Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 1)

This is an ongoing blog post about “making the switch” from Google AdSense to Ezoic in 2024. If you’re just interested in updates over time, see the “Updates” section at the bottom of this article.

Switching from AdSense to Ezoic

For a long time I was afraid to switch to another company besides AdSense because I had not heard of Ezoic and others, but after several weeks on their platform, I’m happy to say that all is well.

I should also say that in my defense, I was also busy with other things in life, and I thought that “making the switch” might take a while, but if you have existing AdSense and Analytics accounts, it doesn’t seem to take too long. The actual time I spent on a computer to make the changes was probably about 4-8 hours overall, but in calendar time it took a few days because of the AdSense and Analytics integration (waiting), and a few other configuration things I had to wait for. (So, several days in calendar time, but 4-8 hours in actual time.)

It’s also important to note that Ezoic is an AdSense partner, which I discuss more below.

In my post on Ram Dass’s best books — and in other articles on this website — I use words and phrases related to the work of Ram Dass, including terms on yoga, Hinduism, Maharaj-ji, Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, mantras, and the different names of the man he called Maharaj-ji (aka, Maharaji, Neem Karoli Baba, Neeb Karori Baba). To help understand that article, as well as his speeches, books, and other writings, I have put together the following “Ram Dass Glossary of Terms” (and I hope it’s helpful to others).

Functional Programming, Simplified — currently 5-star rated on Gumroad.com, 4.5-star rated on Amazon, and one of the all-time best-selling books on functional programming — is currently on sale in three formats (prices shown in USD):

Mindfulness/meditation FAQ: What are the reasons, purposes, or motivations to practice mindfulness and meditation?

The motivations to meditate

I just took a little time to share some old notes from my meditation practice about “The purpose of mindfulness.” Or, stated another way, instead of asking about the purposes of being mindful you might ask, “Why bother being mindful?”, or “What are the motivations for practicing mindfulness and meditation?”

In the following sections I describe the purposes and motivations for practicing both mindfulness and meditation.

I don’t know how many people know Ram Dass or have read his writings, but I updated the first motivation here based on his work, because if you really get into mindfulness and meditation, what he states is the end goal.

Thanks to diverticula, diverticulosis, and diverticulitis, in 2018 I had to have a colectomy surgery, which is also known as a colon resection. This page is a diary of my colectomy experience.

Background: Diverticulitis

I had two bouts of diverticulitis in the lower-left portion of my abdomen, once in 2015 and again late in 2017. After the second bout in 2017 the pain never went away completely, and would get significantly worse if I tried to eat normal, high-fiber foods like cereal, wheat bread, broccoli, etc.

Scala dates FAQ: How do I calculate the difference between two dates? That is, while using Scala 2 or Scala 3, you need to determine the difference between two dates. Also, you want to use the newest Java date/time API for this work, such as the date/time API in Java 8, 11, 14, 17, etc.

Solution: Calculating the difference between two dates (in Scala and Java)

If you need to determine the number of days between two dates in Scala — or Java or Kotlin — the DAYS enum constant of the java.time.temporal.ChronoUnit class provides the easiest solution:

Java double FAQ: How do I format Java double and float output to two decimal places, such as when I want to format its output for printing, or to display in a user interface? (Also, how do I do the same thing in Kotlin or Scala?)

Solution

There are at least two ways to round a double or float value to two decimal places in Java:

While many people know the famous Ram Dass book, Be Here Now — which is currently the #1 All-Time Best-Selling book in Spiritualism on Amazon — I’d argue that it’s not necessarily his best book.

For example, I have met a few people in my travels who were struggling to read and understand it it because of all the art and 1960s “hippie style” stuff — which I personally like — and it was at that time I realized that while Be Here Now is his most famous book, it may not be his best book.

Ram Dass’s best books

IMHO, I think the following books are his best, where I believe best will also depend on (a) a person’s experience with his writings and teachings, and also (b) their own progress on the spiritual path.

As a brief note today, I have tried quite a few different styles of meditation over the last 10-20 years, and I want to make a note of them here. I’m going to start by listing the meditation teachers I know, write a little bit about each one, and then at the end I’ll try to summarize these teachings.

Scala Either FAQ: How do I get the value out of a Scala Either?

Solution

In this recipe I show many different ways to get the value out of a Scala Either, while accounting for the fact that an Either value may be a success value (a Right) or a failure value (a Left).

As a little ZIO 2 example with Scala 3, here’s some code that starts to show how to use ZIO.timeout along with ZIO.attempt while accessing an internet URL with Scala’s Source.fromURL.

Basically I attempt to access a URL using Scala’s Source.fromURL, and then I add a timeout to that, specifically a ZIO##timeout:

As a little note here today, here’s an example of how to use a Scala Either inside a for-expression when using ZIO 2. Specifically I convert each Either into a ZIO in each line of the for-expression.

As a brief Scala note today, in Scala 3 it doesn’t look like there’s a way to use something like a package object to make some initial code available to all sub-packages of a high-level package. That is, I’d like to be able to define some types in a top-level package like this: