Evan Teran's Blog

How not to maintain an API

So I've been working on my graphing code for EDB. I was eventually able to create a Qt widget that 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 that 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 laid-out graph.

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.

Micro-optimization is stupid

I tend to frequent the website stackoverflow.com. It's a fantastic website. It allows knowledge 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 misinformation repeats. It isn't too dissimilar from the various types of incorrect information regarding 32-bit machines and 4GB of RAM.

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 concluded. GTA IV actually discourages violence towards the police!

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 sheer 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 mean bigger. But I think it's about time that Microsoft started to trim the fat.