• Electrification

    This is a note about some steps that I and my family have taken to work to reduce our carbon emissions. According to the EPA, commercial and residential use is the fourth largest source of carbon emissions overall in the U.S., generating about 12% of carbon emissions. Some sizable chunk of that is fossil fuels…

  • Go experience report: the append function

    When the Go language was first publicly released it contained a package named container/vector.  The type vector.Vector was a name for the type []interface{}.  Vector supported methods like Len, Cap, At, Set, Insert, Delete, Push, Pop, and several more.  You can see the source code at on Github.  An interesting aspect of the package is that…

  • The 2016 Election

    Although I haven’t written in this blog in years, like many people I’ve been thinking about the recent U.S. presidential election. What I find most interesting is the continuing evolution of effect of the Internet on life in the U.S. The Internet is destroying the truth. By this I don’t mean the recently much-discussed issue…

  • Piece of PIE

    Modern ELF systems can randomize the address at which shared libraries are loaded. This is generally referred to as Address Space Layout Randomization, or ASLR. Shared libraries are always position independent, which means that they can be loaded at any address. Randomizing the load address makes it slightly harder for attackers of a running program…

  • Non-free Services

    As both of my faithful readers can see, my blog postings have dropped significantly. I’ve been posting my random little comments on Google+ instead. Which leads me to the following. There is a hard-core group of people who only use free software. I’m not quite that hard-core, but in practice I do use only free…