Monday March 24, 2003
The Guardian
A 29-year-old, middle-class man somewhere in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital has become one of the most intriguing stories on the internet. Known simply as Salam Pax, his online diary has fascinated the web's myriad users with its sharp observations of a tumultuous six months for the beleaguered Iraqi nation that has included a presidential election, yet another UN resolution, its resulting weapons inspectors and, of course, the approach of war.
Story continues below; here's the blog Where is Raed ?
As the build-up to conflict intensified, more and more people became drawn - through forwarded emails, weblogs, or message boards - to the compelling musings of what appeared to be an educated, if cynical, young man in Baghdad waiting for war. His diary, mysteriously titled Where is Raed?, has recorded, with humour and in eloquent detail, the anxieties of the Iraqi capital's besieged citizens as they awaited attack - their rush to tape up windows, the stockpiling of groceries, the increased presence of menacing Ba'ath party officials on the streets. By last Friday, as American B52s finally homed in on Baghdad, the website had become the most linked-to web diary on the internet as visitors, in fear of his safety, eagerly awaited his next posting. At the time of going to press, Salam hadn't posted again since Friday.
But is he real? It has been one of the most popular and debated questions on the internet for weeks. What has been troubling many visitors to the site is the question of whether Pax is who he claims he is. Never ones to spurn a conspiracy theory, internet users have queried whether he is an ordinary Iraqi man located in a Baghdad suburb, as he vehemently says he is, and put forward wild claims that he could be anything from a Mossad agent to a Saddam stooge intent on pumping out misinformation for the gullible masses.
To start with, there is the mystery of his cryptic name. It doesn't take long to realise that "Salam Pax" is a simple play on words meaning "peace" and "peace" in Arabic and Latin respectively. This mirroring motif is reflected in the website's address, www.dear_raed.blogspot.com, with its palindromic "dear" and "Raed". There has also been a lot of chatter about the true identity of the eponymous "Raed" from the website's title, Where is Raed? Is "Raed" a euphemism for a family member in trouble with the Iraqi authorities? Or is he Salam's gay lover? Speculation has been rife. But isn't he just understandably protecting his identity?
But the doubters seem to ignore the most compelling evidence that Salam is who he says he is - the detail of his day-to-day life. Those who know Baghdad well, and who have read the diary closely, say there is no doubt in their mind that whoever is writing it is currently resident in the Iraqi capital. The author may display evidence of spending time in the west (possibly Britain, though he does use Americanisms) with his cynical sense of humour and love of David Bowie lyrics, but the reams and reams of fascinating detail about domestic and street life in Baghdad are highly convincing. After all, why would he make it all up, especially for the long period before it even became the internet phenomenon it is today. As Salam himself said last Friday: "Please stop sending emails asking if I were for real. Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy. Well, except my own."
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Baghdad calling
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:
Posted by: Helegor on January 19, 2004 12:39 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: Machutus on January 19, 2004 12:39 AMLet'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: Daniel on January 19, 2004 12:40 AMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Humphrey on January 19, 2004 12:40 AMBut 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.
Posted by: Sampson on January 19, 2004 12:41 AM