I went home a bit early today... what a wasted day!
Not just because it was the day before Turkey Holiday, either.
I finally got away from fixing bugs and whatnot from the test days and got back to the USB project that I'm fiddling with. Not the fun USB project, the other one.
So I put a clean snapshot back onto the test machine and put on the usb code. It self-tests! Woot! Device reset... black screen reboot. Hmmm.
Reboot, turn on soft-ice, and try again. Aha! Accessing a null address or something. Oddly, the offending code on my side looks fine. A couple of runs through to get a feel for what is going on and I discover I need to install a debug version of a system library.
So, turn off the drivers and... hey! Damn it. When I try to turn off the driver, it crashes (makes sense, given the position of the problem) but won't let go of the code I'm trying to re-install.
I try the install anyway, but it won't do it.
So I go to push another clean snapshot onto the box, to find that my hard drive lost its mind. Wouldn't boot -- said it couldn't find the OS.
Screw that. I plugged in the other drive. It came up fine, so I pushed the snapshot onto it, a super clean one. One that didn't have the current passwords, because our IT department is on a security kick and everything got reset Tuesday.
So it boots, tries to access the drive and fails and my computer gets locked out. Normally, it takes two tries to lockout, and the drive setup steals two of them, but I must have had a third sitting from a previous boot. Sensitive little devils.
So I gave up. I'll rebuild my ghosts and all that on Monday.
To make matters more annoying, I think I found the problem flipping through the code while waiting for the ghost to push. But I couldn't test it.
Overall, the NI work has got to be the least interesting stuff I've ever done. I've written as much code these last nine months as I would normally do in one, and most of the rest of my time is spent in compiling, ghosting, fiddling, waiting, whatever. Argh!
I see potential for actual work in the future, but damn, so far it's just been fiddling. Except for the work I took on around architecture and documentation, but I don't really have free cycles for that right now, in spite of the boredom. The timing doesn't work well. I'm on a "hurry-up-and-wait" system, not a "put it down for a few hours and do something useful" system.
I'll give it until my one year anniversary and then I'll complain. There has got to be something that involves actual thinking to do here.
Michael or Whit, if you are reading this, I love National Instruments, the people I work with, the regular paycheck. But damn, the work is boring right now. I'll get over it, probably by getting work that isn't so tedious.