Programming?!

[Goujer (she/her)]

Well I took machine architecture and we went over basic machine code and assembly hacking. Surprisingly basic hacking was an part of that class. I learned that strings and library paths are stored in executable code just strings. You can edit these strings to make the program say something funny or change the path to a library file to a different one. This works as long as the edited binary has the exact same permissions and size in bits.

I think I picked up most of this browsing around forums for hacking early versions of Mac OS X. Surprisingly no one has ever tried redirecting library calls in Leopard to Tiger libraries to try and get the Classic environment working.

[Bella]

That's really cool! I wish we'd gone over stuff like that in my computer architecture class, it was a joke.

[Goujer (she/her)]

We had this thing called the bomb lab that really taught how to analyze compiled code. But of course that was x86 PowerPC is a completely different thing.

[Goujer (she/her)]

I have a friend who now works at Apple and has found the parts of the source code for Mac OS X that I would need to get Classic running on Leopard but he can't give it to me for obvious reasons.

I also started a little side project at work where I'm trying to make an offline version of Barcode Kanojo, it's good Java practice and some of my assembly skills come in handy when the decompiler fails.

[Bella]

Dude, that sounds awesome!

As for myself: been doing DB programming at work lately. Definitely a big change from what I'm used to but interesting nonetheless.

[Goujer (she/her)]

I wish I was doing programming at all at work. It seems like the higher ups are contemplating so much that they can't decide what to have me do. For the time being I'm doing data entry, which I made a script do for me so now I'm way ahead of schedule and I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs and spinning in a chair for 8 hours a day because the only other thing they have for me to do while they set up testing servers for my data is read 500 page user manuals for our products and catalog there feature sets.

But what is DB programming like? Is it much different then something a C like language or is it more like a specification for imputed data?