Tag Archives: API | 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.

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.