“To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product.”
~ from the book, Jony Ive, The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 98)
I recently bought a 2013 Sticks calendar in Boulder, Colorado, and it got me interested in the artist. This is another work from shulock.blogspot.com, a variation on The Thinker, by Rodin.
A Honey badger don’t care coffee mug. Very funny, if you’ve seen the video. You used to be able to buy it at this link at Zazzle.
I enjoyed the tv series, “The Finder”, it’s one of my favorite tv series that lasted only one season. I like pretty much everything about it, and loved the quotes from the character played by Michael Clark Duncan. RIP, MCD, you are missed.
“The need for discipline disappears when you love what you’re doing.”
~ paraphrasing Tony Gonzalez from a Hall of Fame interview this past week
Back when I was writing Functional Programming, Simplified I started to write a little Scala/FP “To-Do List” application that you can run from the command line. For reasons I don’t remember, I decided not to include it in the book, and forgot about it until I recently started using GraalVM (what I call Graal).
Graal includes a native image feature lets you compile JVM classes and JAR files into native executables, so as I thought about things I can make faster, I was reminded of the To-Do List app and thought about how cool it would be if it started instantaneously. So I found the old project, blew the dust off of it (updated all of its dependencies), and made a few additions so I could create (a) a single, executable JAR file with sbt-assembly, and (b) a native executable with Graal.
Someone on reddit says their therapist has this painting of Cookie Monster wearing a kimono.
A humbling thing about this MCAS disease is that I just took the time to make an, “If I’m dead, here’s everything you need to know about how to update this Drupal 8 website” video.
Hopefully I’ll still be around for Drupal 9 — or my own replacement for Drupal — but when I get sick I always wish I had done this, so now I have.
Back when I was 18, I had a choice of three colleges I was going to go to: Kentucky Wesleyan College (KWC), Western Illinois, and the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP). Our family was relatively poor — my dad didn’t even have money to pay the bill for my oldest sister’s wedding that summer — so I went to KWC, which seemed like it might be the cheapest. Every once in a while I wonder what life would have been like if I didn’t go to KWC first, even though I eventually graduated from Texas A&M and lived in Texas for three years. So this morning I’m thinking about the people of El Paso.
The thing about people who kill other people is that they’re not born that way. You can easily imagine babies and young children who are black, white, hispanic, asian, middle eastern, etc., all playing together with no racist thoughts. They’re just children, so they naturally play together. People are made racist by their family, friends, and society, including the hate speech of the current president of the United States.
My condolences to the people of El Paso.
Looks like this airplane company might want to rethink how they place their slogan on their airplanes.
August 4, 2011: 46 degrees, 20 mph wind, and a sled dog just ran down the middle of the street.
~ a note from living in Palmer, Alaska
I saw several fields of caribou/elk at Rocky Mountain National Park on July 31, 2019, a few only ~20 feet away from my car.
“E is for existential crisis.” I had my first existential crisis when I was 16 or 17, then my second one when I was 33. These days, no problems, at least not in that area. :)
(I don’t know who originally created this Cookie Monster image, but I appreciate it.)
As a note about Scala style, this Scala page strongly encourages that side-effect methods that takes no parameters should be declared with parentheses:
“However, this syntax (leaving off parentheses) should only be used when the method in question has no side-effects (purely-functional). In other words, it would be acceptable to omit parentheses when calling queue.size, but not when calling println() (or openGarageDoor()). This convention mirrors the method declaration convention given above.”
“Religiously observing this convention will dramatically improve code readability and will make it much easier to understand at a glance the most basic operation of any given method. Resist the urge to omit parentheses simply to save two characters!”
This is an excerpt from the Scala Cookbook (partially modified for the internet). This is Recipe 13.9, “Simple concurrency with Scala Futures.”
Problem
You want a simple way to run one or more tasks concurrently in a Scala application, including a way to handle their results when the tasks finish. For instance, you may want to make several web service calls in parallel, and then work with their results after they all return.
Solution
A Future gives you a simple way to run an algorithm concurrently. A future starts running concurrently when you create it and returns a result at some point, well, in the future. In Scala, it’s said that a future returns “eventually.”
The wine guy at the liquor store was way too helpful yesterday, trying to sell me some very nice bottles of wine. I finally had to tell him, “Look, I just want some cheap wine to help me fall asleep faster at night.”
“Like Boone’s Farm,” he asked.
“Pretty much.”
“A good choice. Right over here, sir,” he said as we walked to the cheap wine section.
~ a note from august 1, 2014
I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, and there was still some snow in the mountains. This snow is near the Alpine Visitor’s Center at a little under 12,000 altitude.
Wow, many years ago I thought there should be an errata page for the Scala Cookbook, but to the best of my knowledge we never had one. But now, to my surprise, there is one.