Community?

___So, after being passed a link to This Tumbleweed Life and reading through a few of the posts I came across this post which talks about the homeless, more specifically, the growing number of homeless children. The solution that the post suggests is to support your local faith-based homeless shelter. Now, admittedly, the post's author is an ELCA Lutheran pastor (which explains the faith-based bit) however, it got me thinking on the subject of community, or lack thereof.
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___In our complex social system, communities seem to serve a few basic needs: validation, identification, and support. These concepts are ordered in an egocentric manner, an individual feels the need for validation (See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), the idea that there are others that think like they do; once part of that group, the individual can be identified (also read stereotyped), and identify themselves; then, finally, be able to support, and be supported by, their community.
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___These needs originated from the idea that a group can survive more easily than an individual and thus, so long as the individual feels safe inside that group, the individual will desire to remain inside of that group. At the present, of course, survival in such a life or death sense is no longer an issue... or is it?
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___While we may say, homeless "community", what we really mean is a group of individuals that all share the commonality that they have no home. Many suggest that we give this "community" a helping hand... but maybe what we should really be giving them, is a way to bring these individuals into an actual community...
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___Just a thought.

Death by Irony

___So, hours after finishing the final for my Introduction to Systems Programing class, the TA is kind enough to send me the unofficial, unweighted grades for all of the projects. As the instructor has already announced that he will not curve the grades, I can easily calculate my final grade in the class. What else, but a D*.

*obscure reference to: Just Don't Get a D
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___Hours, after publishing this post the first time the instructor sent my official grade, a C-. Hurray for last second grade curves!

MML

___So, here I am, week 9 of 10 in the quarter, getting ready for finals and the chaos that will come with them, only to realize, I'm currently between all of the homework assignments. I've somehow ended up with a day, maybe even two, of free time. Those who don't know me might think my response to empty hours of the day would be of the fairly typical variety: catching up on sleep, relaxing and playing video games... Those who do know me, on the other hand, won't be surprised to find that instead of doing all of those* (* = massive disdain) things, I'm creating my own programming language, please welcome project MML.
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___What, might you ask, is MML? Well, as any who know me have likely already tuned out, I'll explain:
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___MML (or MemMapLang or Memory Mapping Language) exists, for the moment, as pseudo code that will be, at some time (later in the development process), translated into C code, which can then be compiled to run wherever machine C can compile to.
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___The basic concept that lies at it's core is the idea that, in order to improve performance and coding style/readability/understandability, any function or program in MML will be given a set of address spaces, pre-initialized in main memory, where all of the programs variables/arguments/return values can exist. Mapping with-in that space will then be controlled by the programmer, who will have to be conscious of what is assigned to where, and how much of that memory he/she is using. By giving the programmer the ability to call a program or function with multiple address spaces with set rules for access (read/write/execute) you can essentially construct a coding environment allows for both very strict memory rules, and incredibly flexible usage, of the given address space.
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___At the moment, I'm still working on the spec and syntax that I want the language to have, how I want function calls to work, casting, pointers, etc. I'll have further updates as things progress (and I get past my finals, and I run into more free time).