Hello hackers,
Thank you to Meetup for hosting us - having Hack && Tell here always feels like coming home! Much love and appreciation.
Now, without further ado...
Eric showed us how he was able to help the DA's office investigate and prosecute human trafficking by giving them better tools for searching their data. He went through a few examples of how fancier technology didn't really address their top priority problems - for example, a map that led to more leads was less useful than tools for better investigating the leads they already had! It was an inspiring story about how the skills we have helped him literally free human beings. It's a helluva thing to be able to say at the end of the day.
Wesley made a 4GB file on a 232 KB filesystem by changing the list of blocks from a linked list to a loop! It was a great little deep dive into how filesystems work and how you can dig into the nitty gritty and mess with them for fun.
Zach wrote a presentation framework inside Emacs. The source files are org-mode files, a standard organized text format in Emacs. We're trying to convince him to write his own org-mode next ;)
Smooch is a web viewer for the Kisekae Set System, a system developed in the early 90's for creating digital dress-up dolls. Libby showed how a KiSS set works with specially-formatted image, palette, and configuration files, and how to turn that into something you can view in a web browser.
Lyn built a Rubik's Cube Solver based on the book "Mastering the Cube" by Don Taylor. She explained the algorithm her app uses to solve the cube, which isn't the most efficient but instead was designed to solve a cube as a person would - for the eventual purpose of teaching people how to solve it!
Rocky show how decompilation can be used to give more precise program location information to help with debugging. He gave an overview of how parsers, assembly code, and compilation work and fit together, and how programming language grammar is similar to human language grammar.
A longish somewhat technical version of this is https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/Deparsing-Paper project links include https://pypi.python.org/pypi/trepan2 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/uncompyle6 for Python and https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/B-DeparseTree/lib/B/DeparseTree.pod for Perl
- Slides
- Github - A Python cross-version decompiler
- Github - Perl's B::Deparse saving Abstract Tree Information and text fragments accessible by OP address
We don't have a confirmed date for our next event yet, but we'll email the list as soon as we do. Thanks for your patience!
That said, please start signing up with presentations now, so we have a sense of who's interested. If the date ends up not working for you, you could always present at the next time instead. Tell us about your hack here: https://docs.google.com/a/adityamukerjee.net/forms/d/1Sd8vxPQJ8CiPr87su0nrOdFX1jmI5ludwT-SziW3SxM/edit?usp=sharing
As always, you can follow us on twitter, and we'll let you know once we have a confirmed date for our next event ASAP!
Happy hacking,
&&{ aditya, danielle, john }