Month: September 2010

  • The Town

    Ben Affleck has directed a second movie with a real sense of place in Boston, The Town. Since I grew up outside of Boston, it’s really nice to see a movie which is set in Boston and has characters whom one can believe actually grew up there. Plus it has several scenes in Cambridge, where…

  • School Testing

    I always did extremely well on standardized tests in school, which convinces me that the standardized tests are almost completely useless for assessing knowledge or intelligence or the skills of one’s teacher. Success at standardized tests does not require general intelligence, it requires the particular ability to think like the people who create the tests.…

  • School Balance

    Both Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkeley, California have made efforts to balance the public elementary schools by family income. They do this by dropping the idea of the neighborhood school and instead sending some children to schools across the city, in order to get the average family income roughly equal at every elementary school. They do…

  • STT_GNU_IFUNC

    I recently added support for STT_GNU_IFUNC to gold. As you can tell by the name, STT_GNU_IFUNC is a GNU specific ELF symbol type. It is defined in the range reserved for operating system specific types. A symbol with type STT_GNU_IFUNC is a function, but the symbol does not provide the address of the function as…

  • Inception

    I enjoyed watching Inception, and as far as I could tell it was a consistent if complex story for the world that it set up. But that world was a very weird one. If my subconscious mind wanted to get rid of some outside influence within the context of a shared dream, it certainly would…