Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 1)

Server-side HTTP FAQ: When you're writing a server-side application, are cookies considered to be part of the header information?

Answer

Yes, cookies are part of the HTTP headers. Specifically:

[From time to time I write little stories that have nothing to do with programming or technology; this is one of those stories. So, if you’re only here for the technology stuff, you’ll want to skip this one.]

I’m standing in the kitchen of a friend’s house at a Christmas party, making myself a drink while talking to a friend named Angie. This was nothing unusual; she and I were always talking about something. We became friends during our last year in high school, and we’ve been talking ever since.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I have feelings for her, but I guess you could say that I didn’t appreciate her back then. After high school, my ambition took me away to college, and then to a series of jobs in different states. By the time I decided to move back home, she was married and had two young children.

While we talked all the time, this kitchen conversation was unusual. I don’t remember how it started, but Angie did ask me about something I rarely talk about: my parents getting divorced in high school.

Years before I heard of Shinzen Young, I had always “enjoyed” practicing meditation in the cold. Some part of it probably goes back to childhood, when I had to wait for the schoolbus in the freezing cold of northern Illinois winters. (This was in the time before global warming.) I used to stand there without moving, and mentally I’d concentrate on not being cold, or at least not feeling the cold.

Many years later when I lived in Alaska, I used to enjoy going up into the mountains to basically inflict the same thing on myself. I always thought the “meditate deeply or suffer the consequences” approach forced me to meditate more deeply. This past winter that same “Do or die, there is not try” mentality forced me to maintain my focus and helped to combat my medically-induced lack of energy.

As I wrote in Different meditation/mindfulness practices, different cultures, and they all talk about witnessing/noting, mindfulness and meditation masters (teachers) from different cultures, countries, and styles of practice often teach the same thing in different ways: a style of mindfulness meditation known as witnessing or noting.

To me, a simple way to think about this is that as your body goes along with its daily life, all you have to do is simply narrate what your body is doing at all times, in the present moment.

If you like, you can think of yourself as being the witness/soul, watching the body, and noting what it’s doing, like a birdwatcher does when they note what birds are doing in a forest. It’s that simple.

I’ve mentioned before that at the Providence Zen Center, when you meditate, you are told to constantly ask yourself, “What am I?” And when you’re doing some action, such as driving a car, you ask yourself, “Who is driving?”

I’ve also mentioned that these days the most popular mindfulness practice is to “note” what you’re doing, moment by moment. So when you’re eating you say, “eating,” and when you’re washing your hands you say, “washing,” and so on.

Ram Dass and witnessing

Tonight I was re-reading Ram Dass’s first book, Be Here Now, and found a section where he talks about developing the “witness” in yourself by narrating your life: “Oh, he’s heading to the refrigerator now. It looks like he’s going to get some ice cream. Yes, he’s picked up the ice cream container...”

The thing about these techniques is that (a) they come from three different types of spiritual practice, but (b) although their words are different, their intent is the same: They try to get your attention/awareness aligned with what your body is doing in the present moment.

If you’re interested in logging in a ZIO application, the following example shows a collection of different ways you can write log messages. I also show how to create your own custom log format, so the output logging from this application looks like this:

I try not to do this too often, but here’s a currently-incomplete list of ways to define ZIO HTTP routes. I start with some of the simplest examples, and then make them more complicated as I go along: