September 15, 2003

Madame Takes a Powder

This blog is slowly dying -- on September 26, its first birthday, it's going into the deep freeze. The Madame will take her tarot mysteries elsewhere.

I'd kill it right now but some of the material is still new, and that Iowa interview is still sending visitors over here. A partial archive list appears below, or you can click on "master archive" above to see the entire fabulous mess.

In the meantime, check out the site I designed for my sister Lindsay's company Invisible Light Studio. The site is presently not working too well on PCs -- problem with the stylesheet which I'll change when I get home -- but I'm pretty happy with the quick work (1 day!) I did on this -- very much a "in-progress," it will change over the course of this coming week.

mandalawall.jpg

negril_3.jpg

Thanks for all of you who have visited here on and off for the past year. I'm sure I'll come up with something in the next year that will cover some of this territory, though it probably won't have anything to do with poetry.

Posted by Brian Stefans at September 15, 2003 01:53 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Always sorry to see a good blog boarded up.

Posted by: Jordan (no mask) at September 15, 2003 02:07 PM

Powder your nose if you must. We all gotta powder when there's a need to powder. But do please come back from said powder room. Your projects and opinions are interesting and thought-provoking, all for the better...

Posted by: Corpse at September 17, 2003 01:05 PM

:(

Posted by: adult chat fan at November 27, 2003 05:56 PM

i didnt even come up and its alrdy dying

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....

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Posted by: nude webcam chat at December 17, 2003 06:50 PM

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.

Posted by: Elias at January 18, 2004 08:09 PM

Note the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.

Posted by: Basil at January 18, 2004 08:09 PM

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

Posted by: Judith at January 18, 2004 08:10 PM

When 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: Newton at January 18, 2004 08:10 PM

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

Posted by: Benjamin at January 18, 2004 08:11 PM