I enjoyed this National Geographic article about the migrations of the first Americans.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 119)
“If you care about someone you have to let them be the person they are, not the person you want them to be. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
~ From an episode of “Death in Paradise”
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
~ Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (as heard in Midsomer Murders)
Kudos to Samuel Axon of Ars Technica for writing a very good tech review of the hardware behind Apple’s new iPad Pro (2018). As I was reading it, it reminded me of the old style of solid writing that I used to get when I bought print copies of magazines.
One of the nuggets of the article is shown in the image I’ve attached here, where you can see that the 2018 iPad Pro is faster than every MacBook Pro in existence other than its 2018 model, at least in terms of the Geekbench multi-core performance tests. If you dig through the images in the article you’ll see that the story isn’t quite as powerful in the single-core benchmark, where the iPad Pro lags the 2018 MacBook Pro by up to 16%. But in those tests the iPad Pro is roughly the equivalent of a 2018 Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 model. (The older Macs use Intel Core i7 and Xeon W processors, and the Dell model uses an Intel Core i7. The 2018 MacBook Pro uses an Intel Core i9.)
These numbers — comparing a tablet to i7 and i9 processors — make one think that Apple will be using their own chips inside Mac computer systems some time soon.
Tim Logan of Texas A&M University has a nice little article on Why you can smell rain.
“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
~ possibly by Thomas Jefferson
Last week I did some research on whether Colorado judges were appointed by a Democrat or Republican, and I’ve been pleased to see that over 27,000 people have visited that page. Personally, I was never too concerned about judges in previous elections, but I think the current hostile political atmosphere in the U.S. and everything related to the Supreme Court nominees over the last 2-3 years makes people see how “political” the judge nomination process is (IMHO).
I was just reminded of a “funny” event from the worst of the mast cell activation disease days in 2014-2017 (before doctors knew what I had). I was just released from the hospital for something — maybe from my second fake heart attack, I don’t remember for sure — and I thought, “If I’m going to die before they figure out what’s wrong with me, I’d like to have a chocolate milk shake.”
So I drove to a placed called Sweet Cow in Louisville, Colorado, ordered a milkshake, and then began going unconscious before the order could even be completed. While the poor guy was making my shake I walked out of the store, sat on a bench outside, and put my head between my legs, hoping I wouldn’t pass out. The guy who was making my shake was probably only in high school, and he eventually brought the shake out to me while I sat there with my head between my legs. We had some sort of conversation, the gist of which was I was trying not to pass out and him saying that the milkshake was free.
With the help of a few people I eventually stumbled out of there and made it home. Such was life with the worst of the mast cell disease.
P.S. — These days I’m much better, thank you.
Per its website, Fury is an experimental dependency manager and build tool for Scala. It is still under active development, and is in private beta. You can learn more about it by checking out that website, or following Jon Pretty (@propensive) on Twitter.
I just read this quote by J.K. Rowling, and it’s quite good: “Believe me, neither @RGalbraith nor I walk around thinking we’re fab. We just shoot for ‘writing better than yesterday’”.
(Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym she used for some of her other novels.)
Just days after two domestic terror attacks, here are two quotes I saw today:
Donald Trump: “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame...”
Dalai Lama: “Violence derives from anger and anger clouds our ability to think straight and properly assess what is happening. Anger in turn is related to fear and anxiety. What we need to learn is how to cultivate the positive emotions that counter destructive emotions like anger and fear. Compassion, for example, brings self-confidence and the ability to act transparently. It strengthens trust which is the ground for friendship.”
I just read a short chapter in the book Effective Java, and realized I was doing something pretty dumb in my own code by always creating my own custom exceptions instead of using other exceptions already intended to be reused in the Java API.
Here’s the view of Denali from Talkeetna, Alaska, courtesy of Sheldon Air Service in Talkeetna.
As I was reading a blog post titled, What Makes Us Red Hat, I came across the article summary shown in the image where Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer refers to Linux as a cancer. Note that his description of open source license agreements is about as honest as today’s politicians.
The best stories of the weekend are IBM buying Red Hat, and a dog that pretends to be a stray to get food outside a McDonald’s. Oh, and the Red Sox beat the Dodgers to win the World Series last night.
A new Kindle version of my book, Hello, Scala, is now available. This update includes new chapters, new content within chapters, and small corrections to the previous version.
“I view spiritual practice as the freeing of awareness from identification with anything.”
~ Ram Dass (from this page on his website)
“Only open your mouth if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.”
~ Zen quote
Microsoft has a nice interview with FP researcher and Haskell co-creator Simon Peyton Jones.
When I first started learning Zen I didn’t understand the quote shown in this image, and I truly was a carpet to walk on. Then I woke up and thought, “You need to run your business. You need to find the middle way between accepting ‘just this’ and what you need to do to be successful at work.”
It would have been helpful if I had seen this quote then, but the book, Making Zen Your Own, wasn’t available then.
