I find myself constantly battling with Cisco VPN client on my Mac. As such, I’ve recently turned to vpnc as a replacement. VPNC is available as a Darwin Port but won’t work with a simple install. %> sudo port install libgpg-error openssl libgcrypt tuntaposx vpnc That’s all there is to it. The [...]
Manny Ramirez will be back in action Friday night following his 50-game suspension.
This is probably an unpopular stance to take, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the celebratory aspect of his return. I don’t know that he should be vilified — it’s not like Ramirez is the only player ever to test positive. At the same time, “everyone else is doing it” is no justification.
It’s great for the Dodgers and the game that he’s returning. I understand that, and I have little doubt that fans receive a superior product for their money when he’s on the field. I’m just not sure that celebration is the appropriate response here.
I don’t have kids, and goodness knows I abhor the tired “think of the children” meme, but how do parents who cheer his return explain their reasoning? I’m not being rhetorical; I honestly don’t know how you reconcile these two things:
- welcoming back a person who was caught cheating
- imparting to your children values that are beneficial to society
Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky. It wouldn’t be the first time.
At first, the reports were contradictory. But now we've seen multiple reports that Sarah Palin plans to resign her office as governor of Alaska at some point in the very near future. Initially reports suggested only that she wouldn't run again; quickly followed by reports of an imminent resignation.
More in a moment.
3:26 PM ... A few have suggested that she's resigning to free up time to run for president in 2012. (She would have left office at the end of next year.) But I'm not so sure about that. Generally, when you run for election to a high office it's understood that you'll stick around to do the job. Many people run for another office while they're serving out one term and then resign to take the next job. Obama did that, after all. As did Bush and Clinton before them. But resigning an office just to run for another one leaves you open to a lot of criticism for not fulfilling your commitments. So I'm not certain this is really about freeing up time to run for president full time. And if it is, the wisdom of the move, from her perspective, is questionable.
Local station KTVA in Alaska has this ...
Palin announced that she will transfer power to Lt. Governor Sean Parnell. Parnell will be sworn in during the upcoming governor's picnic in Fairbanks on July 25. An emotionally choked-up Parnell said he plans to keep all state commissioners and continue to pursue a natural gas pipeline.Palin did not field questions and would not give any indications as to her future plans.
Filed under: iPod Family, Developer, iPhone, SDK
Last week, TUAW showed you how to sign iPhone applications for informal developer-to-developer distribution. That approach lets you share applications between members of the iPhone developer program by using your signing credentials to authorize the application for use on your development units.
iPhone applications compiled for the Intel-based simulator can also be shared between developers. And, since the free developer program offers access to the simulator, the apps can be distributed even more widely than with the re-signing approach.
Simulator testing does not offer the full suite of device-specific capabilities. You cannot simulate the onboard camera or retrieve proper accelerometer feedback. The simulator does not vibrate or provide general multitouch input. (You can pinch, but that's about it.)
The strength of simulator-based distribution is that it lets you send out applications for early testing and feedback. Sim-only tests strengthen the preliminary design process; this approach helps solicit feedback on user interface and general program layout before the main development push gets underway.
Simulator-based apps are easy to transfer and easy to use, cutting out a layer of overhead that's needed for when you go to a full ad-hoc beta.
To distribute a simulator application, go to the
Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/User/Applications/folder in your home directory. There you'll find the application sandbox folders that are currently installed for your simulator. Each folder is named with a unique id (i.e. 56E66CE5...DC028F) that does not reflect the folder's contents.You'll have to peek inside to determine which folder is which.The folder contains the application, and three sandbox directories: tmp, Library, and Documents.
To share a simulator folder compiled for 2.2.1 and earlier, you must zip up both the folder with the application and the .sb (sandbox) file that shares the same name as the folder. 3.0 and later applications do not use a .sb file. Just zip up and share the folder.
