Category Software

Shellcodes, explained.

Many friends often ask me 'What are buffer overflows?' or 'What is an exploit' and often they are people with some programming experience but little or no understanding of lower level programming. I usually describe the process in simple terms and if someone wants more info I refer them to a good book or an online tutorial. This article is a very good short introduction for someone quasi-knowledgeable in C and/or some x86 asm with a casual interest in security.

Will Wright on the Computer History Museum (Google Video)

The man behind the SimCity and the Sims series of games, some of the world's most successful and original games of all time, speaks about game design, invoking the user imagination, modelling, and his own approach to gaming. Fascinating.

HDR, Panoramas and the Jungle.

Today I took some pictures of Athens from Mt. Penteli just before sunset. The angle is more or less southwest. I used Auto Exposure Bracketing (±2 f-stops) and then prepared some HDR images. The one I thought was visually the best I downsampled to 2Mpixels and uploaded it here. I also made a panorama of […]

The Lion's head on a plate.

Microsoft has announced that it has bought Lionhead Studios, one of the UK's leading (and controversial) game development companies. Microsoft most probably has no clue as to how Peter Molyneux (its head) works and I suspect it's not going to be too long before he leaves LH with a select team to found another company and promise the world once again.

iAlertU

Funny, yet useless application of the SMS (Sudden Motion Sensor) and Apple Remote as found on the new Macbook Pro.

Scaling Rails

Interesting article on scaling a Ruby On Rails setup. Also parts [2] and [3]. Kudos to the guys for sharing.

Textmate!

Ever since I moved to Mac OS X from linux as my main desktop platform a bit more than 4 years ago, I found the shortage of a decent (let alone good) dev. editor frustrating.

Ip2Nation Improved.

It’s a bank holiday here in Hellas and I decided to take some time off work. Being bored with ‘important’ stuff, I added a graphical country identifier to comments. It’s mostly an aesthetic addition, but might also prove useful in other ways. The information comes from comparing the commenter’s IP address (the address of his/her […]