lowleveldesign

I use a private wordpress.com account and write notes in markdown. It supports full-text searching and has a nice markdown renderer. I publish quick notes/bookmarks as blog posts and important notes that I plan to constantly update as static pages. Categories and tags help me arrange things in the side menus.

Well, I can tell you few reasons why I am still using (and will use) Sublime:

- it is way faster to start than, for example, Visual Studio Code and I just prefer it for quick edits (at the same time it is easier to configure than gVim/Emacs and has modern UI) - I like the way multi-select works in general and in the vintage mode specifically (I'm very productive with it) - I use it heavily when I need to analyze source code - the indexer is fast and allows me to quickly jumps between symbols and files

It does not mean I use Sublime solely. When I need to develop some code in Python/PowerShell/Go/C#/... I switch to Visual Studio Code, where I have all the necessary plugins and debuggers. About a year ago, I turned to Sublime from gVim (which I have used for more than three years) and never looked back.

If you are on Windows you may consider using Log Parser Studio [1]. It is a GUI over logparser.exe which understands a lot of various file formats and uses SQL to query them [2].

[1] https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Log-Parser-Stud...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logparser

I am using reader on wordpress.com [0] - it works fine unless you need categories/folders for your seeds.

[0] https://en.support.wordpress.com/reader/

Debugging a syscall or start of the process was a great way for me to learn the system internals. I have some experience with Windows debugging and, after reading the article, I find that configuring the kernel debugging in Windows is quite easy. And I really like the live kernel debugging feature, when you either use windbg (that requires the debug boot flag) or simply run livekd [1] to analyze the running system data (for instance ALPC connections, handles, or loaded drivers data). Is there anything similar available in Linux? I plan to learn Linux internals and would love to use the kernel debugger next to reading the source code and books.

Tangential, but if there is anyone interested in Windows debugging (including kernel debugging) have a look at the Inside Windows Debugging book by Tarik Soulami [2]

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/live...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Debugging-Developer-Re...

You may have a look at “The Magic of Math” [1]. I’m reading it right now and I am loving it. It contains a lot of interesting problems from arithmetics, algebra and geometry. They are well explained and show that math is about creative thinking and not about memorizing equations.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Math-Solving-Figuring-Out/dp/04...

Contributing to an open source projects is a great way of learning too. It forces you to read and understand the project’s code and concepts behind it. Then you practice coding by implementing your new feature. You also need to test it thoroughly. Finally, you will get a code review for your code.

Sorry it won’t be about Cortana but Windows Search in general.

Windows Search was great in Windows 7 - you could configure the fulltext search index through control panel and use it from the start menu. I used to index all my markdown notes and pdf documents with it. Then it started getting worse and worse with later versions of Windows. The start menu search looks comppetely detached from the index settings and, as you noticed, can’t even find installed applications. The only way to use the „old good” search is by using the search box in the explorer window when you are on the computer level. I’m still wondering what was the reason for those changes.

Tangential, but if you would like to learn more about her life, there is a movie entitled „Temple Grandin” (http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1278469/). I found it inspiring.

I have also used markdown files in git for quite some time. When I was running Windows 7, I added my notes folder to the Document library and was able to search my notes from the start menu - that was really great. But then Windows search got broken in Windows 8+ and I started looking for alternatives. I played with OneNote for a while, but missed VIM key bindings, markdown and easy online access to my notes (OneNote online editor is quite heavy). About two months ago I switched to a private Wordpress and till now I am really happy: full-text search works like a charm, I can tag my notes, use markdown (even with Latex expressions) and for cheat sheets (or field notes) I use pages.

You definitely should go for it. Writing helps a lot in organizing your knowledge. I have a technical blog where I publish my small discoveries or results of some longer research. Each time I write a post some interesting questions will pop up in my head (even when I feel I know the matter very well). Additionally, I am really happy when I can give someone a link to my post that answers his/her question. So good luck and I hope we will see your blog post one day on HN :)

Have a look at Bruce Dawson blog [1] - he has written many articles explaining ETW and its tooling. You may start at the summary page [2] to check the covered topics. "Ask the perf team" blog [3] contains also a lot of interesting posts on Windows diagnostics, but unfortuantely is no longer updated.

[1] https://randomascii.wordpress.com

[2] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/

[3] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askperf/

Great comment! I have one point to add to '"Researchey" green-field development for data-science-like problems':

6. Use assertions for defining your expectations at each stage of the algorithm - they will make the debugging much more easier

I'm also against home-brew crypto, but the author clearly states that what he presents has only educational purpose. It's a bit like cryptopals - you also implement your own crypto in order to learn something.

If you are interested in details of the TLS protocol, check out these two books:

- Implementing SSL / TLS Using Cryptography and PKI [1]

- Bulletproof SSL and TLS: Understanding and Deploying SSL/TLS and PKI to Secure Servers and Web Applications [2]

In the first one the author implements the protocol (RSA/DH) from scratch (without even using any crypto library). The second one is a classic and contains a lot of interesting scripts (the chapter on using OpenSSL and creating your own PKI is available for free: https://www.feistyduck.com/books/openssl-cookbook/).

I spent some time studying TLS and wrote two blog posts [3][4], in which I decrypt the network traces of the TLS sessions. Maybe someone will find them interesting too.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Implementing-SSL-TLS-Using-Cryptograp...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1907117040

[3] https://lowleveldesign.org/2016/03/09/manually-decrypting-ht...

[4] https://lowleveldesign.org/2016/05/10/tls-1-2-aes-gcm-and-ne...

+1 for dnSpy. It's not only a decompiler, but also a debugger. Additionally, it has the best IL editor I've ever used. A parser for the native parts of the PE file (headers and sections) is a great feature too.

The executable can be found on the release page [1]. I don't know any Windows ports of ltrace, ktrace, or dtrace. But you may have a look at the list of ETW events [2] supported by the Windows kernel and you should find the ones you need for your diagnosis. With each version of Windows the list of event providers for different parts of the system is also growing (you may use 'logman query providers' to list them).

[1] https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace/releases/download/1... [2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Thank you!

This tool is not supposed to compete with ProcMon, which I consider the best tool of the trade. But... currently ProcMon can't be run on Nano Server (thus for instance on Docker). ProcMon does not trace RPC/ALPC requests either. I even suggest in the wiki that you may pipe the output of wtrace to ProcMon (I wrote a simple tool send2procmon [1] for this purpose): wtrace notepad | select-string "Rpc.*Call" | send2procmon

[1] https://github.com/lowleveldesign/send2procmon

Me too - I usually start my diagnostics session with Procmon. Not so long ago, Mark Russinovich revealed that they are working on a command line version of Procmon for Nano server (https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-16...). I hope they will release it soon :)

Thank you.

Thank you! I use a small number of ETW events (one of the reasons is that I wanted to use the console output). WPT (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/commercial...) or Perfview (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=285...) reveal the whole power of ETW, providing details such as thread context switches, DPC or APC requests.