In the morning I was looking at a project that was visualizing some form of incidents on a map. I was asked to participate at that project, they want me to build a backend data provider to feed this map, so I had to form an opinion. It looks quite interesting and it could be a good chance to gain new experiences, especially because I feel like the project scope is kind of well defined. I could be wrong there though, as history shows I was often wrong in terms of project scope.

After that was done, I basically spent the whole day reading assembler code. I started working through the first chapter of another book that I have with me, Hacking – The Art of Exploitation. I like the way the book is structured so far, although I can’t really tell, as it was only a section of the introductory chapter. The chapter walked the reader through analysing compiled C code with gdb, The GNU Debugger. The code was a loop that printed “Hello, World!” for 10 times. It was interesting enough that you could see something happening in assembler. Because a loop means, you almost certainly need jumps. That is, if they’re not optimized away.

The I tried to understand radare2, a software which should also somehow help to to reverse engineering / analysing assembler code. I am not yet sure though, in what sense it can be used. In the introduction they say two things: First, radare was meant to be a hexeditor. Second, it can now do lots of things and it has a really steep learning curve. I can see that it’s steep, but I’m not sure how to climb it.

After regular presentations there was a game night again, with pizza service. I think I ate to much of the pizza. At the game night I first did not play any game but just chatted in a small round. Then we built a group to play poker. I was very happy to play this again, with humans, and I’m always surprise how strongly my body reacts to this game.

We played in the way “buy in/buy out”, that means everyone starts with a stack of chips that is worth some small amount of buy in. You can leave the game early, if you decided to, then you either get money that you made (i.e. your stack grew in the meantime) or you have to pay money in case your stack shrinked compared to the beginning. That version was more relaxed than the ones that I played before which was in the mode of “winner takes all”. The latter means, that it definitely needs one winner, which makes the game go on for a long time. In the buy in/buy out mode, it’s possible to stop anytime for individual players.