Data Structures Journal

I did the opus customization stuff as required by my professor.

I've completed the datatypes project for this class and I will now answer questions from the audience.

The two data types that appear to be the same are long int and long long int. What I think I've been told is the reason for this is because the c creators implemented long long int but wanted older programs to still be compatible so they made long int and long long int the same size. I think this is universal for all c programs, but I don't know either way.

The difference between fprintf and printf is that printf prints to stdout and fprintf prints to the stream. stdout is standard output, by default it seems to show up on the screen. %s is a format for string of characters, so it doesn't expect any math stuff or numbers. %hhu is formatting for a unsigned char and will expect an unsigned char to be used. %hu is formatting for an unsigned short int. %u is the formatting for an unsigned int, whereas %d is the formatting for a signed int. The datatypes all end in either a u or d to designate whether the expected variable is unsigned or signed. The 13 in %13s tells fprintf to allocate 13 spaces for string characters.

If sign is left unspecified the state is assumed to be unsigned.

The & operate is bitwise and, applying an and to each bit in a variable. The | operator is a bitwise or, applying an or to each bit in a variable. These helped with the problem because by bitwise “or”ing a variable we are able to set all or some of the bits in the variable equal to one, which can easily give us the highest or lowest values that a datatype can hold.

I experienced difficulty displaying the total quantity for long ints and long long ints because you literally cannot have numbers higher than the highest yield for long ints or long long ints.

The total bits allocated for the following are:

signed char:1
unsigned short int:2
unsigned int:4
signed int:4
signed long long int:8

“I'd say Prog Rock. Sit there, soak it up, prog rock is the best genre of music.” The man said taking a bottle of Redd's Apple Ale from his lips. “Here, here let me tell you why.” He got up from the his chair and stood in front of his desk, leaning against it with his feet crossed at the floor. He took a drag from his cigarette. “You know what I hate? Fucking philistines who are so culturally ignorant they ask, 'Jethro Tull is the singer right', that just blows my fucking mind.” He made a pantomime of his mind blowing up. “How can you prove Pink Floyd right so easily?”, a pause brought on by a quick swig of fruit based ale stopped the impassioned speech momentarily. The sound of an excited “Ommm” muffled in his throat as he drank. “And that's another good one, Pink Floyd, 'Wish you were Here'”, he pointed his left index finger as he started to list albums. “'The Wall', 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Animals' Haha, charade you are Joe! Haha charade in deed”, he made a face of scorn at an older gentlemen sitting on the couch. “I bet you like Phil Collins you pleb, Genesis was shit when Peter Gabriel left. Yeah I said it, all Phil Collins can make is pop garbage. Now, if you want to know about a four-fifths time signature, you talk to my man Peter Gabriel. In fact I can call him right now and he can school all of you on musical complexity.”

“Barry, I'm not sure this is the time for that.” Joe said with a look longing for help from those in the room.

“Oh my god, and King Crimson man. UGHHHH!” Barry's face was now in his hands as he hopped in place at the head of his desk. “To experience King Crimson, is to experience a new form of being. It's as close as we'll ever get to leaving this corporeal form and being a creature made purely of light.” Barry climbed onto his desk and got into the fetal position. A soft sound of crying escaped his body and slowly transitioned into solemn singing. “She's a Mooooooon Child. Gathering the flowers in her garden.” Barry relaxed his body and sprawled himself across his desk, indiscriminately knocking items to the floor.

“So what should we do about…” One of the men standing near Joe began.

“I don't care.” Barry said as he let himself fall at a snails pace, head first, off the side of his desk. “Just kill him with a drone or something. Joe, bring me my vinyls, I need to wind down.”

I could talk about all the fun of singly linked lists and the functions and nodes and int values and typedefs and gets and appends and loops and stuff. I'll just copy one function and then I'll write some junk about trash fantasy stories or whatever.

