History of Objective C
Very cool history lesson on Objective C, with the world’s largest monitor.
Objective-C Messaging
It should be noted, that due to the overhead of interpreting the messages, an initial Objective-C message takes three times as long as a C++ virtual method call. Subsequent calls are IMP cached and 50% faster than the C++ virtual method call. Pretty tight, eh?
Learning iPhone App Development with Stanford
Kudos to Stanford for releasing their iPhone App Development Course CS193P. Every lecture will be available and lecture handouts, so I’ll be attending this every day for the next few weeks to supplement my iPhone App Development learning. You can follow along with my notes and progress here in my GDocs.
Beta Testing Google Chrome for Mac
While we all have to wait for Google Chrome to be released for Macintosh OS, why not start beta testing it before it’s released? I’ve downloaded it (beta download here) and so far haven’t run into any bugs or crashing, which is pretty nice. You can definitely see the UI Google brings to anything they touch. Check out the snazy release calendar they have for it’s development. Since Google will be sending updates to the beta browser every few weeks, you can see its development and changes over time which makes for fun browsing.
C Programming Decimal Equivalent of Letters
In C, each letter is actually a decimal, with a difference of 32. To make ‘z’ an uppercase, you would subtract 32 from it, giving us ‘Z’.
COBOL Programmers Are Dinosaurs?
C If, Else if, Else Tutorial
This is a very funny tutorial laying out the ‘If, Else if, and Else’ options in C programming.
Which Variable Type Do I Use in C?
How should I decide which integer type to use?
If you might need large values (above 32,767 or below -32,767), use long. Otherwise, if space is very important (i.e. if there are large arrays or many structures), use short. Otherwise, use int. If well-defined overflow characteristics are important and negative values are not, or if you want to steer clear of sign- extension problems when manipulating bits or bytes, use one of the corresponding unsigned types. (Beware when mixing signed and unsigned values in expressions, though.)
Although character types (especially unsigned char) can be used as “tiny” integers, doing so is sometimes more trouble than it’sworth, due to unpredictable sign extension and increased code size. (Using unsigned char can help)
A similar space/time tradeoff applies when deciding between float and double. None of the above rules apply if pointers to the variable must have a particular type.
If for some reason you need to declare something with an *exact* size (usually the only good reason for doing so is when attempting to conform to some externally-imposed storage layout), be sure to encapsulate the choice behind an appropriate typedef, such as those in C99’s
Assigning Roles in Wordpress
If you want a specific role or even Author in Wordpress to have access or no access to a specific portion of your Wordpress site, I would recommend downloading this plugin which provides the exact answer to this need. The Roles Manager Plugin from here allows specific places a User or even an entire Role can be. A great use when allowing clients into a Dev environment or managing multiple users and their needs.
It even allows you to provide specific roles for one User alone which is pretty specific!
Custom Styling Wordpress Widgets
I love Wordpress because I learn more about PHP and how it works with every requirement that comes my way. One issue is with a Wordpress theme that has multiple widgets, and you want each section of widgets to be styled differently. Let’s say you have two sections of widgets on your website:
- Sidebar (the basic sidebar widget section that most everyone has) and
- A footer (this could be widgets in the footer, or somewhere else on the site that is calling dynamic widgets via the Dashboard).
So of course we want both to have different styles, such as background color, padding, link colors, etc.
You will need to review your theme’s function files, an example of one I wrote custom (so it may be different than yours) is below. I had to take an image of it because it’s not being inserted correctly within my WP theme:
Notice the line that proclaims a beginning and ending div with the class,
I have essentially given the widgets in this sidebar a special class which is called in the css. We can then add a css declaration as below,