A skill set that I haven’t quite had the chance to foster just yet is that of reverse engineering software. It’s not so much that I lack any fundamental understanding of high-level software development, low-level software concepts, or operating system concepts, but more that I just haven’t taken the time to practice and develop the skill. I’ve decided it’s time to change that! One of the ways I’ll be doing this is by working on crackmes....
The dining philosophers problem is a classic problem in the realm of computer science. If you’ve had any formal CS education you’ve more than likely seen the problem when learning about concurrent programming. Today we will take a look at the problem and look at an example of how we can solve it. The Problem Suppose you had a round table with five silent philosophers sat around the table. Between each pair of adjacent philosophers is a chopstick (so, 5 total chopsticks) and there is a bowl of rice in the center of the table....
Typically my weekends are spent hiking with my camera, but this past weekend I was knocked down by a pretty nasty cold. As a result, I found myself toying around with various programming projects I’ve had laying around. Here for a while, I’ve been curious how emulators work, so I took this opportunity to start venturing down that rabbit hole. During this excursion, I decided to start my foray into emulators by writing one for the game Space Invaders, which ran on an Intel 8080 microprocessor....