I am going through the following learning resource http://binary-auditing.com/ and am stuck on the first exercise in the File Understanding section. In the exercise I basically have to get the GUI to display a splash screen BITMAP when a certain MenuItem is pressed. I have found the resource for the BITMAP and know it's id though I'm not sure what to do next. Should I do DLL injection or create a codecave and if so how would I go about doing this. I've been searching for material to tackle this exercise for many days though can't seem to wrap my head around it, the subsequent exercises are similar in nature.
The following is the description of the exercise:
All You have to do is:
Display a splash screen (it's in resource of Rev1.exe), when You click on the Bitmap menu.
NO PATCHING & PROCESSPATCHING ALLOWED!!!
There are few ways to do it so, GENTLEMEN START YOUR ENGINES!
I know how to read assembly and have some understanding of converting it to higher level languages though have no experience of modifying execuatable in such a manner. I also can't seem to find any tutorials or resources on how to do this.
I'm going through the binary auditing series as well, and was searching for some clarification on what the author of rev1.exe meant by no patching. That's how I came across your question.
Anyway, you can find a great set of tutorials on binary modification and reverse engineering at the legend of random
In particular, I would follow the tutorial on Adding a Splash Screen although I don't know if that technique violates the no patching rule.
Related
I'm playing a game where our Guild is constantly sharing teams as screenshots in Discord. I'm wondering if I can find something that will convert those team images into text, using a library of exact images for each of the troops.
Online OCR does a marginal job because of the backgrounds behind the text, so it's not a great solution. Also, it basically solves the wrong problem.
I've found mention of the OpenCV library (for Python?), but the GitHub projects I've seen are looking at a much broader problem.
Here's the algorithm I have in mind:
Locate the team in the image and resize to a standard size.
Locate the sub-images for each troop.
Search the library of template images (about 800 -- a big job to
create!) for each troop and find a sufficiently good match.
Look up and return the text associated with each match.
Ideally, I would like to point the software to an image file and it would tell me the names of the troops in copyable text.
This might be an interesting enough project for me to finally install and learn Python (but that's a whole other question). For now, let's see what already exists that might work.
I am just getting into object oriented programming, and I was wondering, is it okay to put some code on the timeline, like stop(); and mouseclick events for moving frames, or should all this be on separate files also? If they do belong in other files, how would I go about doing that?
MPO is that you should learn the tool as the tool. I think that the timeline is the very best part of Flash, and if you throw that away, you are making your life harder for no good reason. I think all tools have a "code way" and "some other" way to accomplish what they do, and the default of most developers is to assume that the code way demonstrates your skillz and that "the other way" is so obviously easy that it's not worth your time to learn it.
IME, nothing could be further from the truth. I have learned these "other ways" in several tools/language, and you pretty much always get more power and productivity out of knowing both, at the risk of having a significant fraction of your fellow developers looking down their noses at you because they assume that if you're really good at "the other way" that you are doing it because you can't code. For this reason, there are very few developers who truly understand the full depth and subtlety of the timeline, and there are almost none who will talk about how to do this well.
I actually develop scalable enterprise-level Flash applications using the timeline for clients whose stores you've almost certainly been in within the past couple of days, so I do have a fair amount of experience in this area. My rule of thumb is that stop() is ok if it is unimportant to the overall functioning of the program (it's a visual thing only). However, it gets tedious after a while to keep adding it, so when you get to where you're not under deadline pressure, you'll probably replace that at some point with a Class that uses addFrameScript to do the stop().
The best use for timeline code is when you need to synchronize things (for example, with a streaming sound, which has absolutely zero Actionscript handles to get hold of it). Generate a bubbling event at the precise point where the narrator is saying "click the thingamajig" and you've animated the cursor over the thingamajig. Then, in the AS code that controls the parent of the timeline with the streaming sound (or grandparent, or whatever--somewhere positioned to catch the event), you'd put the thingamjig into the toggled state (for example by changing the data model the thingamajig is responsible for displaying).
Very, very occasionally, I will use timeline code to do something more significant. One example is that a swf compiled by Flash Builder knows what color its stage is, but one compiled by Flash Pro does not, without reading the bytes of the swf. I have a Class that fades a graphic in that can only get the real stage color sometimes, depending on how it was compiled (I'm not goint through the mess of reading the bytes--that's frankly ridiculous). So, I just assume we're fading in from white or something close to it (which we are most of the time). For the rare case where it's not, I've noted in the ASDOCs for the Class that it's ok to just populate the color variable from the timeline rather than worry about how to get it in there through dependency injection. I view this as kind of a poor man's version of the Flash Components properties panel.
