Plurrrr

Mon 08 Aug 2022

unblob - extract everything!

unblob is an accurate, fast, and easy-to-use extraction suite. It parses unknown binary blobs for more than 30 different archive, compression, and file-system formats, extracts their content recursively, and carves out unknown chunks that have not been accounted for.

unblob is free to use, licensed under MIT license, it has a command line interface and can be used as a Python library. This turns unblob into the perfect companion for extracting, analyzing, and reverse engineering firmware images.

Source: unblob - extract everything!.

See also: binwalk.

Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay

One day before Rust 1.0 was released, I published a blog post covering the fundamentals of error handling. A particularly important but small section buried in the middle of the article is named “unwrapping isn’t evil”. That section briefly described that, broadly speaking, using unwrap() is okay if it’s in test/example code or when panicking indicates a bug.

I generally still hold that belief today. That belief is put into practice in Rust’s standard library and in many core ecosystem crates. (And that practice predates my blog post.) Yet, there still seems to be widespread confusion about when it is and isn’t okay to use unwrap(). This post will talk about that in more detail and respond specifically to a number of positions I’ve seen expressed.

Source: Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay, an article by Andrew Gallant.

A friendly introduction to Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is probably the most magical linear method in data science. Unfortunately, while it's always good to have a sense of wonder about mathematics, if a method seems too magical it usually means that there is something left to understand. After years of almost, but not quite fully understanding PCA, here is my attempt to explain it fully, hopefully leaving some of the magic intact.

Source: A friendly introduction to Principal Component Analysis, an article by Peter Bloem.