It’s been a hard year in Blogaria, and one of the hardest blows has been the news that Chris’s dear friend Rick Gleason died this afternoon, after having survived the twelve days since the Bali bombing.
When the world twists suddenly on us, when our hearts lurch and stammer, people often propose a moment of silence. That’s right; as I tried to say to Chris, it’s too easy to blather when you try to say anything meaningful about this deepest juncture.
I hope there will be due respectful silence for Rick (and Chris, and for Rick’s family). I hope that awe and grief stop trivial clichés, and allow silence to tell the truth about what’s going on.
But I also hope that the spirit of companionship that Chris’s loving commitment to Rick bespeaks will engender some furious memorial rejoicing, some thanksgiving for good things Rick meant to his friends, some conviviality that perpetuates the generosity of spirit of which Chris reminds the rest of us in blog after blog. I hope that the loyalty that Chris has been demonstrating for the last two weeks cuts loose now with some of the joy that keeps death’s power at bay. I hope that though friends move on, that friendship endures and thrives and through a web of one-or-two-degrees-of-separation wraps us together in a loyalty and friendship that beats cruelty and violence.
I hope that gentleness and affection win in our response to maddening loss, and that vicious brutality loses, it withers away and leaves kind souls to celebrate their friendship—in peace.
Peace be with you, Rick; peace be with you, Chris.
Posted by AKMA at October 23, 2002 09:36 PM | TrackBackAnd you, friend AKMA. Thank you.
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken (aka chris) at October 25, 2002 01:00 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Basil at January 13, 2004 04:04 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Jucentius at January 13, 2004 04:04 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Chroseus at January 13, 2004 04:04 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: Prospero at January 13, 2004 08:29 AMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Garnett at January 13, 2004 08:30 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: Sarah at January 13, 2004 08:30 AM