Hope that points you in the right direction :).
I think it depends on what you mean by is it okay. (no I am not Bill Clinton)
You'll be hard pressed to get a positive response on this as most of the community on SO are developers and generally are not huge fans of using the Flash IDE/Timeline coding.
That being said, I try to always remain open minded and do realize there's a place for the Flash IDE in creating motion graphics quickly, etc. There's nothing that says you should not code in the timeline, if you absolutely shouldn't do it, they wouldn't have made it possible.
The problem I think arises when you start working with other developers and have to figure out where they buried some code on the timeline within some movieclip that is affecting things. For small projects this isn't really an issue, getting into larger teams (3-5 devs at a time, maybe more) then being able to work independently and collaboratively becomes a challenge.
One last point since you say you're just learning OOP. AS3 is a great language, tons of fun, lots of features provided by the run-time so you can just jump past some of the nitty gritty in C/C++ etc. But the concept of the Timeline is unique to AS3. So if you learn to do everything based on the Timeline, then moving to say C++ or Java or C# or any other OOP will likely be that much more difficult. For now I wouldn't stress about this since you're just getting rolling, but just something to keep in your mind as you move forward.
Edit (response to Ms. Blankenship's good answer and comments from Mr. Mear)
I think there is some arrogance on the side of developers. I can speak for myself in saying I've generally not been a fan of WYSIWYG editors (except when I try to build them, then they're okay :).
A couple of reasons:
They have in my past experience been terrible (take Word or DreamWeaver's code output as examples, try to work on a site some mom and pop threw together in one of those apps and you'll start to hate it too).
If someone was able to get this completely right it would invalidate a lot of knowledge I've built up (so it gets me into a defensive stance, not an objectively valid reason, I know).
Working with bigger teams finding code is key + the code editor is bad (compared with any of the alternatives, Flash Builder [my tool of choice], FDT, FlashDevelop, IntelliJ [my friends' tool of choice]).
Coming from a OOP background that doesn't include anything similar to the Timeline and potentially moving back to those technologies. You have the choice to be great at 1 thing or good at 5 things what do you choose? (I'm vastly over simplifying but hopefully you get the gist). I learned to use Eclipse writing Java, I can use the same tool to write C++, C, PHP, etc. This isn't to say I actually always use Eclipse for everything (lately been using SublimeText a fair amount), but I like that it's always an option. As an aside I'm not an Eclipse "Pure Blood", I started off early on playing with Flash IDE and HTML/JS in Notepad, used Visual Studio for a bit, eventually got pushed into Eclipse but have taken a liking to it for the all in oneness.
Ultimately there are too many factors in this open ended situation to say that one solution is the end all be all. To explain with an analogy, if you were to build a birdhouse a hammer, some nails, and some wood are probably all you need. If instead you want to build your own human house you're going to need some different tools (probably including a hammer, some nails and wood).
Also a related SO post (re-hashes many of the same points):
Why not use Interface Builder
I am attempting to learn css attribute relationships. With my current knowledge, I would venture to say that there are only about 30 or so attributes that the majority of web pages are built around, but how you match them up is what gives one page a cleaner look, better functionality, and an overall better experience for the user. Currently I am getting feedback that the 'only' way to learn is by a combination of experience and looking at examples of implementation(s) on webpages that have the feature(s) I want, and trying to replicate. I think this is too time consuming, and not an effective tool for someone wanting to develop a solid approach to CSS. Is/are there tools that you have used similar to any of the below that help you understand the interaction of the attributes for basic manipulation of semantic markup?
Current tools that have GUIs to allow quick feedback of attribute/element manipulation:
JSFIDDLE : An online platform for viewing HTML, JS, CSS, and the result in one window, allowing for common shared code.
Button Maker : Dynamic CSS/HTML generation for a graphical button.
SourceTree : For understanding repository structure for Git,
Mercurial and SVN version control systems.
Eclipse : An IDE with 'desktop' organization of multiple implementations, code, and information panes.
CodingBat : An online console for learning Python or Java by 'snippet' coding and viewing results of different passed parameters.
Codeyear / CodeAcademy : An online IDE to allow for both 'snippet' coding and viewing CSS/HTML/JS/results in several structured learning paths.
Specifically, I would like to learn the relationships of postion based styles, such as fixed, float and such.
For me, the best way to learn: Think up of something you want to make. Make it. Go through the process of finding out what works and what doesn't. Figure out how to fix it. Fix it. Be amazed at how crappy the result is. Repeat.
