JulioBiason.Net

It’s been a long time since I took part of a meme, but… What hell, let’s do it again!

First the instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“Now at Klondike River Lodge for breakfast, at turnoff for Dempster.”

Neil Peart, “Ghost Rider”.

[... or "C, variants and the NULL"]

In C, you have a way to represent nothing. It’s NULL (all caps). NULL points to nowhere and it’s defined as “0″. Why would someone use it? Well, if you have a list and some of the elements aren’t valid, you make them NULL. Since NULL is not a valid pointer, your application will crash if you try to access it. The whole point of NULL is to provide a way to represent the nothing. There is also a nothing type “void”, which you can define anything statically, but you can make it a point of it. Since all pointers have the same size, a “void pointer” is, basically, a pointer to anything.

Also, C have the idea of “nul-terminated strings” (yes, with just one “l”.) the “nul” character is represented by “\0″, which, in practical terms, is a space of memory with the size of a “char” with the value 0 on it.

When going down to the very bits of NULL and nul, they go almost the same, except for their size.

C++ was build on top of C, but if defined NULL as a pointer pointing to the byte 0. It’s almost the same thing as the C NULL but, because it’s a pointer, it doesn’t need to be converted when you’re using a CPU which have a different size for “int”s and pointers (usually, pointers are “long int”s or even more, if your CPU have more than 64 bits.)

Objective-C is a variant of C adding support for objects in a different way and the biggest “user” of Objective-C is Apple. The Apple version of Objective-C provides some basic types like lists. But, because you can’t leave an empty space in the list (which I think it similar to the way we deal with nul-terminated string), they created a NSNull object, which is a valid object, but it represents the null (which, by the way, are called “nil” in Objective-C.) It’s not an invalid memory address, as it points to a real object. The NSNull object provides just one method, “null” which returns a “nil” pointer (are you confused already?)

Now, the fun part: Most list (dictionaries actually, but the process is almost the same) operations, when you try to access an object that doesn’t exist, returns nil. But remember that the only way to leave an empty spot in a list is adding a NSNull object. So, to be really sure that something is not there, you need to check if the result is “nil” or “not an [NSNull null]“.

That’s too much stuff for nothing…

The year is 2010. To reduce production costs, Blizzard decided to join all its franchises into one single product. That’s when “World of Blizzard” was born.

On it, you can be a Protoss Zealot Hunter, in your quest to save the world from Diablo and his brothers.

One of the most popular races/classes is the Zergling Priest.

Two things:

First: I have this habit of starting one in three phrases with “Well,”;

Second: I have a weird sense of humour.

So it should be no shock that the following was in my head this morning:

“Well, “, he said, a small grim in his fleshless face, “It’s elementary, my dear Watson”

- From “The Undead Sherlock Holmes for Young Children”

(from the “it’s-funny-laugh” department)

Over the weekend, we had the announcement of “Diablo 3″, the new game from Blizzard. Blizzard is famous for its “World of Warcraft” franchise, which is about to get a new expansion, “Wrath of the Lich King” in a non-announced time. Blizzard is also working on “StarCraft 2″, so popular on Asian countries that they held competitions which could rival the Olympics.

Now… Can anyone imagine what would happen if Blizzard announced that those three releases would happen in the same day?

First of all, Asian markets would stop ’cause everybody and their mums would buy StarCraft 2 and start playing. American economy and parts of Europe would also come to halt due Wrath of the Lich King (and everybody racing to be the first reaching level 80 with their Death Knights.) The few pockets of resistance would be smashed by Diablo 3.

Governments, in desperation, would pay Blizzard to remove copies of their games from the market.

You know, when I direct, I always like to cast at least one truly mediocre actor like Mark Hamill, Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christensen. That way I can be sure his performance doesn’t distract the audience from all the cool special effects. You should try to use the same method when you direct this filme. Which reminds me, did we get Shia LaBeouf?

MAD Magazine, spoof letter from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg. You can see it on /Film.

Dogs vs Cats.

Cats may be useful, at least, but dogs are funnier.

Sounded funny enough to post:

WE DOAN NED NO EDUMACASHUN
WE DOAN NED NO THOT CONTROL
NO DARK SARCASM IN DA CLASROOM
TEACHERS LEAVE THEM KIDZ ALONE
HAY! TEACHERS! LEAVE THEM KIDZ ALONE!
ALL IN ALL IZ JUS ANOTHR BRICK IN DA WALL.
ALL IN ALL URE JUS ANOTHR BRICK IN DA WALL.

WE DOAN NED NO EDUMACASHUN
WE DOAN NED NO THOT CONTROL
NO DARK SARCASM IN DA CLASROOM
TEACHERS LEAVE THEM KIDZ ALONE
HAY! TEACHERS! LEAVE THEM KIDZ ALONE!
ALL IN ALL IZ JUS ANOTHR BRICK IN DA WALL.
ALL IN ALL URE JUS ANOTHR BRICK IN DA WALL.

It’s been some time since I did a quiz…

I AM
74%
OPTIMUS PRIMETake the Transformers Quiz