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Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup
Find where WhatsApp chats live in an iPhone backup, decrypt an encrypted iOS backup with Python, and read your messages from ChatStorage.sqlite.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Is XMPP any good? Also, let's write a client in Tcl, maybe
I still have my Nokia 5800 lying around. It runs Symbian. That platform is quite different from Android. For one thing the internal storage size is 81 MB - less than what your single android app takes up, even in RAM, and it works faster than modern smartphones - e.g. the SMS app opens instantaneously. Another…
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Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.
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The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it (2015)
Do you recognise these images? There's a good chance you've seen some of them before now, probably several times. Here's a hint: They all depict the same thing.
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Rust9x: Compile Rust code for Windows 95, NT and above
You might remember my old post about the journey to get at least a bit of Rust code working for Windows 98 SE . Well, I'm back, this time with a more ambitious package:
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Practising Programming
When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment’s thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What’s less obvious is that they…
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Things I would like to see in a computer algebra system
If I were to design a computer algebra system (CAS) from scratch today, I would try to achieve the following goals. Several ideas have already been implemented in one system or another, but certainly not all at once. Some ideas could be adopted by existing CASes; others would require fundamentally different designs or…
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Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
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Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)
Just stop, y’all. It’s a waste of your time and your effort. Put down your Google search for an email regular expression, take a step back, and breathe.
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Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
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Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Take the pain out of Git conflict resolution: use diff3 (2017)
Hating git conflicts? Use git's built-in diff3 option to make sense out of it all!
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Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
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The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
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Rewriting Sysctl(8) in Rust: Systeroid
sysctl is a simple and great tool for modifying the kernel parameters. It does its job very well by providing an easy-to-use interface for /proc/sys. It is maintained as a part of procps toolkit for years and it can easily be considered a legacy tool today. So why not push it to its limits and turn it into a more…
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Using SBCL Common Lisp as a Dynamic Library
Have you ever wanted to call into your Lisp library from C? Have you ever written your nice scientific application in Lisp, only to be requ...
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I Avoid Async/Await
Whatever your stance on async/await, I’d like to pitch to you on why, in my experience, async/await tends to make code more complicated…
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When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code
When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly…
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Re-implementing an old DOS game in C++ 17 (2019)
Back in 2016, I started a side project to reverse engineer the game Duke Nukem II and build an open source reimplementation of its engine from scratch – called Rigel Engine (Check it out on GitHub)…
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Generate Python extensions using Nim language
A Python Extension is generally some code written in language other than python to extend the python ecosystem by exposing an interface compatible with Python API.Such extensions are generally in form of compiled code and loaded dynamically by the Python runtime ...
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Pointers Are Complicated III, or: Pointer-integer casts exposed
In my previous blog post on pointer provenance, I have shown that not thinking carefully about pointers can lead to a compiler that is internally inconsistent: programs that are intended to...
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Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
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Why Ruby Has Symbols
Difference between strings and symbols in Ruby
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Making Rust a Better Fit for Cheri and Other Platforms
Recently, Aria Beingessner published an interesting essay “ Rust’s Unsafe Pointer Types Need An Overhaul ”. There are several parts to this essay, all of which address issues which cause me pain in Rust, and which I would love to see fixed. I want to focus on one issue: Rust’s usize conflates address, data, and object…