In my last post, I talked about the underpinnings of networking at the lower layers. This post is going to talk about NAT: network address translation. NAT is almost as universal as IPv4 networking, and is used nearly universally on home and small-and-medium-sized business networks—with good reason, too: Having more than one IPv4 address carries [...]

So, I have someone on Identi.ca (@flameeyees@identi.ca) discussing with me me about my views on FatELF. No biggie, but trying to continue the argument (pointless as it is) there is just too much work: the character limit does not permit real discussion on such a complex issue. So, permit me to address each of the [...]

Since 1996, when I was introduced to the concept of free software and the GNU/Linux operating system (in the form of Slackware), I started to take a look around and found myself amazed at what was the free software community then. Watching it build massively amazing pieces of software that are second to none in [...]

There are a variety of tools that are in the “computer person’s” toolbox—lots of them are niche tools that are great for certain types of situations. But sometimes, the tool doesn’t exist (or, it exists, but is so esoteric that maybe you cannot find it). What do you do then? In today’s strange situation, I [...]

Back when the IBM PC and IBM PC compatible machines were created, there was nothing but a single defacto standard for interacting with the system. The BIOS—which was little more than a piece of hardware containing software routines that helped an operating system interact with hardware present on the system—provided routines that could be called [...]