Install the shared app by decompressing its sandbox folder (and, for 2.x, its .sb file). The recipient must have installed the iPhone SDK. Drop it into the simulator's Applications folder on another machine and launch the simulator. The app should appear in the simulator, ready for testing.
TUAWDeveloper-to-developer: application sharing for the iPhone simulator originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you haven't noticed it, I figured I'd call your attention to our new "tweet spot" on the homepage of Serious Eats. The latest tweet from our Twitter stream now appears at the bottom of the upper right hand feature box.
We use Twitter in a variety of ways, but if you're not on Twitter yourself or are not following us (and, really, why aren't you?!?), you may be missing out on the fact that it's become a bit of a supplemental microblog for us. We often post links there that we're thinking about blogging on the homepage or that, for whatever reason, may not ever appear on the homepage but are still interesting, funny, or useful. So hit our tweet spot, why doncha?
And, of course, if you're not following us on Twitter, what the heck are you waiting for? We're @seriouseats.
Originally posted in Street UseI can't tell what this is for. Might be a portable night market stall (for food?). There's a generator on the tail and a light bulb hanging in the middle. Seems to be in Korea. That's all I know. (Thanks Dave Gray)
Tonight the Mets will play the Phillies in Philadelphia, their third consecutive game in as many days in a different road city.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, this is only the second time in franchise history that this has happened to the Mets, the last time from July 23-25, 1995 when they were in Colorado, Chicago, and St. Louis.
It is common knowledge that the Mets rank at the bottom of the National League with 50 home runs.
…however, these numbers threw me for a loop…
The Mets have the fewest strikeouts and the highest team batting average in the NL at .273.
They also lead the league with 79 stolen bases, have the second most hits, and are tied for the lead in on-base percentage with the Dodgers at .349.
…looking at this from afar, you would say there is no way this ballclub could be just a .500 team, but they are, which at this point has remarkably been good enough to compete in their division…
…this has to be attributed to the men they leave on base day in and day out…
Photos by Donna
It began with pickles. I'd bought a quart of small cukes to pickle with tarragon but I wasn't thinking as I made the brine. I wanted some spice in there so I added black peppercorns. Then, here is the not thinking part, I put in a load of coriander seed, then the tarragon, but as I smelled the brine coming up to heat, it was clear that pepper and coriander would completely overpower the tarragon, and simply don't belong together. So I removed the tarragon. Donna arrived just then and said, "Mmm, smells good in here. Like corned beef."Having ruined the brine for the pickles (using the standard 5% brine ratio from Ratio, bien sur), I thought let's put it to use with what pepper and coriander were made for. I'd bought some short ribs intending to cure them with a dry rub to see how that worked, but now that I had a brine with corned beef seasonings, it would be a pickle instead. I'd bought them specifically to make corned beef/pastrami, normally made with brisket. But briskets are big and expensive and I wanted small portions. Also the brisket nowadays is so lean it can become dry. I wanted to use a well marbled cut, and short rib seemed perfect. (I thought I was being particularly clever, here, making corned beef out of short ribs, but apparently Asianjewishdeli has been doing it for months! Rats!)
The fact is, you can corn any cut of beef if you want, doesn't have to be brisket. The key ingredient is the pink salt, sodium nitrite, which keeps the meat vivid red even after cooking, and gives the beef its distinctive corned-beef flavor. So I simply added a half teaspoon of that to the brine, chilled it and submerged several boneless beef shortribs in the brine and left them for a few days.
I love the smoky spicy flavor of pastrami (corned beef coated in black pepper and coriander and smoked). To get this effect at home, without relying on a smoker, I grilled them over a hot fire. After grilling, they needed to be tenderized which we do by slow cooking. Corned beef is typically cooked in court bouillon, but I wanted to keep all the flavor in the abundantly seasoned meat. So I wrapped them in foil with a little water to make sure the environment was moist and cooked them for a few hours in a 200 degree oven.
