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iPad
It’s taken me a while to understand the point of the iPad. I can type on a keyboard faster than I can press keys on a screen, so the iPad would not be useful for me as a computer. And it wouldn’t fit in my pocket, so I wouldn’t carry around the way I carry…
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After the Apocalypse
Coincidentally, I saw the movies The Road and The Book of Eli just a few days apart. They are two different and yet oddly similar visions of what the world will look like after civilization collapses. Men will be predators. Women will suffer. Roads will be left covered with cars. Cannibalism will rise. People will…
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Change Congress
Lawrence Lessig is pushing for a constitutional amendment to change the campaign financing system. You can sign his petition over at http://action.change-congress.org/amendment. I think Lessig is right that campaign financing is broken. Elections for national office are very expensive. Politicians spend a lot of their time fund-raising. Jesse Unruh was probably reasonably accurate when he…
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Go Linkage Names
All Go code lives in a package. Every Go source file starts with a package declaration which names the package that it lives in. A package name is a simple identifier; besides appearing in a package clause, package names are also used when referring to names imported from another package. That poses the problem of…
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Protected Symbols
Now for something really controversial: what’s wrong with protected symbols? In an ELF shared library, an ordinary global symbol may be overridden if a symbol of the same name is defined in the executable or in a shared library which appears earlier in the runtime search path. This is called symbol interposition. It is often…