• .eh_frame_hdr

    If you followed my last post, you will see that in order to unwind the stack you have to find the FDE associated with a given program counter value. There are two steps to this problem. The first one is finding the CIEs and FDEs at all. The second one is, given the set of…

  • .eh_frame

    When gcc generates code that handles exceptions, it produces tables that describe how to unwind the stack. These tables are found in the .eh_frame section. The format of the .eh_frame section is very similar to the format of a DWARF .debug_frame section. Unfortunately, it is not precisely identical. I don’t know of any documentation which…

  • Natural Law

    In the past I’ve argued that it may be possible to build a basic system of ethics by looking to our evolutionary background to discover what sort of behaviour is natural for humans. This is a natural law approach which looks to our evolutionary heritage to discover the essential nature of humans. Robert George’s work…

  • 2010

    Apologies for the long gap between postings. It’s been a busy month. Like everybody else, a look back at some things worth noting in 2010. The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway. A surrealistic quasi-comedy masquerading as an SF novel. The writing style often reminded me of Neal Stephenson. Taking apocalyptic SF one step further, most…

  • Healthy Expenses

    The long-term budget forecast for the U.S. federal government looks dire. This is almost entirely due to health care costs. People talk about social security going bankrupt, but that is actually easy to fix with relatively minor tweaks, such as increasing the income limit for which people pay social security taxes, and/or increasing the retirement…