The result: exquisitely juicy, flavorful pastrami that's easy to do at home. Several steps, yes, but all of them easy.
How did I prepare the pastrami? Neo-Reubens. Pastrami, sauerkraut, gruyere, with a mayo spiked with sriracha sauce, sandwiched between English muffin halves and cooked in a skillet. English muffin makes the perfect portion size for such a rich sandwich, we had with chips and beer. The hardest part of this preparation was waiting for Donna to finish taking the picture so we could eat.
There's a complete corned beef recipe in Charcuterie, which includes mustard seeds, allspice, mace, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, all of which are fantastic, but all I used for this brine was peppercorn, coriander, garlic, pinch of ground cinnamon, and chilli flakes, and importantly 1/2 teaspoon of pink salt for about two cups of water (if you don't know about pink salt, there's more info at the bottom of this post). Pickle your beef for a few days in the fridge, coat with a mixture of equal parts peppercorns and coriander seed roughly cracked or chopped, grill them, then slow cook in foil as described above. After tasting these, I can't imagine ever using brisket again. Corned beef short ribs are fabulous.
Becoming Minimalist:I had a thought last night that I wanted to wake up this morning and get rid of 75% of the ‘stuff’ that I own. […]
How do you start to get rid of these things?
Get some sort of external storage. The basement, a small rental storage unit, your parents’ place, or New Jersey. The less convenient it is to access, the better.
Put nearly everything you own there. Leave out only what you’d pack if you were going on a trip for 2 weeks.
From that point forward, remove only what you need, as you need it, from storage. You’ll almost never need to do this.
After a year, get rid of everything that’s still in storage.
Last April, there was a flurry of “news” coverage on concerns about Up, and whether it not commercial enough.
Well, it has currently grossed more money than any other film this year (though Transformers 2 will blow past it soon. Still…)
Is anyone going back to the “analysts” and upbraiding them for their shortsighted work? Is there any punishment, demerit, or other drawback to having been so wrong?
Last night I had what may have been my last meal at Joe Jr.'s: cheeseburger deluxe and chocolate egg cream. As the news came out yesterday, Joe's is slated to close on Sunday after 35 years in the Village. They have lost their lease--one man at the counter stated, "They had the lease, but the landlord backed out at the last minute." Others said about the landlord, "It's the son, not the father, who's making problems." In an interview on NY1 the landlord said he would try to extend the lease through July and, about his son, "forget him altogether."
The little diner was packed and people kept flowing in--to sign the petition, give their regrets and outrage, and eat a meal. Some people were in denial, "It won't really happen." Others were somber, "It's a terrible shame." Some were angry, "The landlord is a greedy prick." The waitress was exhausted, "I haven't stopped since 3:00 this afternoon."
The petition on the counter filled up fast, people signing their names under the words: "DON'T LET JOE JR'S CLOSE: After 35 years in the neighborhood, please let the landlord know how important Joe's is to the Greenwich Village community. Joe's is our kitchen, our meeting place, our hangout, our comfort food. Our neighborhood will lose a treasure should it shut down this weekend."
Next to the petition was a paper with the landlord's name and number, urging people to call. One woman called on the spot, leaving an angry message for the landlord stating, among other things, "This is a shonda!"
Outside, passersby stopped to read the sign in shock, crying out, "Oh, no!" They went in to sign the petition, too. People lingered on the sidewalk, talking about what could be done to save Joe's--hire a lawyer, organize a rally, call Tom Duane!--and about the many losses of the vanishing city, in which anything can be taken away without much warning at all.
this might seem morbid to some, but I find it inspiring
In the world of urban planning, there are few things hairier than transportation hypotheticals. When NYC pedestrianized Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square in May, the transportation commissioner said that traffic speeds would go up — but now it seems that we won't know until December at the earliest whether that's actually true.
