“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.”
~ Edsger Dijkstra
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 175)
A website named digibarn.com has a collection of images and short stories they call Daniel Kottke’s Amazing Apple Relics. If you’re interested in Apple history it’s a nice little find.
I like the quote by Pema Chodron (PC) that’s shown in this image, but personally a better one for me is, “You know what, I screwed up here, and I need to own that.”
It took me about 43 years to stop blaming other people for my problems. Then one day I finally said to myself, “The only reason I don’t live in Alaska is because of me. The only reason I don’t practice yoga more is me. The only reason I don’t meditate more is me.”
A couple of times a year I still open my mouth to start blaming other people or situations for my problems, but I try to catch myself before the words actually come out, and when I wrongfully accuse someone else for my problem of the moment, I do try to apologize.
(It’s worth noting that I think PC and I are talking about two different circumstances. I’m talking about things that are under my control, which are the 99.9% of the things that happen to me in my daily life. I have read several books by PC, and I suspect that this quote is about people who have been harmed by things out of their control, such as family violence. I absolutely agree with her quote in that context.)
While reading Carlos Santana’s autobiography I’ve been trying to explore more of his music. This video shows two of his songs — Soul Sacrifice and Evil Ways — at Woodstock in 1969.
Chapters from The Handbook of Applied Cryptography are available from the publisher and authors as PDFs at this link.
When it’s finished, this series of articles by José Manuel may be a good read on functional programming.
This image is from an article about Ubuntu named, How to make your desktop look like my desktop. makeuseof.com has another article on customizing the Ubuntu UI with themes.
“The dogs have just returned from 10 days of breaking trail to Toklat and back.”
~ A note from this Denali National Park and Preserve page on Facebook
Lightbend has a good article by Jonas Boner and Viktor Klang titled Reactive Programming versus Reactive Systems. This quote describes the article: “looking at the differences between writing code in a Reactive Programming style, and the design of Reactive Systems as a cohesive whole.”
This is a nice article on the best Linux laptops of 2016, including what to look out for in graphics chips and other hardware issues. As I become more disgruntled with Apple and the direction of Macs and MacOS, I thought I’d start looking for a Linux laptop.
Here’s a decent interview with Tony Fadell on bbc.com about the creation of the first iPhone.
During a recent cross-country drive I listened to the book The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana. I’m not a huge fan of his music — though I love this work with Faith Hill — but I am interested in him because he’s very open about his spirituality. Although I haven’t finished the book yet, I’ll give it a “thumbs up” rating. The book is his autobiography, and includes stories about playing professionally and hanging around in strip clubs when he was 13, everything related to the band Santana, growing up with a strict mother and abusive father, and much more.
A quote from this LionsRoar.com article:
“You know who said it best? Leonard Cohen. He meditated all those years at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, often for twelve hours at a time. In an interview, he said his storyline just wore itself out. He got so bored with his dramatic storyline. And then he made the comment, ‘The less there was of me, the happier I got.’”
Dan Bricklin, inventor/creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, has created this page of historical notes and images about his work. His work came long before my interest in computers and programming, so I enjoy reading about it from a historical perspective. He shows a TI calculator and very large state diagram on this page. I remember seeing calculators like that in stores, and the work he put into the state diagram looks like a modern mind map.
If you’re into history, it’s all very cool.
This bloomberg.com article shows a little bit about how and why solar energy may become cheaper than coal in the next ten years.
bgr.com found a nice part of a talk by Steve Jobs in 1998 where he talked about products vs profits. I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that Apple has lost their way in this regard. macOS keeps getting more and more clumsy, and both it and iOS have more bugs (that affect me) than ever. And then there’s the battery issues in the 2016 MacBook Pro and macOS, which is discussed in the bgr.com article.
As a quick note about traits in Scala, this StackOverflow page makes a few good points about sealed traits:
- sealed traits can only be extended in the same file
- this lets the compiler easily know all possible subtypes
- example: the compiler can emit warnings if a match/case expression is not exhaustive
- use sealed traits when the number of possibly subtypes is finite and known in advance
- they can be a way of creating something like an enum in Java
For functional programming sealed traits also offer one really big advantage:
- they help you define algebraic data types, or ADTs
Sealed trait examples
Examples of things that can be sealed traits are days in the week, months in a year, and the suits in a deck of cards.
The first answer from that SO page shows a simple example of how to write a sealed trait:
sealed trait Answer case object Yes extends Answer case object No extends Answer
This article on noelwelsh.com about algebraic data types and sealed traits is also helpful.
Here’s a short article on dzone.com that explains why you might not need to use StringBuilder in Java any more.
One of the things you have to remember when working with human beings is that IQ is not the same as EQ, and they’re rarely equal. Some people have a horrible temper. One guy I know is smart, but he remains the biggest jerk I’ve ever met.
I remember hearing one time that when people are hurt in their childhood or teen years they stop developing emotionally at that point. So if they are somehow hurt when they are twelve years old, they can be thirty years old physically but only twelve emotionally. I don’t know if that’s 100% true, but it seems like it in some cases I know. (And the hard thing is that these people don’t know that they have these problems.)
Nothing screams “Happy Holidays” like a fake positive-pregnancy test, that’s what I always say.
(Google “woman selling positive pregnancy tests” for more details.)
