The best laid plans of mice and men… How’s that go?  Unfortunately, I fed the gremlins before midnight or something the day before my presentation and I was not able to show the epic WPF visualizations I had planned.  Better late than never, here are 2 different perspectives of the native heap.  Green is an allocated busy block, red is anything else right now.  I have a ton more data to display but have been working on the interactivity and having the various chunks be more useable.  Right now there just blocks, though they are relative to the actual size, color coded and laid out in a representative fashion to where they lie in the address space.  They do not individually respond when clicked on, to detail the specifics of their allocation.You can definitely see the patterns and layout of the heap, including the pattern demonstrated by the link lists that manage individual sizes.  (re: CORE Security Technologies Gera R. has a paper on heap-defragmentation).I’ll blog more about this process soon; I’m still on the road having just gone to a SwA (Software Assurance) conference in DC (sounds spooky).  There was an interesting talk by Rick Kuhn of NIST on Combinatorial testing and covering array generation. That’s it for now, more soon. 

I decided to play around with IE and see how well I could adapt WPF to a systems application. This was my first try, so it sort of looks like an alien toothbrush or something, but it get’s the idea across.

It’s essentially a height map, and a mesh, pretty basic; I haven’t calibrated it to operate on the heap exclusively or anything like that. I just wanted to start playing around with 3DTools. I’m giving a presentation at BlueHat in a week or so, but I totally have all this done already and I’m just going to blog about it bit by bit — right!!

I like some of these visualizations quite a bit;

• http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=244
  
  • I’ve got a reason for likening that one, more on that later
    
• http://www.processing.org/exhibition/index.html
  
  • This site’s got lots of neat conceptual stuff, not WPF, but I guess it’ll do…
    
• http://www.orbifold.net/unfold/info.php
  
  • Not really visualizations, more diagramming right?
    
  • I’m going to see how well my native C++ version comes out in the next day or so too
    

Anyhow, my first real blog post ever!

Later/Shane