At the same time, however, a smart model of what exactly would happen if you changed this or charged for that is a prerequisite for making any kind of informed improvements to a snarled-up central business district. And so, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Charles Komanoff's absolutely astonishing Balanced Tranportation Analyzer — a 3.5 MB Excel spreadsheet which is the product of many years of research and analysis into the question of New York City traffic.
This thing is so big and so complicated that even with all of the detailed explanations in it, it's hard to understand — you really need Komanoff himself to walk you through it. But he recently did just that for me, and so I can point you to the “Delays” sheet, for instance, where Komanoff attempts to quantify the externalities imposed by any given car in NYC traffic.
Being a cyclist, I'm acutely aware of the issue of externalities — it generally costs you nothing to blindly step off the sidewalk and into the bike lane, or to open your taxi door without looking behind you, but it can affect me greatly. Komanoff's a cyclist too, but he's concentrating in this spreadsheet mainly on vehicular traffic. After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driving south of 60th Street in Manhattan causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds, it comes to a significant amount of time.
Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the value of an hour of saved vehicule time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.
Of course there are lots of variables here; for one thing, the externalities associated with driving your car into Manhattan go up with the total amount of traffic in the CBD. If you think there's 5% less traffic in New York now than there was a year or two ago, for instance, the cost imposed goes down from 3.26 hours to 2.79 hours. Or, to put it another way, if you could somehow implement a policy which resulted in 10% fewer vehicles driving into Manhattan, any given vehicle would impose “only” 2.38 hours of externalities — an improvement of about $43 over the base case.
Komanoff, of course, isn't just analyzing the present, he also has a plan for the future. First of which, necessarily, involves congestion pricing. To drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street, you pay a toll: on weekdays, the toll is $3 at night, then rises to $6 for most of the day, and for peak periods (6am to 10am, and 2pm to 8pm) goes up to $9. At weekends, there's a similar but smaller toll, at $1/$3/$5 prices.
Then there's the subway fare: that too changes according to the time of day. At night subways are free; sometimes they're 50 cents, and most of the time they're $1. At ultra-peak hours (between 8am and 9am, and between 5pm and 6pm) a subway fare rises to $2, dropping to $1.50 the following hour.
One of the most interesting parts of Komanoff's plan is the bus fare: always $0, all the time. That speeds up buses considerably, since it basically eliminates long lines at the fare box as people hunt for their MetroCard. In turn that makes buses more attractive, and a lot of people, attracted by the free fare and faster speeds, will start taking the bus rather than driving or taking a taxi or a subway.
Medallion taxis do not pay the congestion charge, but there is a 33% taxi-fare surcharge. 10% goes to the taxi drivers and owners; 23% goes to the MTA.
Add it all up, and it's pretty much revenue-neutral, says Komanoff: the biggest line items are that you lose $1.46 billion in transit fares, while gaining $1.31 billion in congestion charges. But total time savings are the biggie: implement this plan and New Yorkers get over $2.5 billion of time back which would otherwise be spent wasted in traffic. Vehicle speeds in general rise about 20%, and as much as 25% between 9am and 10am.
All in all (see the “Cost-Benefit” tab), Komanoff sees $5.3 billion in gains and just $2 billion in losses. Sounds good to me. What's more, it's politically more acceptable than the last attempt to introduce congestion pricing into NYC, where the brunt was disproportionately borne by Brooklyn. This plan puts much more of the cost of the plan onto Manhattanites, largely thanks to that taxi surcharge. Here are Komanoff's charts (from the “Incidence” tab):
Komanoff's still working on this spreadsheet, but the main message is pretty clear — that smart congestion charging would be great news for New York, and probably for most other dense cities as well. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can even try playing around with the numbers yourself. Enjoy!
There's a lot of tacky shit being sold on Etsy right now in honor of Michael Jackson. This, however, is nice: Off the Wall crocheted and embroidered pillow.
At Percona we provide services both Onsite - visiting the customers and Remote - logging in to their systems or communicating via email,phone,instant messaging.
