I had a spectacular two-part afternoon today, after goodbye-ing everyone at DigID World. Chris Locke offered me a lift to the airport, by way of lunch and (of course) Starbucks. We talked about everything under the sun — life, love, DigID presentations, God, Feuerbach, Heinz Kohut, and Chris’s various gigs and book projects. We talked about the menu at the Original (TM) Pancake House, which promised "hand-crafted omelets" that might take as long as 30 minutes to prepare.
We talked about music and coffee and blogging. We talked about an idea for a keynote on teaching and technology that I’ll be giving in the spring. We talked about how to get to Denver International Airport. We were still talking to each other as I headed into the terminal and Chris pulled away.
And as soon as the Transport Security Authority decided that I wasn’t a threat to safe air travel, I headed to where Doc Searls had suggested that I meet him in Terminal B. We talked about organizing our digital photos, about conferences, about home-schooling, about people at the conference.
Next time somebody tells me that the Net makes people antisocial, I’ll be thinking about the precious gifts of friendship that I’d never have known apart from the Web. Thanks from the heart, guys.
Posted by AKMA at October 17, 2003 11:18 PM | TrackBackThat 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.
Posted by: Archibald at January 13, 2004 09:05 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: Thomasina at January 13, 2004 09:06 AMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Mable at January 13, 2004 09:06 AM