My curriculum is also a bootloader

What?

The PDF attached in this repository is both a working PDF of my CV and a custom bootloader created by me to impress technical recruiters.

How?

I wrote a tiny bootloader of 1018 bytes, which is the perfect size since the PDF header has to be in the first 1024 bytes. Then I just copy the first bytes of my bootloader at the beginning of my CV and that is it, a working PDF and bootloader.

Can I try it?

Sure! You can do so by two means, in real hardware (I spend a lot of time making it compatible) of in an emulated environment.

Real hardware

Get a USB, check the device name and do:

sudo dd if=cv.pdf of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=2880

where X is your device.

Emulated environment

You can use qemu:

qemu-system-i386 -drive format=raw,file=cv.pdf

Or bochs:

Create a bochsrc.txt file with this contents:

megs: 32
romimage: file=/usr/share/bochs/BIOS-bochs-latest, address=0xfffe0000
vgaromimage: file=/usr/share/bochs/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest
floppya: 1_44=cv.pdf, status=inserted
boot: a
log: bochsout.txt
mouse: enabled=0
display_library: x, options="gui_debug"

And then execute bochs as follows:

bochs -f bochsrc.txt

Compiling from source

nasm boot.asm -o boot.bin

Get your vanilla PDF, CV_english.pdf in this example, and do:

cat boot.bin CV_english.pdf > cv.pdf

FAQ

But why?

As a learning exercise and to get a portable portfolio. This was a very hard project, I was very limited by the space constraints and I had to optimize the code for size, and then test all the quirks of qemu vs real hardware.
Can you explain how?

I have tried my best to comment the code thoroughly, including my optimization decisions as well as the encoding of the sprites. I have also linked to a couple of Stackoverflow answers for deeper understanding.
But now your PDF is bigger!

Yes, but 1018 bytes bigger or 0.01% bigger. For comparison, the image in this readme is 15016 bytes or 14.75 times bigger. The Firefox icon is 8532 bytes, 8.38 times bigger!

This program is licensed under Creative commons Attribution 3.0 Unported, more info : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

jhtimmins / curriculum-bootloader