I recently submitted a bug report to Qt software, the results were less than impressive. One thing I’d like to make clear though is that Qt is an amazing library that I would recommend to any c++ software developer, I truly mean that. It is well designed, well documented and generally works as advertised. On top of all of this, it is portable! It really just gets better and better. Which is why I found the handling of my bug report so… underwhelming.
Flash accidentally subverts the privacy mode of newer browsers?
Pretty much all of the popular browsers now support a “private browsing” mode. The whole concept of this mode is to prevent any history of your browsing activities from being recorded. The problem is that there is nothing forcing browser extensions to respect this mode of operation.
How not to maintain an API
So I’ve been working on my graphing code for EDB. I was eventually able create a Qt widget which natively renders a graphviz graph layout. It actually works quite nicely, you can create an ordinary graphviz graph either in memory or from a file like usual. The code can simply create a “GraphWidget” and the code will display the graph perfectly (there are some constructs which it doesn’t support, but the basics are there) with nice things such as zooming and rotating.
All of this works great, except for the fact that graphviz decided to change some of the structures used to represent the layed out graph.
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Fun with graphs
So I figured that I would post some of the progress with EDB. I’ve been very happy with the function analysis engine that I developed, but there is one thing that it completely ignores, basic block analysis. Of course in order to identify functions it does technically break things down into blocks, but this information is discarded when a whole function is identified.
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Micro-optimization is stupid
I tend to frequent the website stackoverflow.com. It’s a fantastic website. It allows knowlege to be shared in a unique way. The only problem is, some people have no idea what they are talking about. If there are enough people who agree with these misguided notions, well then these incorrect answers get up-votes. And the cycle of mis-information repeats. It isn’t too dissimilar from the various types of incorrect information regarding 32-bit machines and 4GB of RAM.
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It Lives!
It’s official, I’ve gotten the core component of EDB to compile on Vista!
It took a lot of effort and to be honest, some working around various compiler bugs. But step #1 has been completeled. Next I’ll have to port the “DebuggerCore” plugin, and it should be smooth sailing from there. I plan to have Win32 support before calling it 1.0, we’ll see. I hope to have more updates soon 
.
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GTA IV Actually Discourages Attacking Police
I’ve been a huge fan of the GTA series ever since GTA 3 came out. It is a genuinely fun game which gives you your money’s worth of entertainment. The plots have been good and the missions are hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that you’ll wanna stop playing. I’ve always gotten a little amusement from the people who claim that games like GTA encourage violence, particularly violence towards law enforcement. As of today, I’m about 50% done with the game, and have come to a conclusion. GTA IV actually discourages violence towards the police!
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How Microsoft Could Have Handled Compatibility In Vista
So I’ve been using Windows Vista for a while on my desktop and have been generally happy. The system is stable, most features work as expected, and let’s be honest, it looks really nice. One thing that has constantly frustrated me is the shear size of each release of Windows. Every release is noticeably larger than the previous. I certainly understand that each release adds more features, and more features means bigger. But I think it’s about time that Microsoft started to trim the fat.
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Time to update older UI toolkits?
My favorite editor of choice for the past 10 years has been nedit, it is a wonderfully simple yet complete GUI based text editor with a focus on development. It has all of the basics that I need; syntax highlighting, relatively smart indenting, brace matching, the ability to highlight an include and open the file it refers to. All of the basics are there, so as an editor it suites my needs and development habits. There is only one thing, it’s ugly. And this is no fault of the developers, it’s the fault of how Motif looks.
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Linux’s ptrace API sucks!
I love Linux, as a developer, I find the tools available suit my style of work perfectly. Sometimes the tool that I want isn’t available. That’s OK though, because whenever I can, I try to contribute.
I do a lot of reverse engineering work and thus the lack of anything like Ollydbg spawned off my EDB project. It’s a debugger designed to focus on applications at a machine code level. This project is coming along nicely but there is one thing that I really wish I could change…ptrace sucks, and it sucks a lot.
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