I found myself in a weird situation: a long long time ago, I wrote a java application that I didn't touch nor ran for a few years. Today, I found it on a backup and wanted to run it again (its a graphical application for generating HTML pages). However, it failed in a particular feature. Not with an exception or stack trace, just functionally. Now, I have the source code at hand, so I look into the code and find the logical error. Below is a snippet of it:

if (myHandler != null) {
  int i = startValue + maxRange;
  for (int j = endValue; j > i; j--) {
    ... (do some logic)
  }
}

It doesn't matter what the code is supposed to do, but from what I can remember, I shouldn't be adding maxRange to the i variable (yet - as I do that later in the code). But instead of setting up the java development environment, emerging the IDE etc. I decided to just edit the class file directly using dhex (a wonderful utility I recently discovered) because doing things the hard way is sometimes fun as well. So I ran javap -c MyClass to get some java bytecode information from the method, which gives me:

   8:   ifnull  116
   11:  iload_2
   12:  iload_3
   13:  iadd
   14:  istore  5
   16:  iload_2
   17:  istore  6
   19:  iload   6
   21:  iload   5
   23:  if_icmpge       106

I know lines 11 and 12 is about pushing the 2nd and 3rd arguments of the function (which are startValue and maxRange) to the stack to add them (line 13). To remove the third argument, I can change this opcode from 1d (iload_3) to 03 (iconst_0). This way, zero is added and the code itself just continues as needed. And for some reason, that seems to be the only mistake I made then because the application now works flawlessly.

Hacking is fun.