First Post

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States. I live in the valley of the mountains. I have 10,000 foot peaks in my back yard. Yes, we have fantastic skiing, maybe you have heard of Snowbird. That resort is 20 miles from my house. There are all kinds of things to do outdoors but, I spend most of my time in front of my computer. Yes, right now I'm in front of it typing this blog.

My name is Kim Mansfield I have been working in the embedded software industry for about 27 years. I spent a few years in school. I attended Utah State University in Logan, Utah majoring in music. Yes, that's right music. I transfered to the University of Utah in Salt Lake and continued in music. When I was looking at a career in music I realized I didn't want to teach in public schools so I transfered to the business department. I was required to take a class in BASIC and fell in love with computers. I transfered to the engineering department and completed my degree in computer engineering. It is a computer degree with a hardware design emphasis.

My first full time job was as an assembly language programmer working on the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. I then moved to the Z80 and spent about 5 years writing test software in assembly language for Sperry Univac here in Salt Lake. I bounced around in Sperry ending up in the department that ported Unix to Sperry hardware. I learned to program in C and coming from an assembly language/hardware background that is the way I approached C.

I left Sperry as I completed my MS in Computer Science and started writing C code for the 8051 microcontroller. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. After that I spent a short time at Novell but they had a reduction in force. I went to a small startup which ran out of funding. I then spent a year at Enterasys (Cabletron). After that I decided that corporate America had changed. There were no long term jobs. I created my own business and went into contracting. It was a little shacky starting up but, now I enjoy the advantages of being a contractor. I feel like I'm in control of my life and like the changes as I move from job to job. It gives me a chance to learn new things and meet new people.

Well, enough of talking about me, let me tell you what I would like to do in my blog. I have been fascinated by interpreters. I have written many of them in C and assembly language. I have incorporated them in products to create macro languages which allow the user to alter the function of the embedded device. I thought we could explore interpreters and how they could benefit embedded systems.

Other subjects I'm interested in are fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and neural networks. As I have mentioned I received an MS degree from Utah State University. The subject I wrote my thesis on was using neural networks to adapt finite impulse response filters in audio applications. I would like to explore these topics and see what benefit they might have in embedded applications.

So, until next time keep your code simple and comment it. You may have to go back and modify it.

Kim

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