPIB card at the moment. The Raspberry Pi will need less power than you. It will be more silent than you.

I am sorry, Terminator, but you will be replaced. Not today. Not tomorrow. But you will be replaced.

I don’t know why I am wiriting this. I am really, really tired. Terminator cannot hear me. It is just a machine. Or is it?

At this time I cannot tell. I am too tired.

Today I coded even if my throat hurt. That’s why I drank white Sambuca. Another bad habit.

The development boards are happy. They are connected to an old 3Com SuperStack II PS Hub 40. It is a very old piece of equipment but the development boards don’t need much bandwidth. The development boards currently working are four.

Only one of them is currently in a box. A (not so little) pcb with a tiny Atmel powers it. It is the Atmel MCU that decides when and if the board gets power. I wrote the firmware that runs on that tiny MCU even if I wasn’t supposed to. It works but it isn’t pretty. I would like to rewrite it but I will not.

The other boards are just on a table.

They are all the same but all different. They are obviously different. There aren’t two things that are exactly the same. However the core hardware meets the same specs.

The software however is different for each board.

One board got the SDK. I do not like to cross compile even if I know how to. This board is the second one that got the SDK. The first one went away. A production board was needed and the one that got the SDK was the most functional of the bunch. Moreover, if something happens the SDK will let me to recompile whatever is needed. Hopefully.

The board with the SDK didn’t get a system update. I am sorry, DEV 3.0 SDK. The system update doesn’t play nice with the SDK so no system update for you.

There is DEV VPN, another board. It got the latest system update and a new kernel so it could support OpenVPN.

Then there is board 0.1 00, 0.1 02 and 0.1 03.

Only one of them got a system update. For now. They are all different but they will become the same some day.

That day the system will be ready. All the boards save the SDK one will get the same kernel. However they will not get the same software.

I need to go to bed.

Do I need to code?

I don’t know. I think that the code I write is wanted.

Is the code I write needed?

I don’t know.

The features are always changing. The hardware is always changing. My code isn’t the same it used to be.

There is no framework. There are a lot of documentation and howtos I wrote but they are only useful to me.

There is no documentation available on the process.

There are more than three programming languages involved in this project.

Every choice is mine and mine alone.

I am a cowboy coder and I shouldn’t be.

I am the system administrator of my own machines. I am the network administrator of my own network. I can usually get my machines to connect to my local network and do what they are supposed to do. That is the best I can do.

This evening I wanted to go to sleep. I did not.

I played with a MSP430 and a SLE4442 because I was tired to be a cowboy coder. I like to write firmware for MCUs more that I like to write software, that’s the truth.

And so, about my bad habits?

Not sleeping enough.

Drinking when my throat hurts.

Coding.

Writing this post when I am too tired to code.

The worse habit? Electronics.

1461287944 and I am still awake.

A.C.

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