Check out the first post in this series: Stark Industries – Entrance into Madness

One of the things I learned at Stark Industries is how to do your job without the proper tools available… I was like MacGyver.

Part of my job was working with hexedecimal code. I had to parse this code, change it, and discern meaning from it. This normally wouldn’t be so bad if I had the proper tools.

It would be like MacGyver needing to incapacitate someone when all he has is a toothbrush and a drinking straw. I bet he would give anything for a knife, maybe a bat, or just a gun… maybe just something that just looks like a gun.

Well, I really needed an IDE. My title was “Software Developer” after all and I needed to develop software. An IDE makes sense right? This post isn’t about acquiring that golden idol that is the Java IDE. I am saving that post for when I venture into “The Process.”

This post is about making due with what you have. On my machine I had Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. Thats it. (And no internet) One of my collegues chose to use Excel and wrote VBScript to hack together a hex editor. Surprisingly, it actually turned out to be a very nice tool. I didn’t know VBScript and had absolutly zero interest in learning that POS language. Instead, I wrote my software in the only other alternative… Internet Explorer. You paste your hex code in a text box, all 100K of it, click a button and the Javascript does its thing. Oh yes, its was pretty damn slow, but it worked.