We believe both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks and mixing them right way allows you to get your problems solved most efficient way.
Onsite visits are great as they allow consultant to meet your team in person and great for relationship building. It is great for architecture design and review as you can sit down with the team and use drawing board. It also often allows the best focus both for consultant and for participating team - when consulting visit is arranged it is usually the top priority for some of the staff members which provide consultant with information and assistance he might need.
Onsite visits also often allow to get prompt attention from other team - looking for network engineer to understand network topology or for someone from marketing to get the growth plans - they typically can be brought in for question.
I believe Onsite visits also offer unmatched training experience for the team - one of the team members can work side by side with consultants observing what he does and asking the question about the progress.
The Single Day visits are often extremely valuable as a kick off to do application redesign, for performance review or for starting long term Remote DBA or support relationships. They can be done with little planning as basically for any system there is enough work to spend efficiently understanding the system and working on the pressing problems customer may have. Such visits are often result in a lot of “homework” as application changes or implementing changes on production which when can benefit from remote followups to validate changes and provide further advice.
Multi day onsite visits require a bit more planning to be efficient. Many times in my career I would come to the customer for a week only to find I have created the implementation plan within 1-2 days and it will take a while to implement it and pass it through development and testing stages. Before long onsite visit it is very good to have a call with consultant to understand what exactly needs to be done, how much time and what resources it requires.
Projects which can be efficient as multi day visits are whenever implementation is required (coding unlike giving advice takes a lot of time) - migration projects, any forms of scripting, implementation (writing queries), hands on setting up MySQL, Replication, Monitoring, High Availability with MMM or DRBD are good examples.
Another good example of efficient Multi-Day visit is when there are multiple groups or multiple applications using MySQL - in such case each of the problem areas/groups can gets its own day or few hours which keeps consultant busy.
To make a Multi-Day visit efficient it is important to plan on what will be done - what people will consultant need to work with and which problems do they have. Providing proper access and having staging/test systems available are also often required.
Remote work has a benefit of consultant being available in the short time intervals and being able to multi task.
Working with the customer there are two types of “waits” which are often encountered. First - waiting on the customer. It could be fixing access problems, completing application changes, QA, scheduling downtime to implement changes and millions of other things. Second - waiting on database (or other) operations to complete - backup, restore, ALTER TABLE, load testing - all of these things take time and make consultant to wait for them.
In case you’re working remotely consultant typically has other tasks to do while such long processes are running. If you’re spending time onsite you may have other tasks or you may not while if you’re working remotely there are always things to do.
Another benefit of remote work - it truly allows to engage the team. If you have consultant onsite getting another one with some specific knowledge is complicated while getting another person to login to the system remotely for a quick look is easy and efficient.
Time is another interesting factor - onsite visits usually happen during office hours while changes to production are often avoided. With remote work it is much easier to do work which needs to be done at night hours.
Remote work however also needs to be well organized. The benefit of onsite work is - it is always planned at very specific time. Given date and time consultant will be there so both consultant and customer prepare for the visit. If appointment is just a phone call or online meeting there is larger chance it can be forgotten by ether party. In many cases the remote work not planned to the specific time at all which can cause it to be delayed because of either party delays.
If you need something to be done fast and you’re doing it remotely make sure to plan it to exact time and make sure there is someone to assist consultant if he needs any help such as access issues, some questions about setup or what exactly given queries are doing. Prompt responses can keep the ball rolling much faster.
Another trick to make remote work successful is to be very clear in your instructions especially if you’re not going to be available to assist consultant when he is doing the work. As remote work is often done cross time zones this becomes a very important factor.
In case you have a lot of work done in such “disconnected” mode it is a good idea to have daily/weekly/or be-weekly (depending on project intensity) calls to get team to discuss the progress and generally get team on the same page.
In general surprisingly a lot of things can be done in completely remote mode - we’ve done not only basic optimizations but architecture redesigns, large scale deployment, migrations and high available architectures implementation such a way often surprising customers (in a good way) of how little customers the work took.
