Languages and buffers
To my absolute surprise, I discovered that Python has a nice, logical, and at least 60% sane syntax for dealing with character set conversion. (This is in contrast with virtually all other languages on earth, which have barely entered the Unicode era, and if so, somehow believe that their version of Unicode is the one everyone else will use, and that they will use it correctly. Ahem.) Now, in general, I do not like Python’s overly-formal, whitespace-dependant syntax, but if one is trying to fix a major fuckup caused by a sequence of text misconversions, Python can come in handy.
And on an unrelated note, recently found a fascinating buffer overflow howto on cDc. It’s a bit dated, but it explains the gritty details very well.