What did you do this past week?
My group for the IMBd project met and started to dissect the project. I started to make tickets for the things we need to do in the project. Our group came up with an idea for the website that I’m super stoked about, and we even looked into a couple of apis that might be good for phase I.
What’s in your way?
There’s a lot of websites with good databases on information we’re interested in. Unfortunately, some of them don’t have an api. I don’t think we really want to get into web scraping, so we’ll probably have to keep looking for different sources or different data.
What will you do next week?
I’m supposed to be looking into how to design an api. I’ve only worked with Postman for generating requests, so looking at it from the other side will be interesting.
What was your experience of exceptions, IDB1, and types?
I worked with exceptions some over the summer, but it was good to cover the topic more formally and completely. I’m both excited and nervous for IMDb1. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I’m looking forward to learning the technologies and about our website idea. Learning about which types are mutable was really useful. I didn’t realize tuples were immutable.
What made you happy this week?
I made panna cotta and a peach gelatin using unflavored gelatin. It was my first time using the unflavored gelatin, and it was a lot of fun. You can make jello out of almost any liquid with the gelatin. I‘m also pleased that my basil seeds germinated. Hopefully I’ll have a large enough crop by late fall to make pesto.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I was trying to reverse engineer a .class file for the CTF this Friday. I had trouble getting started because java isn’t supported by gdb, but I didn’t realize that at first. I thought that if I made the .class file into a .jar file, I could run it with gdb. This isn’t the case. .jar files are used to package different classes and resources into one file, so the code can be easily distributed. Next I tried to run strings on the file, which yielded terms such as LineNumberTable and StackMapTable. It turns out that these are attributes of the class file format. The attributes are metadata about your code that are stored in the class file. LineNumberTable, for example, will match up sections of the JVM code array to line numbers in the source code. StackMapTable stores information about variables to verify their types. Finally, I downloaded JD-GUI, which de-compiles java class files. It was super easy to use, and a really interesting tool.
