asm and reverse engineering

I've been lately giving a shot to some assembler tutorials. Just because.

I never did any serious assembler, but when I was into reversing I was eating asm for breakfast, but from the read perspective.

In https://github.com/kidd/assembler-tutorials there are the few codes I wrote, either following tutorials, or walking random paths myself, using nasmx macros.

In windows, there's MASM and NASM, but MASM is not in GNU/Linux, so the option was NASM. It's nice that it gives me the same syntax I was used to in the old days using W32Dasm, ollydbg, soft-ice and friends.

Anyway, I've been looking at nasmX, which are a bunch of macros that lift assembler a bit. At least, allowing you to write with ifs, whiles, and "forgetting" about the calling conventions. Super cool!

Meanwhile, I've been also following some reverse engineering forums, and rediscovered RE a bit. A nice fuzzy feeling that many things are the same, but tooling changed (radare2 is a must in linux, and the learning curve is vim-like).  Still, I'm starting to do my first hacks on android using anbox, apktool, and jd.  very basic stuff, but nopping a few things and rerunning them in the mobile is already an achievement!

 As always, lots of resources, and not so much time to swallow them.

Finally publishing commit-msg-prefix.el

It's been a few months since I released commit-msg-prefix.
Just to remember a bit what was it about, I created a gif so that we all can relate again to it.

The user story is the following:

• In your company/organisation, you have to follow some rule of prefixing all your commits with either a keyword (Add/Remove/Fix/Hotfix/Bump/Release) or an issue number, or something like that.
• When you are about to commit that, you know what you just did (you should!), but you can't remember which particular issue number was that.
• Then you go to jira/trello/github-issues/younameit and look for that and insert it.  

Usually, as it's been a long running issue, you have commits with that number, in your recent commit history, so an alternative to the last bullet point is to have a quick look at git log.

Well, commit-msg-prefix makes this automatically for you, so it shows the latest commits (filtered as you want), and lets you choose one (find-as-you-type provided by helm/ivy/ido), and inserts the first word of the commit.

Obviously, most of the relevant settings are configurable, so you can have support for fancier substitutions, or use mercurial logs.

The package itself is pretty simple, but it might be useful to others, and if it is, I'm happy to share it.  

I just issued the Pull Request for it to be in melpa, so more users can give it a try and I can test it a bit further. I hope it will be accepted  and will be available in melpa soon.

In the future, if it has some adoption, it might make sense to merge it into magit, but I don't want to bother magintainers when the idea is not widely tested yet.

Happy hacking!

So,... Here's Ivan Sutherland blowing your mind

Just by chance I stumbled upon an Ivan Sutherland's talk. And Listening to this guy is an enlightening experience.

The pace of his talk is calm but not slow, concrete but not obvious, and man.... he talks about history that he's lived in his own self.

For those who do not know who's Ivan Sutherland, he's the guy who invented sketchpad, where many of the concepts that today we give for granted, and some that we're just starting to develop now (most of it in the early sixties).  Here's the link to the sketchpad thesis, in case you want to read about it.

Btw, thesis supervisor: Claude E. Shannon.

Here's the talk. Give it a shot. Insight level: "Alan Kay".