The Movable Type demo this morning went well; I wasn’t assuming that the ten-minute time slot I had allotted to me would suffice for the prupose, and was even more skeptical when the presenter before me ate up five of my minutes. But I had prepared illustrated handouts, screenshots and arrows and all, and I was lucky that the act before me had used PowerPoint. I plugged the laptop into our network, asked the operator to fire up Explorer, and walked the class through customizing the interface, posting, and commenting, all in about seven minutes—and I think it went fairly well (having hard copy in front of them, to take away, helped measurably). On the other hand, only one of the class has tried MT yet, so it’s hard to gauge how effective the demo was; I was below the anticipated glazed-eyes quotient, though.
Then I survived a small meeting on how to allot the funds left over from a large technology grant. There was less money than Id hoped (that’s the bad news) but the other committee members unconditionally backed my plan to bring in some snazzy spokespeople to kindle enthusiasm for technology (and to help Seabury assess the possible pitfalls of technology for leaders in parish ministry). Arranging that’ll be fun, even though part of it will wash over into my sabbatical leave.
Add in morning prayer, midday mass, evening prayer, rigging up Movable Type for the class that’s using it, my two-hour Biblical Theology seminar, time spent photocopying handouts for the MT demo and more handouts for Biblical Theology, some pastoral conversations, and a couple student appointments. Stagger home, have some frozen pizza with Pippa as Margaret goes to a meeting in the evening, and I’m pretty well worn out.
Posted by AKMA at October 23, 2002 09:15 PM | TrackBackSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Botolph at January 13, 2004 01:19 AMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Jennette at January 13, 2004 01:20 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Lancelot at January 13, 2004 01:20 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Cecily at January 13, 2004 08:27 AMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Gervase at January 13, 2004 08:28 AMSeth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Mary at January 13, 2004 08:28 AM