March 25, 2003
Shutting down the blogs of war
I'm coming late to this, but if you haven't already heard, Kevin Sites' blog from Iraq has been shut down. Sites is a CNN correspondent, and ever since he landed in Iraq, he's been posting fascinating glimpses of everyday life in a war zone. I loved it; after seeing all the top-down coverage on the TV, Sites' blog -- complete with digital-camera pix he took of Iraqi street life -- gave me a totally different perspective on the conflict. I'd have thought CNN would have loved it too.
As it turns out, they didn't. A few days ago, CNN asked Sites to stop blogging. As Sites posted:
Dear readers:
I've been asked to suspend my war blogging for awhile.
But I don't want let you down -- I'm chronicling the events of my war experiences, the same as I always have, and hope to come to agreement with CNN in the near future to make them available to you in some shape or form, perhaps on this site.
As a CNN spokespersons herself said: "Covering a war for CNN . . . is a full-time job and we asked Kevin to concentrate only on that for the time being."
I think it's probably more than that. Major news organs get their credibility by appearing to be as fair and objective as possible -- and, more importantly, by speaking with one authorial voice. Too many personal accounts of individuals on the ground waters it down. Which really sucks, because I'd imagine it would be easy for a major news organization to set down firm rules around blogging by its employees, such as: Don't attack our company or expose our inner secrets; don't attack our competitors; don't reveal any information that endangers troops. Beyond that, do what you will. And the audiences love this stuff! Sites was getting over 4,000 visitors a day.
All of which makes it more exciting that my friend Chris Allbritton is getting ready to leave for Iraq tomorrow, for his Back To Iraq blog. He is literally making history: He's the first person to do truly independent journalism funded entirely by his readers, who are international in scope. He's raised over $10,000 from donors -- including me -- and will be able to go and do whatever interests him. He's planning on posting to his blog two or three times a day.
Yesterday, his satellite phone and ruggedized laptop arrived, and I went over to his place to watch him test it out. The laptop is tiny but as heavy as a brick; you can pretty much deflect bullets with one of these things, though I hope he doesn't have to. We climbed up onto the roof of his Manhattan apartment building, set up the chunky satellite phone, and plugged it into laptop. I wandered over to the edge of the roof and remembered that this is where Chris went on 9/11, to watch the Twin Towers collapse, in disbelief. He took digital photos of the collapse and put them on his site. It was one of the first examples of how everyday people are transforming the way we gather and experience news; even back at 9/11, I got as much concrete information and pictures from blogs and personal web sites as I got from CNN. When he heads back to Iraq, he's taking that grassroots trend and putting it to a new type of test.
I headed back over, where Chris was picking away at the teensy 3/4-size laptop keyboard and cursing. "I have no idea how I'm going to type on this thing," he said. A few seconds later, he connected to the satellite -- the same way he'll do it from Syria, Turkey, and hopefully even Iraqi Kurdistan. "Check it out. We're on!"
Posted by Clive Thompson at March 25, 2003 11:12 AM
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Another One Bites The Dust: Looks like Time Inc. has forced a freelancer covering the war for Time.com to stop posting to his personal blog. Here's more info.
Thanks! I'll make a note of that on the main page.
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I bring this up because over
Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
When a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
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.
This is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Let'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.
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