I’ve been learning Scala, it’s a great little programming language.  I would like to see java replaced by it eventually.

I was dealing with a very specific issue in scala, whereby I was matching a Map and getting the following error:

error: constructor cannot be instantiated to expected type;
[scalac]  found   : Some[A]
[scalac]  required: Int
[scalac]           case Some(x) => {

It turns out, there are two ways to access a Map.  So if I have

val wallet = Map(”Money” -> 100)

wallet(”Money”) returns 100

wallet(”Monkey”) throws an exception

wallet.get(”Money”) returns Some(100)

wallet.get(”Monkey”) returns None

Therefore, I was supposed to be using get when matching access to wallet:

val numOfM= wallet.get(”Monkey”)

numOfM match {

Some(num) => {println “#:” + num}

None => {println “You don’t have enough bananas :(”}

}

Even if they removed explicit end tags, it’d be better.

Doesn’t this:

background-image:
url(’bgdesert.jpg’)

Requires understanding a lot more syntax than:

<background-image>
<url>bgdesert.jpg</>
</>

If I thumb down an it means I don’t want to see it again.  Yet, I constantly have to look at this stupid ad:

Please don’t show me it anymore. :(

Thanks

I was looking for more information on glassy-bleu, a theme hp made for their laptops, and I found a link to this guy’s twitter page as one of the top 4 results.  Thanks, Google, for letting me know someone out there is trying the theme.  Maybe if it was a blog post he’d have details on how I could try it.

A better application of twitter links would be to just inline them into the search results as the full result.  Why do I have to load another entire webpage to view the twitter user status change?  This whole thing is stupid.  In the best case scenario, they would just derank twitter.

You see, on facebook, it’s my closest friends reading my status.  So if a friend with a dissenting opinion reads my status and is compelled by a post to offer a differing opinion, he can’t reply to it to argue because he would do so knowing I have spent my entire life orienting myself with a group of friends which essentially forms an overly complex system of confirmation bias.

To correct this, people post on their OWN facebook status their own beliefs.  This forms a cycle in which everyone is expousing beliefs to cope with annoying friends they disagree with.

Is this a bad thing?  I am not sure.  People are discussing their ideas more, and becoming more interested in policies and politics.  Regardless, I have a feeling it is one small stone in a large quarry of the trend of people grouping up more and more by self similarity in society.  Doing so is rational, beneficial, yet  perhaps less colorful.

But what’s interesting about this is that McCain is feeling hurt from a law he supported.  When the shoe’s on the other foot, it feels different.  I would hope that instead of trying to make special cases, he’d instead realize that there are either some flaws with the overreaching power of the DMCA, or accept it and host the videos on his own servers, free of youtube’s takedown policies, but at the cost of viewership.

Personally, I think copyright law is a difficult thing.  It’s expensive to manage and defend.  It offers low value in return for high costs to content producers to defend their copyright works against all violations without tools like google has provided.  Yet, with google’s tools, it has come at the cost of free culture.  Is there even a balance that can be struck that is fair to both the copyright holders and the content producers that minimizes time spent in court, paying lawyers?

Because of this, I was able to extrapolate the following graph. This graph shows that the Nintendo wii was likely first searched around June, 2005, in Japan.  I believe that this is when Nintendo first came up with the name.  Therefore, the Wii name was identified as a possible name almost a year beforehand.

Is this useful at all?  Probably not.  I do, however, think it is interesting that the actions of companies could possibly be inferred by the searches their employees do.

However, I have reservations with some arguments supporting in-game advertising.  First of all, very few people want their game spoiled by blatant, obvious, advertising.  Posting billboards for pepsi inside a Counter-strike third world city map is bad.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, most people are happy when games that mimic reality.  We might not want billboards in strange places, we’re fine with the fake-company parody advertising in Grand Theft Auto.  Any ad that is as realistic as possible, even though it mentions no real company, makes Grand Theft Auto feel more real.

However, my reservations are on people who argue “I’m fine with in game advertising, you can put pepsi in a pepsi machine because it promotes realism.”  My argument is that it isn’t real.  Unlike the manufactured advertisements in real life ™, the advertisements in games promote only the brand of the advertiser.  I’m only fine with pepsi machines in my sandbox GTA-esque game, as long as across the street I might find a coke machine.

Advertising doesn’t promotes realism in games, because there is only one advertiser.  It is void of product differentiation; advertising tries to convince you that there are no other products.  Yet those who want advertising in games want it because it makes the game feel more like reality.

Without competing advertisements, there is no realism.  It is eerie, and gives the user a feeling of being cheap.

Therefore, I argue in-game advertisements are fine, but in-game advertising is not immersive.  It can never be immersive by definition.

“This ultrakill brought to you by MOUNTAIN DEW.. YEAH“