Technolo-babble

After finding out that Qt is now available under an LGPL license (well, as of March 3), I've decided to revive work on my thus-unnamed C++-based cross-platform DM-IDE project (compare to Crashed's Python-based DMIDE). Previously I was using wxWidgets (which I'm not particularly fond of), but now I'll be restarting the project under Qt (which is much more elegant!). Initially I'm probably going to keep the IDE closed-source but may free it up after it's been polished a little.

I've not done much for the IDE quite yet (I'll have more free time soon), but I did manage to nearly complete a syntax-highlighting routine. All that's left is to add multi-line functionality to strings and preprocessor commands per the escaped-newline sequence and {""} blocks, and handle embedded string objects "[rawrVar]" --- neither of which will be at all difficult (surprisingly). After that I can start working on other (less-interesting?) aspects of the IDE.

I'm not making any suggestions at any kind of release cycle, and I probably won't be making regular updates on the project's progress (especially after my membership expires and this blog becomes unusable), but I'll leave off with a small teaser of what I've been toying with for just a little while now:

My membership expires in 26 days, 2 hours, and I likely won't be renewing it (for quite some time, at least), so here's my poof post. Grab the libraries while you can if they interest you; you won't be able to access them once my membership expires.

I previously posted that I would be participating in IainPeregrine's "Get Something Done" event. Unfortunately real life has intervened. My relationship with my girlfriend of the past year---anniversary was last Friday---has been going rapidly downhill and I'm afraid we might soon break up. For that reason, I haven't been developing much of anything, and I'm officially withdrawing from the event. Sorry guys.

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Update: We broke up.

A long, long time ago, I stumbled upon Joel on Software, where Joel Spolsky blogs about things of relevance to techy programmer peoples like myself. I haven't followed every post thoroughly, but today I decided to follow my e-mail (I subscribed to get e-mails of updates to the blog), and came to Joel's Stack Overflow DevDays post. Now, I hadn't known about Stack Overflow before, but after some exploring, I'm already in love with the site.

If you're a programmer, odds are at some point you've hit some kind of snag. Here's a community where, regardless of your language, problem, or whatever, you can post and likely receive instant feedback (I got 5 responses basically within the hour of the post on my C++ question!).

Now, this community isn't exactly geared towards BYOND, but as it is independent of language specifics, I imagine you could simply use "byond" as a tag when you post your question, and it'd be easy enough for other BYOND users to find the question. This may not be useful without a large BYOND following on that site, but if you program in other languages (C++, Java, whatever), you'll find a rather large community of users there willing and able to cater to your problems. And you can of course always provide help in return. :]

For binary-diving reverse engineers, the hex editor is of great importance. It allows you to perform a deep inspection on every byte in a file, and as such is one of the first tools any reverse engineer should grab.

Up till now, I've been using XVI32; it's a rather simple hex editor, and when I'm digging around in hexadecimal, the last thing I want to do is mess with an unruly tool. Normally, I would recommend this program to anyone.

Today I was thinking about my choice of hex editor, and I was wondering if anything new had come along over the years that was worth looking into. Sure enough, 2 minutes with Google and I found exactly what I was looking for:

010 Editor
Now, normally I don't get overly excited with this kind of software. IDA-Pro and SoftICE can barely get a smile at me. With 010 Editor, the fun still hasn't ended. Let's take a look at it.

After you've been delving around with a binary file for long enough, you often find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over again. 010 simplifies this with a built-in C-like scripting language, with the usability of Python. You simply create a script file, type in some code, save, and it's ready to execute!

When reversing file formats, the goal is usually to map out all kinds of arbitrary structures. 010 Editor supports a template system, by which you can use the aforementioned scripting language to essentially map out the structures of the file format. The definitions look just like C-structs, and you can even use typedefs and enumerations to help make the data that comes out more easily understandable. What's more, the struct definitions support inline code, so if, say, the first byte of a structure determines how the rest of the structure is laid out, you can put that logic right into the structure definition!

This all sounds well and good, but how practical is it? Well, after I downloaded the software, I put about 5 minutes into reading the documentation on scripting and templates. After that, I used various file format definitions I have laying around to write a set of templates (with the format spec. in front of me, each took about 2 minutes). That's fast! I can already tell how this type of functionality will greatly improve future reversing endeavors.

Of course, the templates feature and the scripting aren't the only cool things that 010 packs, but they certainly were what made it stand out. If you want to look into this nifty piece of software, you can try it for free for 30 days, or buy it for $50 for a home license. Here are a couple shots of my play with it:
Viewing a file with a custom template
Looking at my templates (not too many...for now)