AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Could you elaborate? What do you think the problems with the conventional resume are?

I don't know that the problem has to do so much with the audience as with the complicated dance between the resume writer and the presumed audience. Audience*s*, I should say, because many resumes have to be crafted to get past a bone-stupid or simply clueless HR drone *and* pique the interest of the clued people. Tough task. How would an information-design approach help?

I'd think that academics might take a tip from what artists and writers have been doing for the last six or eight years and prepare a portfolio CD or DVD to augment the resume or CV. Recapitulate the CV electronically with hyperlinks to actual publications: representative articles, the first few chapters of a book, some representative blog postings...

And the CD itself isn't enough. It ought to have a decent label on it too.

Good points -- I’ll have to think more on this.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

When 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.

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read: