I have recently been learning about Angr, a binary analysis framework developed by UC Santa Barbara and Arizona State University. It caught my eye because of its versatility and utility in reverse engineering binaries whose disassembly and decompilation are hard to understand manually. Oftentimes, it is simply due to the fact that it was compiled from newer or relatively less popular languages like Rust or Haskell, where the state of currently publicly available decompilers leaves much to be desired. Angr's ability to perform symbolic execution therefore allows us to blackbox certain functionality within the program (or even the entire program) by attempting to find the right input for a desired output.
UIUCTF20 was a really fun Animal Crossing themed CTF that ran from July 17-19 2020. While I have not played the game before, I somewhat knew what it was about from watching Youtubers play it, and also from memes about the turnip stock market.
Our team PPP came in third place, which went above my expectations as most people playing were relatively new and I am quite happy with the result. Now, on to the writeup!
In this post, I talk about how themes of alienation pervades the music of the English rock band Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd is one of the greatest bands in popular music history, achieving international commercial success and widespread influence in subsequent musical developments. They formed in London in 1965 to humble beginnings as a student group, and comprises Syd Barrett (guitar and lead vocals), Nick Mason (drums), Roger Waters (bass guitar, vocals), and Richard Wright (keyboard, vocals).
I have been using a multiple monitor setup on my Linux system for a long time, and one thing that always annoyed me was that the default monitor arrangement detected by X Server doesn't reflect its physical positioning (why should it?). Due to a combination of laziness and the fact that reordering it with nvidia-settings's X Server Display Configuration takes only a few seconds, I never bothered to find the time to find a proper fix for it. However, the fix is actually incredibly simple.
My Jekyll blog has been on the default minima theme since its inception. It was functional and served its purpose, but as someone who has extensive web development experience having designed and implemented sophisticated web interfaces back when I was working at Saleswhale, I felt like I could definitely do much better. This post talks about how I re-themed the blog.
Today I created a new tab for my blog, 'Dev Cheat Sheets'. This page will contain common commmand line commands that I use often. I have a habit of simply performing a reverse-i-search on my terminal when I need a particular command, and therefore I have never really bothered to firmly commit them to memory or find a proper place to record them. However, this gave me problems when...
I joined the Autolab team at the close of the semester this year. The Autolab team builds and maintains Autolab, an autograding platform for programming assignments that is currently being used by around 20 universities around the world. It is used very extensively in most computer science courses to grade programming assignments in Carnegie Mellon. In this post, I will share how I came to join Autolab, and the role that I am planning to play in it.
This is the first part of a 2-part guide on how you can SSH to the Andrew File System without keying in your credentails, as well as mounting the Andrew File System (AFS) locally on your Linux machine. This is highly useful if you are a student or faculty member from one of the many universities around the world whose computing systems runs on AFS, such as CMU, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, to list a few.
This post is addressed to my future self, who (hopefully) would found a startup of his own someday. This is my last week at Saleswhale and I would like to pack as much wisdom into this post from my experiences there and from the wonderful people that I have talked to. It is a very personal post for me and it speaks straight from my heart. To be honest, I teared up a few times while writing this. I hope you will feel the sincerity in my words, and I hope it will inspire you.
It was three years ago that I was introduced the concept of the "power law" in Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. Thiel states that "We don't live in a normal world, we live under a power law. Exponential equations describe severely unequal distributions". This, in effect, is very similar to the 80/20 rule that I discussed in my previous post, and observations of such a distribution can be found ranging from income distributions to the fact that the best venture capital fund investments grow to a value that eclipses the rest of their portfolios combined.
08 July marks 8 months since I started working in Saleswhale (08 November 2017), and also the last month that I will be here before enrolling in college. It is an opportune time to look back and reflect on my growth as a software engineer and to collate the lessons that I have learned so that I may remember them in my future endeavors. Actually, given the stark contrast between academia and industry, I am quite certain that I will gradually lose sense of the things that I learned, especially those regarding working in teams and software engineering best practices.
Last week I had the good fortune of having a one-on-one session with Gabriel, the CEO of Saleswhale. As I rarely have the chance to go on a one-on-one with Gabriel I decided to ask him questions more pertinent to his role as a CEO. This has been something that I have been very curious to learn more about after my previous one-on-one with Ethan, who shared with me his experiences, challenges, and many thoughts as the CTO. In this post, I will share what I feel is probably the most important takeaway for me during the session with Gabriel.
Static site generators like Jekyll makes it easy to write and build static websites. However, this still comes with the problem of a suitable deployment method. I will share about my thought process and the best approach I found for tackling this problem.
It has been a while since I had intended to start my own technical blog. The idea began seriously floating in my mind after my one-on-one with my senior colleague Javier in Saleswhale. Starting a technical blog was one of the valuable pieces of advice that he gave to me, and it was something that he regretted not doing earlier.