It's already on flikr

...so stop taking pictures already.

ARGF and friends

A (quite old) list of Perl and Awk vestiges in Ruby.

To be sure, ARGF is extremely useful, but the others really shouldn't have made it into the final design.

Ptrace 0.9.1

A Ruby gem providing access to the ptrace(3) facility has been added to the opdis repository . The initial version is available, as usual, at rubygems.org.

The design is similar to the BFD, Opcodes, and Opdis gems: a Ruby extension (in C) that provides a basic wrapper for the original C libraries, and a Ruby module that provides a more natural, Ruby-like interface.

Not all of the Ptrace features have been enabled or tested. Currently, the following ptrace commands are working and tested:

• PT_ATTACH
• PT_DETACH
• PT_TRACEME
• PT_KILL
• PT_CONT
• PT_STEP
• PS_SYSCALL
• PT_GETREGS
• PT_GETFPREGS
• PT_SETREGS
• PT_SETFPREGS
• PT_READ_I
• PT_READ_D
• PT_WRITE_I
• PT_WRITE_D

Definitely "cattle call".

Have to say, group interviews sound like a very good way to hire very mediocre people. Getting applicants "out of their comfort zone" is great for reality television, but not for assessing their ability.

2xV8 == V16?

A good overview of how the V8 JS compiler works. The interesting bit being the profiler thread, that causes the optimizing compiler to revisit 'hot' blocks of code.

The state of the art in malware

A pretty thorough analysis of the TDL-4 Botnet.

The most amusing bit is the antivirus feature.