Author: darthjedi

Where were you when I needed you!?

Over the last year, it’s been pretty hard to not put on a couple COVID pounds… or, let’s be honest, about 20 COVID pounds; and as of late, when I’m looking in the mirror, and I say “Man, I’ve gotten pretty fat”, my wife @amandarachael is quick to say “You’re not fat”…..

Well, today, I went to the chiropractor (long overdue), and the chiropractor says… hrm… “you’re kind of fat, that’s gonna hurt your back”.

AND Amanda is sitting in the chair, right next to me, and she didn’t jump to defend my honor! Where were you when I needed you?!?

Well played, fairweather friend! 😜

Socks and first world problems :(

I decided to treat myself to new socks, so I wouldn’t have to keep spending 15 minutes every morning searching the floordrobe for socks… only to find out that the new socks have a (l)eft and (r)ight orientation. 

HOW IS THAT GOING TO HELP???

To add insult to injury, I didn’t realize this until I finally decided that the socks were too uncomfortable and I needed to return them. I went to take them off and found the L on the R side, at least I got them switched around now….

#AlwaysListening

So… I was just driving down the road, and I said:  

“I hate people that drive in the passing lane below the speed limit”.

Jediah Logiodice

My zfold2 phone comes to life and says:

“Virginia has a law against driving to slow, but it doesn’t define how slow is too slow.” 

Google “Always Listening” Assistant

Building GnuDisassembler for Ghidra on Kali 2020.3

Let me save you all an hour+ of your life. 

Grab the latest version of Ghidra: https: https://ghidra-sre.org/

Use the Ghidra GUI to install the GnuDisassembler and the SleighDevTools.

Install the following dependencies to Kali:

flex

bison

texinfo

zlib1g-dev

grade

Download the latest binutils source into your ~/.ghidra/ghidra_<version>/ directory.  Link for the right version can be found in the build.gradle file in that directory.

Set your GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR to the location of your ghidra install (mine was /opt/ghidra/ghidra_<version>.

Check your version of gradle:

gradle –version

Compare the version of gradle Kali installed, to the required version listed in the /Ghidra/application.properties file from the source for the version of ghidra you installed.

Kali installed version 4.4.1 for me, but the minimum for gradle for ghidra 10 is 6!!

If there is a version difference, download the binary for the right version of gradle and use that to run your build command..

Sad to say, I spent over an hour trying to debug completely ambiguous errors from gradle (e.g. Could not find method get() for arguments [] on platform ‘linux64’ of type org.gradle.platform.internal.DefaultNativePlatform).

gradle build

Enjoy!

Through the looking glass

I’ve recently come back up for air (so to speak).

I’ve spent the last year in pandemic world trying to enable one of the world’s largest used car sales companies to have better experiences and more efficient ways to buy and sell cars online – without leaving the comfort of your “home”.

In some ways, I might be tempted to think that I am doing something really cutting edge.. which is why I feel like I have just come up for air.

I just finished a pretty amazing book called Sapiens – https://amzn.to/3jGq2bV.

Here are my thoughts:

This book is meta!  It is a story of myths and imagined realities used to frame up the story of myths and imagined realities all centered around this thing we called human experience. 

There are places in the book that you will find the author speaking authoritatively on ideas that he feels are universal, yet they fall short of accuracy and authenticity – but that’s the brilliance of the book – like a dream within a dream,  the book did such an amazing job at stretching the imagination both into the past and towards the future to frame a shared vision on the relevance of culture and society.

I could not put it down.

Jediah Logiodice

I followed up by reading A Crack In Creation – https://amzn.to/3ArJz6b.

Here are my thoughts:

Amazing story of how humans discovered how to reprogram the code that makes up their physical bodies – and the possibilities of amazing wonders or emerging horrors are limitless. 

I can almost imagine, that some years from now, the first sentient androids are going to be referencing this book as the dawn of the intelligence explosion Bostrom refers to as “Superintelligence”.

There is no going back now – as Collins would say,, let the hunger games begin.

Jediah Logiodice

But, that’s not all… we now have flying cars: https://youtu.be/a2tDOYkFCYo, and autonomous physical in-store shopping experiences: https://youtu.be/FynpkeS7RUM, and containerized housing: https://youtu.be/qVV6CyGJgZo, and artificial intelligence running buildings as a super organism: https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE.

I just picked up Homo Deus: https://amzn.to/2UToQaT.

It is incredible to think about how far we have come, as a species, in such a short period of time; I am really excited, but slightly reticent to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.