About Mr. McCat

My name is Wicked Whisker McCat, or simply Mr. McCat.

Raving mathtard, C++ enjoyer, undecidable λC shill.

Ardent enemy of verbosity — there is no good boilerplate. DRY or die.

In real life, for the time being, I am a software architect (whatever that means) on a medium-to-large sized desktop application written almost entirely in C++ (circa 1,5Msloc).

Chief programming-related interests, aside from work:

• Excavating whatever binary files I can get my hands on;
• Functional Programming. Mainly Haskell these days, but looking towards expanding into languages sporting Dependent Types support, like Idris or Agda;
• Sometimes both of the above at the same time;
• Functional Analysis;
• Statistics. Less dabbling in it than having a long-standing grudge against people advising the use of bootstrapping with Hierarchical Linear Models to obtain p-values. These I am intending to wage a full blown paper war against one day.

Contacts

Should you happen to need or want to get a hold of me for whatever reason, feel free to DM me on 𝕏 @WickedMcCat.

About this site

The first and foremost among my interests which I wish to explore here is the dissection of various binary formats and the problems that arise when trying to parse, analyse, or validate them.

Some of these problems are domain problems, as in figuring out the external context needed to correctly parse some piece of the bitstream syntax.

Yet, other problems are tightly entwined with the programming languages that we use — they can and often will provide their own unique challenges in expressing all the necessary structures and algorithms needed to parse and inspect a certain format.

The inspection part is important, because it imposes a requirement of generating the accompanying metadata that would enable showing the whole structure in an inspector tool. Parsing alone is usually pretty straightforward, save for a few especially bogus pitfalls created by the authors of some of the formats.

Some formats are easy, some are decidedly not.

Let's find out which is which, and why.