You won't learn all the little tricks by looking at independent examples. You won't learn much by "looking at" anything. Do it. Once you have a basic grasp of what's going on, make something. Copy something. Time consuming? yes, sure... if you say so. Experience comes with time.
The thing with copying other people is that you don't know the process they went through. Why did they do something a certain way? Is it even right? Just because somebody put it online doesn't mean it's any good.
So specifically, what function do you want to implement? Google that, read all the different ways people do it. Find one that you like, implement it. Tweak it. If you don't understand, look into that.
I think there's a term for when you're trying to find something, you go from one (related) thing to another until you forget your original issue... That's bad when you need to be productive. It's perfectly fine here, where you just want to learn everything.
For some things, it's important to have structure. Once you learn the basics, I think having some sort of structure or system will just slow you down. I like to go at it and solve a problem, learning as I go. When I'm trying to figure something out, I have nothing but Notepad and Chrome with a lot of Google search results tabs open. You don't need all these GUI tools. Sure they might make your development go a little faster with their auto complete or error warnings, but what's your rush?
Don't spend so much time finding the perfect set of tools that you never get to the thing you were finding those tools for. Just do it.
I am having an absolute nightmare trying to build anything of value with Sencha Touch. The docs seem to describe everything in bits in pieces without every tying everything together..
One of my key gripes is that I don't understand how anything is loaded into the browser.. If I simply define an Ext.List in index.js within this method:
Ext.setup({
onReady: function() {
}
})
Then that Ext.List is loaded into the browser for some reason. If I define multiple objects in that method, how does it know which to put into the browser? Furthermore, when I extend Ext.List and put that in the above method, nothing happens. What's going on?
Better yet, where I can find good documentation that explains how this framework works? I've pored over everything on the Sencha Touch site, including the tutorials, and all of it is horribly incomplete.
It does seem confusing at first. What's important to understand is that Sencha Touch different from jQTouch or jQuery Mobile in that you create your interface in a completely programmatic way, os there's no defining the UI in a HTML file or anything like it. The framework is written much more in the tradition of classic widget set's, QT for example. This style isn't something traditional web developers are used to, but I'd actually say the documentation is quite complete. It's just not written in a style familiar to web developers.
This is how it works: one component needs to have an attribute fullscreen: true set on it. This component becomes the root, and all other visible UI components are added to this component using the .add() method. But there all defined in Javascript. That's the most crucial thing to remember.
You have probably already found it, but the main documentation repository is the API documentation (here). If you're going to get anywhere you will have to get used to reading stuff from here quite a lot. Important facts here is that everything in the UI inherits from the Component class, and that Panel is probably
When I was getting started, I found this page a little bit better for starting. I especially recommend Drew Neil's excellent screen casts on panels.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that Sencha Touch is still a young library, and that it has it's roots in the highly programmatic and OO-centric Ext.js framework. Taking some time to really learn the fundamentals of Ext.js probably helps a lot in the long run when trying to get going with Sencha Touch (tip: Observable is the most important class).
So sorry, you're right that the documentation isn't very friendly. But the UI you get from Sencha Touch still blows the competition out of the water when it comes to mobile interfaces, so I'd say that it's still worth it if you're really want the most slick mobile UI there is.
I recommend you to checkout the conference videos http://www.sencha.com/conference/videos specially the "Structuring Your Sencha Touch Application", I restarted an app from scratch following the MVC pattern explained in the video, in two days I got where I was before plus a ton of fixed bugs but most importantly now I really understand what I'm doing and why it was so hard to get things to work before using this standard pattern.
I found one of the best places to learn sencha touch is this 4 part series on building a simple SenchaTouch1.0 app :-
http://miamicoder.com/2011/writing-a-sencha-touch-application-part-1/
Follow it up with the MVC example :
http://miamicoder.com/2011/writing-a-sencha-touch-mvc-application/
Having completed the above tutorials gives you the comfort and confidence to approach SenchaTouch's own documentation, tutorials and screencasts.
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I'm supposed to do a presentation for my co-workers on a web framework I evaluated. These people are developers and hate long and boring PowerPoint stuff, so I got lots of little code snippets. I also put together a small sample application. My question is, how do I present the code so people can follow?
Some things I thought of:
Put the code on PowerPoint slides, looks pretty bad and unless it's an image I can't get syntax highlighting to work. Having my code in images is a pain and doesn't scale well to different resolutions.
I played around with the S5 XHTML presentation format and integrated a JavaScript syntax highlighter. It's a bit clunky but workable (I'll get some grief for ignoring the company's CI for presentations since I wouldn't use their templates. Don't even ask...)
