Work moment…

These past 78 days has been busy and uninspiring.

Oh, but dd, work drains everyone’s soul!

Not if you make your job a fun place. Improving your flow and making your own job an easier experience is part of your job.

Screw what your manager wants you to do. They don’t know what’s under the hood of the beast. Challenge your managers, keep track of work (using tickets), document your tracks.

If they fire you, your time is better used elsewhere. You tried to prevent Ethical Collapse, and that’s what matters.

Yeah, I should look around for a better place.

Reminder over, on to the more fun parts now. ～

Projects

alicedbg

alicedbg 0.1 was released! 🎉

It features a brand-new API as v2, new shell commands, the first breath of the memory scanner, and a disassembler powered by Capstone. Supported platforms are Windows (Vista and up) and Linux. I’ll do Linux build(s) for 0.2.

The older API, v1, is sticking around until I move two other projects to using the newer API. It will likely be removed in 0.2, and the v2 API will move to the root module path.

Although possible, I don’t expect to support Windows XP, because OMF support in DMD is going away soon, alongside Optlink, which saw its last release in 2013.

So far, for 0.2, the dump command-line switches have been improved, going from the ugly syntax “--dump --show i” to something memorable: “--dump-imports“. Best part, is that they still stack! So clean, so cute.

Oh, and, support for enumerating processes. Again, supporting both Windows and Linux.

Currently writing my own shared library loader (also known as a dynamically-linked library loader), dubbed “dynloader”. My current woes with bindbc keep growing, so I had to make my own, unfortunately.

It’s important to keep yourself to one task at a time, speaking from experience. So far, so good, with many items left to do for 0.2!

ddcpuid

ddcpuid 0.21.1 was released with minor fixes regarding AMD processors supporting AVX-512 and LA57 (5-level paging). 🎉

I’m still uninterested in fixing wrong core counts for some Intel processor in non-HTT environments (requires me to set up my i7-3770 again) and those using the Hybrid architecture (requires OS-specific calls, hoping it supports Intel’s ThreadDirector).

What a pain. Intel, fuck you! 🖕

gitsummary

gitsummary is a git summarization tool. It allows me to have an overview of project commits and therefore help write these status blog posts.

Very simple thing with a few parameters to tell git what to print.

Example output (shortened):

$ gitsummary --git-since="2 months ago"
# alicedbg:
- 13 days ago: Fix GDC compilation
- 13 days ago: object: Prep work to process reader

# gitsummary:
- 6 weeks ago: Init

It is possible to make it output raw HTML to be included here, or somewhere else.

ddhx

Restarted work on the ddhx rewrite with the new focus on internal APIs with the mentality of turtles all the way down and making working prototypes first.

I won’t have anything for 2023, as wished last year, but by having gained some interest in working in it again, may be interesting for a few people.

ddpicker

ddpicker, my Web Emoji picker, saw new updates with a dark theme, a favicon (cute!), and a new random Emoji button.

Next thing I may add is a codepoint (e.g., U+1FABC) search feature, and a minor styling update.

GitHub Portfolio

My GitHub Portfolio has seen a major styling update, shamelessly inspired by the ibm.com website.

This new style features a much more consistent and easier to read styling, and now features alicedbg as my current big project. So good-looking! So professional!

Wii, PSP, and The Scene

Recently, I picked up my old PSP and Wii, bought accessories to bring them back alive, and they’re still kicking!

These machines are still rather interestingly fun on their own, with scenes still ongoing for machines long abandoned by their creators. Although, don’t expect me to write Homebrew software any time soon. I should sometimes play with them just for the fun of it.

And yes, even the Grandstream GXP 1625, with its dual ARM926EJ-S processors configuration, can be seen as interesting. Its own little world, processing what needs to be.

Speaking of, unfortunately, I still have no interest and use cases for embedded. My poor Raspberry Pi 3B+ is still collecting dust. Maybe one day, I’ll do something with it.

Closing Words

I’m tired of many, many things, but despite that, I try, bits by bits, to work on my projects.

Good habits like small exercises, taking walks, and drinking water, help just by a little.

Have a good week!