The code asks "Where am I"

The overall picture of software is very tangled though the principles are simple. It seems to me that the design structure of computation itself is weak in principle. The establishment of layers can make tasks simpler to implement, however the overarching goal is left to hang in the wind at the end of the process.

I don't find it hard to deal with library functionality, but there is a point where these can obfuscate deeper problems with design model and the correspondence between utility, control and application.

I have incorporated the changes to ( paragraphing indents and justification on left and right ), in the XML code for the blog, so I don't have to script it for every post. I like the fact that text is aligned on the right as it seems much more readable, much like a book.

This the Microsoft design modularity which I think is restrictive and limits the potential of application. It is a form of gate keeping to control the access to the hardware. It is possible to get information on how the hardware works by having the software, however it is perhaps a failure in the hardware designers skills that they cannot devise a useful proprietary hardware that is not exposed by disassembling the interface code.

Here is a link to a website which discusses this issue and the security issues that surround using shared libraries that may be replaced by a malicious application to allow breach of security and allow a local MiM attack on the users private information, or the comprise of the machine for some other use. Link is HERE at securityfocus.com .

Tow things I noticed as I read through the article and one is that they have a very secure grasp of the topic and two they show the application of some neat tricks. It is not possible to absorb all the possibilities of what can be done with a piped OS interface and this is a cool new one I learned there.

Quote from "man grep" and this is something that is useful to find a value and show what lines are right after it, or in its context.

 Context Line Control
   -A NUM, --after-context=NUM
     Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines.   Places
     a line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups
     of matches.  With the -o or --only-matching option,  this  has  no
     effect and a warning is given.

The article is well written and informative and if you have an interest in this kind of lower level interface, then it is a very good read. The second part of the article is good and is here: Part 2 DLL and .so

Another good reference at yolinux is here and they describe Linux ".so" files. May be better for the ASM averse programmer, but requires a bit of understanding of the overall concepts to make sense of it.