I could put together a script (notes) and "live-code" in front of my audience. I don't like this so much because it keeps me so busy that it's hard for me to give a good explanation while I write. And there's also a high chance of me causing errors and make them wait.
A screencast? But then I wouldn't have to be there... Maybe narrate it?
So what would you do?
I could put together a script and
"live-code" in front of my audience. I
don't like this so much because it
keeps me so busy that it's hard for me
to give a good explanation while I
write. And there's also a high chance
of me causing errors and make them
wait.
I like this option, if you can get your demo streamlined to the point of not holding up the audience. You can do what TV cooks do when the recipe takes more time than they have; start the coding, then jump ahead to one that's 90% or 100% done.
If you have a colleague you can get up to speed, you can have them do the coding while you talk and point out what they're doing.
You can use your IDE, which will give the syntax highlighting and show your audience how to compile, deploy, test, etc. I would recommend using an oversized font though, just for the session, so that everyone can see.
Does your IDE allow opening/closing regions or code segments? In Visual Studio you can create code regions that you can expand or collapse. If your IDE has the ability to do this you could create your code samples as regions and then open/close them as you go through your presentation. You could switch back and forth between your presentation and code samples in the IDE, but wouldn't have to code on the fly. Using open/close allows you to hide the code you're not referencing to keep things less cluttered.
I actually saw this done at Agile 2008 and it seemed to work pretty well.
You can only fit so much information on a PowerPoint slide but that's actually a good thing: people can only look at a certain amount of information and get something meaningful from it.
So if you can't fit it on a PowerPoint slide, you need to rethink your approach.
Code snippets are good. They don't need to be highlighted. Just put them in Courier New (or some other fixed width font) and it'll come across as code. Code snippets don't have to be complete either. Just boil them down to the essential concepts (using comments or ellipses to indicate missing code).
Programmers being programmers, they'll probably ask questions when it gets to the technical, which is good.
Also, if the programmers are familiar with something similar try and relate all the concepts back to what they know. It makes it easier to grasp. Like if you're explaining Spring MVC and they know Struts, explain the Struts equivalents. It can be useful to put that sort of thing in table form (even as a handout).
That's what I did for exactly that (a Spring MVC primer for Struts programmers).
If you want your audience to see a lot of code snippets, especially lengthy ones, you could print them out as handouts or provide them as notes in PDF or text files (people can follow along on their laptops).
Actual presentation slides should contain the smallest amount of text (including code) necessary to convey your ideas. If there's a lot to read from a distance, your audience will get tired after awhile and might have trouble following along. Let people read the full code sections on their own laptops or handouts, while calling attention to just the critical parts in your presentation slides or script.
If they don't like Powerpoint, don't use use it. We use Camtasia screen recording to record 'live' demos for presentation to customers (live in quotes since it doesn't have the disadvantage of crashing halfway through your presentation :-). They always prefer to see it in action rather than what they think is fudged functionality.
It's pause-able like your Powerpoint slides and has the advantage of syntax coloring since you just record bringing your up in your favorite editor. It's also dynamic which is much better than Powerpoint (although I've seen some people do crude animation with multiple Powerpoint slides, always funny to watch in action).
This basically maps to your screencast idea but, if you want a reason to be there, do a large number of small screencasts to show interspersed between your real presentation, narrating (in person, not on the screencast) if necessary.
Personally, I'd prefer to send a fully narrated Camtasia off to the target audience but that's because I'm not totally over my early-career phobia of public speaking :-).
In a pinch, you could do a real live demo since your audience (is videance the equivalent for video presentations?) are programmers and will understand any problems you have.
I had this done to me, and thought that it was the best possible solution:
Get another person to help you out. While you are talking about the code, let the helper type the code. This way everyone in the room will be looking at the code, while listening to you explain it.
This of course involves finding someone who can help out, and understand the code just as well as you do. But the results can be great.
If you could do it all in a screencast and you wouldn't have to be there, then do a screencast and don't be there. Nobody complains when a meeting gets canceled. Just distribute the video, maybe with an accompanying report with notes or links so people can read more about the tools you're demonstrating.
And you'll get more credit later as your co-workers and managers talk to other people: "Hey, did you see the presentation Bibac did? No? You should; I'll send you the address after lunch."
If you're demonstrating code in the presentation, then also consider having the finished project available so people can try it for themselves.
When I give presentations involving Visual Studio I put code snippets on the general tab of the toolbox. During the presentation I drop/drag these code snippets into a code file, markup page, etc.