Evan Teran’s Blog

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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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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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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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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First let me say that I wouldn’t classify myself as a Microsoft advocate. I have a Linux box I use for my daily work and a Windows machine for both work and play. I am however, an early adopter. So pretty much as soon as I could get my hands on it, I installed Windows Vista.

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OK, So I was reading up on the new virtualization architectures that both AMD and Intel introduced. My first reaction…why the heck did they make it so unnecessarily complex?

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A few months ago I decided to get a shiny new gaming system from Dell. I eventually decided to go with the XPS 720 with pretty much all the bells and whistles I thought were reasonable. One of which was going with 4GB of RAM. After all, just about everyone agrees that more RAM leads to better performance. This machine also came with Windows Vista Home Premium, I’m the early adopter type so I saw no issue in this.

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