Things I did Today, Other Than Work
I threw a log into the fire pit, lit it up, and sat staring at the flames, sipping a beverage. My phone was inside the house on a charger and I am not currently reading a book so I had nothing but my thoughts lingering as I sat in the cool evening air and watched the flames rise and fall.
Maybe I should write something just to write something I thought. Just do a short piece, maybe don't worry about what it says because it's not as though it really needs to be seen.
As a bonus, maybe writing something down will help me remember in the future what where I was in the project I am working on next time I set that project down for a year.
Anyways, things I did other than work: - Applied for a different job. - Cooked dinner (lemon pasta with peas. it was ok.) - Made a Catte meme using a still from the movie Sneakers. - Made another Catte meme using a still from the movie Sneakers but this time with the Gayint Pew Pew map reflected in Whistler's glasses. - Tried to figure out how to make proper C programs in order to read and manipulate disk images that contain DOS/DOS-like systems.
Muddling Through it
Writing and building C programs is not something I have a lot of experience with, as I have never had to deal with C and C build concepts in depth. In order to figure out what I'm doing (poorly), I am switching between the GNU C manual and various other pieces of documentation in order to solve an immediate problem in front of me, whatever I decide that problem is in the moment.
The problem I want to solve for myself with the tools I am creating is that I want to create a disk image for a DOS system on a non-DOS system without doing things like running an emulated system or mounting a raw image using the lo block device. I want to create a raw disk image that can boot entirely with userland tools. I want to configure an entire system (at least from a filesystem perspective) using files or other disk images on a host system. This is something that should be easy!
What I have at the end of today is part of a program that can print out the Master Boot Record information from a DOS-like disk image, including a 4-entry partition table. I am working on separating out program invocation concerns from functionality that maps out the disk layout, which means I'm going to need to start figuring out makefiles.
I could really use a good recommendation on documentation for creating C builds on various *nix-like systems.