Right about now, Trevor is leading Seabury students through David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, so that someone so inclined can read (Jeff’s permalinks are screwy — he discusses SPLJ on April 13, 7, and 6) a number of reports on what they think about the book. This passed the threshold of blogging because this morning David notes a review of the book, and urges those who haven’t already bought their copies of the book (and he knows there are some of them, because he’s been keeping track) should do so now before the paperback edition drives all of the more attractive, more profitable hardcover copies out of the market. Authors always complain about the covers that get slapped onto our books, and publishers rarely listen; in this case, David is absolutely right.
While I’m talking about David, I took the geography test too. I recognized all the names (except “Western Sahara,” which I didn’t know had attained name-hood) but all the new -stans tripped up my percent score.
Posted by AKMA at April 14, 2003 09:28 AM | TrackBackWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Hansse at January 12, 2004 10:16 PMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Amie at January 12, 2004 10:16 PMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Chroseus at January 12, 2004 10:16 PMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Isaac at January 13, 2004 10:41 AMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Tobias at January 13, 2004 10:41 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: Dudley at January 13, 2004 10:41 AM