Month: March 2010
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Small E-mail Servers
I’ve run a small e-mail server at airs.com for many years, providing POP and forwarding services for friends and family. In the early days of the net several people found it useful to have a fixed e-mail address which they could forward to their ISP. Later on commercial services appeared, like pobox.com, and these days…
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High Mimetic
Roger Zelazny, in discussing why he liked to write science fiction, referred to Northrop Frye’s theory of modes. In Zelazny’s interpretation, Frye described characters in fiction in four modes: The mythic mode is stories about gods. The high mimetic mode is stories about heroes, people who are better than ordinary humans. The low mimetic mode…
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Signed or Unsigned
C has always permitted comparisons between any integer type, and C++ follows its lead. Comparing signed types to signed types is straightforward: you sign extend the smaller type. Likewise, when comparing unsigned types to unsigned types, you zero extend. When comparing signed and unsigned types, the rules are less clear. The C standard specifies a…