Node *mknode(int val){
   Node *newNode;
   newNode = (Node *) malloc (sizeof(Node));
   newNode -> value = val;
   return(newNode);
}

So this is what I have for a function that creates a node with a passed value. In the first line before the header you can see a node being created. Then memory is allocated to the node. Nextlish you have the int value associated with the node being assigned val which is passed into the function. The original header on the project page had the passed variable called “value” but it looked weird to me to have “newNode → value = value”, so I changed it. Lastlish, it returns newNode, as the header implied might happen. Finally the comfy little squiggly brings itself in and snuggles up to all that fine meaty function goodness, keeping it secure and safe. Like a single father trying to overcompensate for a perceived feeling of disappoint he imagines his child has over their situations, the squiggly tucks the little function in, tells the function that it can't have any water because it's bedtime, shuts the door, and then goes to watch tv for about a half hour, before finally going to bed. That's kind of how a return type works.

Okay so in terms of fantasy stories the Dragon Age series of videogames is alright. The first one was nothing too extraordinary, it's idea of Dwarven society was derivative of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels, it's history of Elf oppression at the hands of Humans is clearly reminiscent of The Witcher, a series of novels and videogames that Bioware wishes they could emulate. The idea of a special military order that operates above national conflict in order to defend the world from a very real, forgotten force of evil is familiar to George R R Martin's Song of Fire and Ice novels. Much like the novels themselves the military order in charge of this defense is ignored when they shouldn't which leads to some pretty wacky antics, and in a coming of age story reminiscent of Jon Snow's, a character must kill the child as well and learn to lead his people.

I could go on for so very long about how Dragon Age pretty much takes everything about itself from other works, but it's not a particularly bad thing considering the nature of story-telling itself. What I do want to talk about is how in Dragon Age 2 they decide to ignore literally anything interesting about this world they created (Hint: The interesting stuff is the stuff they copied from actual writers), and decided to focus on personal relationships over a course of time. Now, I'm not hear to tell you that personal relationships are an uninteresting story, Woody Allen has made a very lucrative career creating movies about personal relationships and dodging allegations of child molestation¹⁾. What I am saying is that the writers at Bioware mistook interesting personal conflicts as “well now this guy is a gay terrorist” and “wouldn't it be fun to listen to this guy complain about the same thing for the whole game, can you repeated the phrase 'tortured past' for ten to fifteen hours?” and “what if we took the classic 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' trope and took away the part where she would be anyone's dream girl so she's just a quirky mess of a person where everyday she doesn't kill herself trying to get dressed is divine intervention”. Her personal story culminates in her releasing a demon into the world because “why would the demon lie to me?”, the gay terrorist blows up a church because “the church thinks I'm a dangerous criminal so I had to prove them right” and the whiny guy with the boyband haircut whines, switches sides, then switches back to your side because he built his life around whining at you. None of these characters experience any growth, what happens at the end of the story is what you would expect from each of them the first second you talk to them. Sure they argue with each other, and talk to you about stuff, but what you say to them doesn't matter and what they say to each other is just a way to disguise the boring structure of the game, both in terms of gameplay and story, to the player.

This game came out in 2011, I'm still haunted by the fact that I preordered it. Never again Bioware.

I did the sll1 project for list functions. It's alright. 9/10.

I spent like 3 hours last Thursday consulting with the knowledgeable people over at 4chan's /g/ board about my seg faults and infinite loops. Many of them talk about having returns in if statements such that:

var++;
if (var == 2){
  var2 = var * 3;
  return(var2);
}
else return(var);

I'm sure of how good an idea like that is. Normally when I make a function I try to make sure that their is only one instance of return, at the end outside of any ifs, for or whiles. That way the code doesn't just end abruptly, for the same way that I don't easily use the 'break' command, but I suppose both have their uses and in a more desperate mindset I tend to lean a little on the easiness of break. Still despite their unusual, to me at least, practices they did provide for me an outside look at my code and insist into my issues. Also C/C++ is a dead language learn Java or be jobless you idiots.

Dated - March Seventeenth, twenty-fourteen. Nine AM.

#GetWrecked ²⁾

The Irish are a poor degenerate race of people that mistaken people themselves to be a people with a respectable heritage. What they are is a poor man's replica of what an idiot would call a Scotsman. They are hat-less fiends who do nothing more than drink booze and steal. Only an Irishman would make their diet consist solely of a root indigenous to the Andes mountains. Somehow the idea that Ireland is not so very much like Peru escaped the Irishman's dull Neanderthal gaze. Perhaps they were too busy rutting like animals and spawning more of their disgusting ilk to take care of their crops or look at a map.

Spare the Irish, spoil the sword.