Programming

🧭 Where we left off Welcome back to our ongoing series on measuring test coverage for binary programs! In part 1 we used Go’s built-in -cover flag — clean and accurate, but only works if you own the source and can recompile. In part 2 we used valgrind and gdb to trace gzip without touching its source. In part 3 we explored Intel PIN, a proper dynamic binary instrumentation framework — powerful, but it came with a ~100MB proprietary C++ SDK and was limited to x86_64. ...

🎄 Intro It is December, the most wonderful time of the year for programmers. But as we log in for Advent of Code (AoC) 2025, you might notice the atmosphere is a little different. We passed a decade of Eric Wastl’s incredible work, and with this milestone comes a significant shift in tradition. Before diving into solutions, I want to take a moment to reflect on the state of AoC this year, the changes we are seeing, and why—despite everything—we keep coming back to the terminal. ...

😸 TL;DR Being lazy, I made a tool to run qcow2 images for my convenience. It now supports x86_64, aarch64, s390x, and ppc64le. Feel free to use it if you find it useful! 📖 The back story If you’ve ever typed qemu-system-x86_64 into your terminal, you know the feeling. A creeping dread. A cold sweat. The QEMU headache. It’s that special migraine reserved for developers who know they’re about to spend the next ten minutes deciphering their own shell history to remember that one magic flag for networking. ...

▶️ Intro : Let Me Be On the previous post we continued our journey with a more complex scenario, using a mix of gdb and valgrind to trace all the function execution inside a given binary. This time, hold on because we’re cranking up the complexity. We’ll dive deeper into low-level analysis and explore how to use Intel PIN, a powerful dynamic instrumentation framework for manipulating and inspecting executable code at runtime. (Photo by FURQAN KHURSHID) ...