Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just like files, means “the current thing”:

Falling out of love with warp

Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

The way routing works is essentially building a type that gets larger and larger. One route might look like:

 bye = warp warppath | | name

Welcome back to the “Making our own executable packer” series, where digressions are our bread and butter.

Last time, we implemented indirect functions in a no-libc C program. Of course, we got lost on the way and accidentally implemented a couple of useful elk-powered GDB functions - with only the minimal required amount of Python code.

The article got pretty long, and we could use a nice distraction. And I have just the thing! A little while ago, a member of the Rust compiler team stumbled upon this series and gave me some feedback.

Learning Rust is… an experience. An emotional journey. I’ve rarely been more frustrated than in my first few months of trying to learn Rust.

What makes it worse is that it doesn’t matter how much prior experience you have, in Java, C#, C or C++ or otherwise - it’ll still be unnerving.

In fact, more experience probably makes it worse! The habits have settled in deeper, and there’s a certain expectation that, by now, you should be able to get that done in a shorter amount of time.

In the last article, we found where code was hiding in our samples/hello executable, by disassembling the whole file and then looking for syscalls.

Later on, we learned how to inspect which memory ranges are mapped for a given PID (process identifier). We saw that memory areas weren’t all equal: they can be readable, writable, and/or executable.

Part 1

I’m not sure where the day 3 challenge is going, because the problem statement for the first part is kinda convoluted.

As usual we have an input, like this:

vJrwpWtwJgWrhcsFMMfFFhFp jqHRNqRjqzjGDLGLrsFMfFZSrLrFZsSL PmmdzqPrVvPwwTWBwg wMqvLMZHhHMvwLHjbvcjnnSBnvTQFn ttgJtRGJQctTZtZT CrZsJsPPZsGzwwsLwLmpwMDw

Each line represents the contents of a “rucksack”, divided in two halves (which are called “compartments”), so for line 1:

When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how computers talk to each other.

The history of network protocols and standards is long and complicated. Starting with a comprehensive review would prove quite tedious, especially if such a review was done in isolation from modern use.

Hi everyone. Has it been two months since I last posted something? Yes it has!

That seems like a nice round duration, so let’s break the silence with a few announcements.

I have a new website

If everything goes well, you’re on it right now.

Does it feel okay? Take a minute to accustom yourself to your new surroundings. Identify potential sources of fresh water. Gather some supplies with which to fashion a makeshift shelter.