Recent posts

I’ve been working on a book since March, 2012 called Akka Concurrency and on Monday, Oct 15th 2012, it went live at Artima. I’m really happy to see it make this milestone – it’s been a long time coming! The book builds on the existing, and excellent Akka Documentation by...
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I’d like to say that I write useful code all the time, but let’s face facts… useful code doesn’t come around all that often. In my new job I’m using Maven instead of SBT and I miss the cool tilde modifier in a big way. And now that I’m using the Artima book...
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A little while ago, I gave up on Zsh. There were a number of people that showed me how I could have fixed up Zsh so it would suck less, but I just didn’t have time. Well, I found myself with some time yesterday that couldn’t be spent doing much useful, so I made the switch. It now...
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I recently enjoyed a couple of days with Heiko Seeberger and Josh Suereth as they dragged me through some Advanced Scala Training and it was quite awesome. As an exercise, to test out my new found skills I pimped a new method onto “numbers” in Scala and I thought it might be...
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I recently responded to someone’s question on StackOverflow and now I have to rant about something. There is a large problem I find with programmers that I meet (generally in Real Life, as opposed to on the ‘net because on the ‘net I associate with passionate programmers) when...
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Ok, so everyone and their grandmother appears to be using Zsh and I was starting to wonder what was wrong with me. Why was I still using Bash? So I grabbed Oh-My-Zsh (which was pretty cool, BTW) and dove in… but here’s the problem – I didn’t have time to dive in. ...
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I’ve recently been devouring Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, but a recent post by Debasish Ghosh pushed me to go through it cover to cover… I’m almost there :) I was wrestling over the complexities of applying the sequence function...
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A couple of people pointed out that my posting about why Monads are so awesome left a bit too much to the imagination. I tossed in an update that should make it less mysterious about what the heck I’m talking about.

Update: In the comments below, Alex is trying to educate me on something… I’m still not entirely sure what he’s on about but it’s been keeping me thinking about this post. I’ve modified it a bit here and there to try and be more correct. Essentially, I think...
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I saw a post on Supuser.com that asked about how to go “back” to a directory rather than “up”. The right answer was “cd -“, of course, but I’ve been using a home-grown tool to do this for years and it works really well. It started out as a Korn Shell so...
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