Tag: Theory

Undocumented APIs

Because I always love to push the envelope, and love learning how different services work in the background, I find myself running into undocumented APIs fairly regularly. Through writing many random bots, I've come up with a pretty nice workflow for handling, and documenting these APIs.

This article is going to cover how I typically go about the endeavor of documenting unknown APIs.

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Coreboot

BIOS

We've all seen one of these two BIOS screens upon starting a computer:

American Megatrends BIOSAward BIOS

On the left is American Megatrends' BIOS, on the right is Award's BIOS. These are the two main BIOS manufacturers, and they have almost complete marketshare when it comes to firmware on laptops and desktops. Most newer machines don't show these screens anymore, but they're typically still running one of these two pieces of software. I'm going to cover what these two pieces of software do, and an alternative to these.

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Unicode

Unicode is one of those things people don't commonly think about, but benefit from immensely. To explain why Unicode was necessary, we need to look back at the early days of computing.

Before the 80s, if you owned a IBM mainframe, you were pretty much stuck only buying IBM computers. The reason for this is that IBM computers could only talk to other IBM computers, due to there being no "standard" way to encode characters. This meant that even files made on an IBM likely couldn't be read by competitor's machines.

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Demystifying Lossless File Compression

The Idea

We all know the basic idea of file compression. We see ZIP files regularly, and know how to extract and compress them. Although most everyone knows how to use these compressed files, and understand that compressing files makes them smaller, most people have no idea how it works technically.

Though this may seem like magic, it's a fairly straightforward concept. In this article, we are going to be demystifying file compression.

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