“Matter is frozen energy.”
~ Einstein
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 69)
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
~ Albert Einstein
“I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious.”
~ Albert Einstein
(I try to follow this “mantra” in my technical writing.)
“The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.”
~ Albert Einstein
When my dog Zeus was alive, he'd join me while I was meditating. That's what this photo reminds me of.
(I’m sorry, I don’t know the original source of this image.)
Dateline May 22, 2016: Before I write this, just to be clear, on most days and times I’m not laying in bed waiting to die. But, there have been somewhere between 20-30 times where I have laid down in bed not knowing if I’d ever get up again. Five of those times I passed out. Recent lab tests also show that I may have something called a paraganglioma, which doctors refer to as a “pharmacologic time bomb.”
So while I’m not laying on my death bed 24x7, I can tell you what my thoughts have been when I laid there, now knowing if I was about to pass out or die.
I haven’t bought too many statues in my life, but I did buy some of these howling dog/coyote/wolf statues while I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They remind me of Zeus and some other Siberian Huskies I have known.
In gratitude,
You have watered seeds of love in me.
In gratitude,
I will water seeds of love in someone too.
~ from a song by Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village,
dedicated to all who have helped me, especially Zeus
I lived in Palmer, Alaska for too short a period of time, and on my daily walks I would often go past this statue of Balto in the downtown area. Someone was kind enough to put a hat on him to keep him warm.
Today (April 8, 2020) is a day off for me, but I woke up early and went up to the roof of the garage to see the big Moon. This is a photo of the Moon setting in the west, and the Sun rising in the east, within about fifteen minutes of each other.
I missed the news about Bill Withers passing away. A lot of times when I’m putting around I sing “Ain’t No Sunshine.” That and “Use Me” are probably in my Top-50 favorite songs of all time.
It was interesting to read that he was a 31-year-old factory worker making bathrooms for 747s when he wrote Ain’t No Sunshine.
He also intended to replace all of the “I know” lyrics with a third verse, but other musicians told him to leave it as it was. “I was this factory worker puttering around,” Withers said. “So when they said to leave it like that, I left it.”
I’ll confess this
You’re my tragedy
I paid you to rest
Just as fast as you turned on me
Gone forever
Vanish the memories
This face of pleasure
Is masked by your misery
Straight out of line
I can’t find a reason
Why I should justify my ways
Straight out of line
I don’t need a reason
You don’t need to lie to me
Lie to me
~ some Straight Out of Line lyrics, by Godsmack
As a brief note, you need this “fork in run” setting in your sbt build.sbt file if you want JavaFX client/GUI applications to properly stop:
// see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5137460/sbt-stop-run-without-exiting // OLD SYNTAX: // fork in run := true // NEW SYNTAX: // https://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Forking.html Compile / run / fork := true
Conversely, if you don’t use that setting and then you stop your JavaFX app that you started inside sbt, the app won’t stop properly and it will leave a Java process running, and at that point about all you can do is kill sbt and restart it, which gets annoying after a very short while. That setting causes sbt to create and run the JavaFX app in a new JVM. As noted in the code, I found that setting on SO.
The Moon at 5:15 this morning, Monday, April 6, 2020. :)
As a brief note today, I started to create a little Scala/JavaFX WebSocket client based on the Java-WebSocket project. I initially created it to test my Play Framework WebSocket example. I had hoped to be able to easily get to the server response request headers, but atm I don’t see a way to do that.
That being said, this is what the Scala/JavaFX WebSocket client currently looks like:
And here’s its source code:
In this article I show how to write a WebSocket server using the Play Framework and Scala. My goal is to create the simplest possible WebSocket server so you can see how the basics work.
To demonstrate the WebSocket server I also created an HTML/JavaScript client. It isn’t quite as simple as the server, but I decided to keep some extra code in the client in case you have problems and need some debugging help.
I’m not a big fan of how Bill Gates made his money, but I applaud his call for a nationwide shutdown of the United States to deal with the coronavirus.
As I’ve written before, the President of the United States needs to order a nationwide shutdown. Anything else is just going to prolong how long and how hard we have to deal with the coronavirus, and how many deaths there will be. As I posted before, dealing with this on a state-by-state basis is like having a “peeing section” in a swimming pool. We are, after all, “One Nation Under God.”
You can read more of Mr. Gates’ comments at this Business Insider short story, which has a link to his paywall-blocked op-ed on the Washington Post.
As a brief note to self, I currently have a situation where I have about ten shell scripts, and each script uses the same jar file, but I keep changing the version number of that jar file each time I have a new release of my Static Drupal application. For example, my current jar file has this name:
Static-Drupal-assembly-1.2.jar
So to keep all of those shell scripts using the correct, current version of my jar file, I created a file named VERSION that has this version variable:
version=1.2
Then in my other shell script files, the first thing I do is “source” that file to get the version variable into those other shell scripts. One of the first lines in my ten shell scripts looks like this:
. ./VERSION
By doing this, I now only have to change the version number in that first file, and it’s automatically picked up in all of my other shell scripts.
After my previous post about electing people who don’t believe in science, I came across this post about having a “peeing section” in a swimming pool that sums up my feelings about not having a nationwide lockdown.
We are, after all, “One nation under God.”
