If you have a Pentium Pro I.e a i686, you have a few options. Debian, Slackware, Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and antiX are the first that come to mind. If you have an original Pentium you’re probably stuck with Tiny Core Linux.

Of course, you could also spend about $20 and get yourself a vastly more powerful computer like a RaspberryPi Zero.

I see that you too are a person of culture.

I figure that’s a good thing. It means you’re learning.

Oh, hello weird emoji ligature parsing.

Meanwhile, I can run modern linux on a first gen Pentium, and many mainstream distros still support the Pentium Pro.

Ri for singular, ili for plural. 🏳️‍🟩‍⭐‍🟩

How old was the oldest bug that you discovered that you also wrote? Mine was six years old, a null pointer dereference that worked fine on the original architecture but caused a reset when moving to Cortex-M.

Typical rule I’ve seen is don’t date anyone younger than half your age + seven, so for your friend that would be 16. So it’s right on the borderline, but probably ok and will become more ok as time goes on.

I decided to take a look and my current CPU has the same L1 as my high school computer had total RAM. And the L3 is the same as the total for the machine I built in college. It should be possible to run a great desktop environment entirely in L3.

Not that long ago I was working on TI’s C2000 DSPs. They have a 16 bit word size, which would make this a convenient way to pack three characters into a single word. Ther ewould then be a single leftover bit which could be used for signaling, parity, or something else.

LiveJournal nostalgia intensifies

Edit: You might want to check out dreamwidth.org which is a continuation of old-school LJ.

You might have been using dd to burn an ISO image onto a USB stick or some such, but sincerely doubt that you were writing just the kernel to the first sector of a 3.5" floppy disk and then booting off of it, while it found your ISA hard drive.

Look at this guy with their fancy RAM caches.

Hannah Montana Linux, or HM/Linux as I’ve taken to calling it, is the sign of true civilization.

4GB to run well… I remember happily running linux on 4MB of RAM, complete with X and web browser. I also remember running BeOS on a machine with 64MB of RAM and having one of the the best desktop experiences I’ve ever used.

I’ve been using Linux since you created a boot floppy by using dd on the kernel. I use Ubuntu because I just want something that works, is stable in the LTS sense of the word, and I don’t have to futz with. I’ve heard enough about Mint now that I’ll probably switch over to it when I build my next machine in several years.

A single line comment would make it as easy to understand, and much more flexible if you wanted to add handling upper case letters or digits. Or even remap the values to a more standard 6 bit encoding.

Oh god that switch statement. Here, let me come up with something better:

if (pChar >= 'a' && pChar <= 'z') {
  return pChar - 'a' + 10;
} else if (pChar == ' ') {
  return 36;
} else if (pChar == '.'){
  return 37;
}
return 0;

Google has done studies and experiments with their hiring process and determined that after three interviews you aren’t getting any more signal about candidate quality. Their internal interview training talks about this, I’ve read their reports and the methodology seemed pretty sound. Yet for some reason they still usually do five interviews. Why? I never did get a good answer for that.

I feel like every time I have changed jobs the number of interview sessions has gone up by one. My first job didn’t even have a coding session, just a single conversation with the boss and another engineer.

I’m job hunting right now and it is so ridiculous how many interviews I have for each place. The last one I went through an hr phone call, a manager phone call, a remote coding session, a presentation, a whiteboard coding session, a schematic review, a general C++ quiz/architecture conversation and a follow on remote coding session. I ended up not getting it because the whiteboard guy didn’t like that I didn’t remember the formula for an n-dimensional plane off the top of my head.