August 23, 2025

Hello again! It's been a while.

I've kept busy. Unfortunately... most of that business has been dealing with real life and my day job. Outside of that, though, I've done a couple of things since my last post. Really, I've had this draft sitting unfinished for a while now. In very typical fashion for me, though, I've had to narrow scope and focus on just putting pen to paper.

So, site updates are the focus today! I've aded a sidebar menu for navigation, as well as some small font and layout improvements. The sidebar's currently very barren, both styling- and content-wise, but right now you can find a link to my Backloggery account. Granted, so is this homepage and the rest of this site at the moment (if you're coming here in the future and I've managed to substantially improve this place, see here for an archived version as of the time of writing, including the previously broken elements I discuss later). Improving the whole site's presentation is on my todo list, but fair warning: it won't come fast. Creativity isn't my strong suite (but I'm trying!).

Also, if you (my currently mostly imaginary reader) may have noticed parts of the site broken in the last few weeks. There's a reason for that: I've been working on a script to automatically update Neocities whenever I finish an update to the site. I host the source code for this place on GitHub, and the goal's to automatically update the site whenever I push updates from my local repo to the GitHub remote one. The script's gone through a few iterations so far, and I want to document the process on a separate page at a later time since I think it'd be interesting to read through as someone making a new site, so I'm not trying to make this a comprehensive walk-through of my process. But currently, it's a Node.js script I intend on using with Git's pre-push hook. After having issues with the official Neocities Node library and the only fork I could find, Neocities-Extended, I just decided to roll my own using Node's native HTTPS API as a learning experience. Still, it's far from done, and I haven't looked into using GitHub Actions (deploy-to-github seems promising...), so that might end up being my next step. Sorry if any further script testing ends up temporarily breaking anything else in the near future!

Finally, I've got some plans for future site pages and shrines I'd like to create. I'm really excited about it, but I don't want to go into details quite yet since I also don't anticipate they'll be ready to show any time soon. If the rest of this place is any indication, though, you'll likely see a new page or two (however barebones they might be) popping up in the near future!

July 07, 2025

I've been wanting to do some exploring into Windows' .exe format lately, as well as x86-64 assembly in general. There's something really interesting to me about looking at and understanding the exact bytes that your computer is also reading from, seeing byte-for-byte what your computer is told to do with no room for hidden instructions, behind-the-scenes compiler optimizations, or reading between the lines. At a level where what you see is really what you get.

It's dawning on me as I write this that even looking at the bytes of an executable program, there's still deeper layers to go. Looking at the raw object code and assembly instructions leaves no room for behind-the-scenes compiler or assembler optimizations. However, any program for Windows will still depend on calls to the Win32 APIs, and those are currently opaque to me. Granted, to make a Windows program, first I have to create the universe. I've got to start somewhere.

So, the first thing I did after setting up a project folder for this exploration was create myself a Hello World program in C:

...and then, subsequently, install a compiler. Yeah, whoops. Forgot about that.

I opened the resulting hello_world.exe up in a hex editor, which told me what the resulting bytes were, but nothing about how to read them. After a brief stint looking into disassemblers, decompilers, and debuggers, I tried taking a look at my .exe in Ghirda. I'm not overly familiar with Ghirda, so that was intimidating. After that, I took a different approach and started looking for resources on Windows' EXE format.

That eventually lead me to 0xRick's A dive into the PE file format article series. I've only read part-ways through Part 2 at the moment, but so far it's exactly what it says on the tin -- a (seemingly well-researched and thorough!) writeup on the Portable Executable (PE) file format that Windows has been using for its executables (and DLLs, system libraries, etc.) since the Windows NT days. Very cool. I also took this time to grab the PE-bear tool that 0xRick's articles use. It's a very nifty tool for viewing breakdowns for PE executables and their sections/headers.

My "Hello World" in PE-bear:

I fell down a really neat rabbit hole looking into the DOS Header and DOS Stub portions of the PE format, as well as the 'MZ' magic numbers that indicate an MS-DOS MZ executable. It's a fascinating relic of backwards compatibility, and I really like the idea of using a custom DOS Header/Stub to implement an MS DOS program within a fully-featured Windows PE executable. It could make for a neat easter egg, although I feel more potential for a slightly larger project. Could two instances of the same executable, one run under Windows and one under DOS Mode, communicate in interesting ways? Unsure at the moment. I'll sit on the idea for now.

July 01, 2025

I haven't forgotten about this place. Admittedly, it's a bit intimidating to think about all of the potential directions to choose from. This place is currently more or less a blank canvas.

I went to the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Florida a few days ago, which was very nice. The place is very akin to a zoo, albeit packed into a smaller space than the zoos I've been to. I got to see all sorts of crocodiles, alligators, and caimans from across the globe! There are so so many different species, and all of them had plaques explaining more details about them. I took quite a few pictures with my iPhone 8.

They also had turtles, tortoises, lizards, snakes, etc., not to mention lemurs, birds, etc. All types of reptiles definitely accounted for, though. I'm not the world's #1 reptile fan, but it was really amazing to see them all. Probably my favorite was the Indian Gharial. I nabbed a photo of their plaque, as well. I love their awkwardly long, thin snouts. It's honestly a little hard to imagine them walking around out in the wild with those things. Also saw some Galapagos Tortoises, which I've got a soft spot for. I knew they were huge, and they certainly lived up to that expectation.

One thing I never hear anyone talk about is the stonework and statues they have on display. They give the place a certain vibe along with the animals, although I'm not sure what to call it. It's a strange mix -- I saw a Buddha, some Moai heads, several alligators, a huge and elaborate carved dragon... it was all super impressive. I can't imagine how much effort some of it must have taken.

I will say, though -- it was absolutely sweltering. I was there aroud midday. It was worth it, but God, Florida's summers are brutal. Beautiful weather, but not fit for human habitation.

I'll edit this later to attach photos.

EDIT 2025-07-06: I've added images! I'll upload more images when I have a better solution for browsing them, but for now, I've included four below.

May 26, 2025

Lately, I've been wanting to make a website for myself.

I've always been a lurker in any internet community I join. Over the years, though, I've gradually realized that's really not how I want to carry on. I want to contribute to the spaces I'm in. I want to be part of a community. I want to be online. That said, lurking for years means I don't really have an online home to call my own.

I know social media isn't for me- I have no interest in making a profile on Twitter, Reddit, or any other major site. I want a space to express myself, though, and all of my interests. I don't want to limit myself to any specific topic. I want control over my space, and to not need to conform to any specific template. And, at the end of the day, I really want to experiment with web design. I love the retro- and indie- web, and I've dabbled in the long past, but web design is a blind spot for me. I really do want to write more code to do less.

So, I made a website.

Right now, this space is one blank page with a single blog entry, but I don't plan to keep it this way forever. I have big ideas, and I want to do something different than I normally do -- I want to stick around long enough to make some semblance of those ideas become reality.

Watch this space :)