Having lived with many great dogs (and a couple of cats), I just orded this book by Eckhart Tolle. The few pages I can see on the Amazon preview look great. It looks to be more about “mindfulness” and “spirituality” than “religion,” which suits me well. I’m looking forward to it.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 89)
The bad news is that I have the flu. The good news is that I’ve watched the first 25 episodes of New Girl (though I wasn’t conscious for all of them, and I’m not sure what happened to Coach).
I haven’t binge-watched anything like this since I had a bad infection after having my gallbladder removed.
One small step for me, and I don’t know if it will help mankind at all. But Hello, Scala is now called Scala Book, and you can find it here on scala-lang.org.
“I have never been forced to accept compromises, but I have willingly accepted constraints.”
This is a view of the Rocky Mountains that are west and south of Boulder, Colorado. The apartment I lived in was located in the south/west area of Broomfield. There was actually a sign on the street in front of the apartments that said, “Welcome to Superior,” but somehow my apartment was in Broomfield.
Dart Isolates give you a way to perform real multi-threading in Dart applications, the ability to truly run code on another thread. (For more information on that statement, see Dart futures are NOT run in a separate thread.)
When I first read that Isolates were like actors I was very interested in them, but then I was surprised to see that (IMHO) they are implemented in a more low-level/primitive way than something like the Akka Actors library. (The entrepreneur out there might see this as an opportunity to create an Akka-like port for Dart and Flutter.)
For a long time I thought it was enough to know about something spiritual, but it wasn’t necessary to feel it. For instance, I’ve known about impermanence on an intellectual level, but to experience it in your bones, that’s the difference between a finger pointing at the Moon and the Moon itself. Robin Williams spoke eloquently about this difference on the park bench in Good Will Hunting.
Another topic is desire. There’s a Buddhist monk vow that says, “Desires are endless, I vow to conquer them all.” I’m not a Buddhist monk — I dropped out of monk school because of things like cookies, margaritas, sex, and love (not to mention pain) — but recently I had the very direct feeling of desire, and it finally occurred to me that if I don’t get past it, it will still be affecting my life in 2020, 2024, and if you believe in multiple lifetimes, I’ll still be dealing with it then.
It blew me away that this feeling is thousands of miles beyond simply knowing that I have that desire. For me it’s like the distance between (a) knowing that there are glaciers in Alaska vs (b) being right there and seeing and hearing the calving.
Editor’s note: “Desire” can be cookies, margaritas, etc. — anything where there is “want” with attachment.
As a brief note, if you need a Dart function to get the current date/time (DateTime) in a “seconds since the epoch” format, I can confirm that this function works:
/// the current time, in “seconds since the epoch”
static int currentTimeInSeconds() {
var ms = (new DateTime.now()).millisecondsSinceEpoch;
return (ms / 1000).round();
}
Today, October 10, 2019, we’re having our first snowfall of the season. I’m going to have to bake some cookies.
Here’s an example of Union Types in Scala 3 (Dotty). This image comes from this Martin Odersky video.
UPDATE: For more information, see my free “Scala 3 Union Types” video.
In Alaska people tend to paint things like garbage dumpsters and walls in alleys, so it was cool to see this pictorial of painted bus stops in Belarus.
A Wolf Called Romeo is “the true story of the exceptional black wolf who spent seven years interacting with the people and dogs of Juneau, Alaska, living on the edges of their community, engaging in an improbable, awe-inspiring interspecies dance, and bringing the wild into sharp focus.” You can check it out here on Amazon.com.
For whatever reason, I get back into yoga every fall, and a favorite book during this time is The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
(When I studied by myself I thought his name was pronounced like “pat and jolly,” but when I studied with Judi Rice she taught me it was “pa-tan-ja-lee.”)
“If you are motivated by a wish to help on the basis of kindness, compassion and respect, then you can do any kind of work, in any field, and function more effectively with less fear or worry, not being afraid of what others think or whether you will ultimately reach your goal.”
~ the Dalai Lama, in this tweet
I don’t know the original source of this image of Darth Vader and Yoda balloons, but I post it here because I’ve been seeing many photos from the Albuquerque Balloon Festival the last few days.
As far as I know, there’s no built-in way to remove spaces from a multiline string in Dart, but you can write your own Dart function to do this.
For example, I just dug into the splitMapJoin method of the Dart String class, and wrote a stripMargin function like this:
String stripMargin(String s) {
return s.splitMapJoin(
RegExp(r'^', multiLine: true),
onMatch: (_) => '\n',
onNonMatch: (n) => n.trim(),
);
}
Dog wants a second opinion after the doctor says he should be neutered (funny). From Tundra Comics.
“Seize the time. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
~ Jean-Luc Picard
I recently had a discussion with two people I’m working on a book with, where they are essentially very active reviewers. I like to write with enthusiasm, so I made a particular statement in the book. One person said they thought it was motivating — which was my intent — but the other person said it made them wary. I thought it was fascinating to get such different perspectives.
When I was meditating this morning I remembered going on a first date with a girl in high school. We went to a nice restaurant — it had tablecloths and silverware — I don’t currently remember the name of, and sat across from each other at a small, round table.
After a very short while a young boy came up to us and asked, “Are you on a first date?”
My date and I looked at him and said, “Yes, we are.” I started to look around to see where the boy came from, but I couldn’t figure that out.
“It’s okay if you sit closer to each other,” he said.
“Really,” we replied, looking at each other and smiling with surprise.
So I got up and moved my chair around the table until my date and I sat next to each other. “Is that good,” I asked.
“Much better,” he said. “This way you can hold hands.” And then he left.