“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”
~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via @WorldAndScience)
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 99)
The Kwan Um Zen school has this fun Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson story.
And I had never heard of the saying, “It’s easy to see a flea on the nose of a person one mile away, but very difficult to see an elephant standing on your own nose,” but it’s way too true, and I like it.
Flowers and a grassy roof at the Visitor’s Center, Anchorage, Alaska.
Creating a huge federal deficit during times of low unemployment seems like a ridiculous idea. It’s like racking up a huge credit card debt when you’re making good money. When times are hard, you’re not going to be able to pay off that debt and you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy.
“You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will ... and their motives may not be the highest.”
A snowy mountain peak, Palmer, Alaska. Took this picture on a bike ride in the spring of 2011.
I’ve been writing books for ten years — such as the 2021 Scala Cookbook and Functional Programming, Simplified — so I haven’t had the time to work on many open source projects, and therefore, my ability to remember how to:
- fork a Github project
- pull it down
- create a git branch
- push that branch back, and then
- submit a pull request
are weak, at best.
That being said, I’ve done it a few times lately, so I’m getting better at it. Today was a very smooth process, so I thought I’d make these notes while they’re still fresh in my mind.
As a brief note today, I found that GraalVM was actually making one of my Scala/Java/JVM applications slower, so with the help of Thomas Wuerthinger at Oracle, I learned a little bit about how to use the GraalVM profile-guided optimizations.
I reloaded Gimp with all of its custom special effects and in my copious spare time at night I’ve been working on a simulated sketch of yours truly (Alvin Alexander).
To love the right,
Yet do so wrong.
To be the weak,
Yet burn to be so strong.
Go rider, although your ride has been through lies.
Go rider, see your soul through the devil’s eyes.
If I could live my life again,
Would I live that life in sin?
Go rider, go ride into the night.
Go rider, now see your soul through a woman’s eyes.
I am sinner,
Hold my prayers up to the sun.
(Hold my prayers up to the sun.)
I am sinner,
Heaven’s closed for what I’ve done.
.
.
.
What have I done ...
(What have I done?)
What have I done?
I am sinner.
(I am sinner.)
Hold my prayers up to the sun.
(Hold my prayers up to the sun.)
I am sinner.
Heaven’s closed for what I’ve done.
Heaven’s closed for what I’ve done ...
~ Sinner’s Prayer, Salvatore P. “Sully” Erna
Here’s a small example of how to create a Factory Pattern in Scala. In the Scala Cookbook I created what some people might call a simple factory and/or static factory, so the following code is a much better implementation of a true OOP Factory Pattern.
My Scala factory classes
I don’t have too much time to explain the code today, but here are the classes that make up my Scala factory, including a set of “animal” classes along with a DogFactory and CatFactory that extend an AnimalFactory trait:
This 18-second Twitter video shows what you get when you mix a cookie monster with a Siberian Husky.
On the ice-blue line of insanity
Is a place most never see
It’s a hard-won place of mystery
Touch it, but can’t hold it
You work all your life for that moment in time
It could come or pass you by
It’s a push-shove world
But there’s always a chance
If the hunger stays the night
It can cut you like a knife
If the gift becomes the fire
On a wire between will and what will be
~ Michael Sembello
“Having a direct experience of seeing everything one looks at (including one’s own body) as moving subatomic particles alters the perception of ‘me’ and of the substantiality of what we regard as ‘normal’ reality.”
(I can’t remember where I saw this quote, but I think it had to do with some sort of computer system with monitors that allowed you to walk into this device, and see your body as moving subatomic particles.)
One thing that’s overlooked with Trevor Bauer throwing the ball over the center field fence when he was mad is that he threw it over 340 feet — more than the length of a football field.
“Effort takes no talent.”
~ Orlando Franklin, former Denver Broncos player
Mike (Pastor/Lawyer): Why’d you want to see me?
Sam (Prisoner): Papa told me you were a spiritual man, and that we need to help each other.
Mike: Help each other? Well ... you’re the one in jail.
Sam: [laughs] Well, there’s all kinds of jails. One of the worst is the prison of wrong thoughts. I was locked up there for many years until I found the key and opened the door.
(from the movie Mountain Top)
I’m working on a small project to parse large Apache access log files, with the file this week weighing in at 9.2 GB and 33,444,922 lines. So I gave myself 90 minutes to try a few different ways to write a simple “line count” program in Scala. (Not my final goal, but something I could use to measure file-reading speed without applying my algorithm.)