The Great Mix As I mentioned before mixing Onsite and Remote work can be indeed the best mix especially for the complex projects. Onsite visit is great to setup relationships, get initial understanding of the system and get initial project planning. After it is done a lot of work can be done remotely quite efficient while there may be the benefit in onsite status-checks and team interactions as well.
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Wow, Michael Bay sounds terribly egotistical in these quotes. I saw Transformers 2, and I think Megan Fox has a very valid point! But even if she doesn't, it'd be much cooler to show a little more humility when you get criticized, especially when it's coming from someone who's a big part of your current success. And, honestly, does Michael Bay really think he's known for having good acting in his movies? Or writing? Or directing? Actually wait, what is he good at again? Michael Bay Calls Megan Fox "Ridiculous" source Megan Fox slammed Transformers director Michael Bay for focusing more on special effects than acting, but he doesn't mind. "Well, that's Megan Fox for you," Bay tell the Wall Street Journal. "She says some very ridiculous things because she's 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, 'Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it,'" he goes on. Fox told Entertainment Weekly: "I mean, I can't s--- on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don't want to blow smoke up people's a--. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting." Michael Bay Calls Megan Fox "Ridiculous"
The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin".
Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.
Tags: books Brad Pitt Michael Lewis Moneyball movies Steven Soderbergh
Posted by Dave Arnold
Last Sunday my cousin, James (the guy who drew the cartoons for this blog), introduced me to his buddy, Devin Coldewey, a tech stuff reviewer for CrunchGear. He brought with him the coolest point-and-shoot camera I’ve ever seen, the Casio Exilim FC-100 (his review here). This thing costs $300 and shoots slo-mo video at 1000 frames per second! 1000 frames!! Anyway, I cooked him dinner and in return, he agreed to come in Monday and shoot slo-mo of us sabering champagne. So here it is: How to saber champagne, complete with slo-mo video (scroll to the bottom of this post). Oh, and Casio: we’re adding the Exilim FC-100 to our wish-list (of things to get for free). In fact, if we got one, we’d probably find a reason to use it weekly, if not daily.
Before we start: I don’t want to hear anything about saber vs sabre. Both are acceptable spellings, I do not fence, and saber looks more American.
While we are clearing the air, many people feel that sabering sparkling wine is useless and wasteful. I disagree. Sabering expensive champagne is wasteful (if you make a mistake). Sabering a $7 cava is an exhilarating and awesome party trick. Whether or not a bottle will saber depends only on the bottle, not the price of the wine – so stick with the inexpensive.
What is sabering? Sabering is the art of cleanly severing the top off a bottle of sparkling wine. You hit the lower lip of the top of the champagne bottle and snap off the top of the neck. Yes, you break the glass; No, the glass doesn’t get into the drink because the momentum carries it away from the neck (but you may get a shard on the floor so be careful). This works because there is a sharp radius where the lip meets the neck that concentrates stress, making the bottle want to snap cleanly.
Oh Yeah
Here is the procedure:
- Select a bottle that looks like a standard champagne bottle. Don’t pick one with a funky neck – it might not work (although I have a friend who can saber beer bottles). Super-important tip: select a bottle you KNOW will saber. If you sabered a bottle before (Paul Chenaux Cava, for instance or Gruet sparkling), odds are it will work again. If you have failed with a bottle before (Cristallino Cava), you will probably fail again. You don’t want to fail, it is embarrassing.
- The bottle should be cold and let it rest upright for a while before you saber it. Be gentle with the bottle before you saber. Warmer bottles are easier to saber but tend to gush. The best saber jobs don’t gush at all (take that anti-saber snobs). You’ll see gushing in the bottles on the video because they warmed up while we were shooting and were treated roughly.
- Don’t take off the wire cage until you are ready (or the cork may come out on its own).
- Get a knife. It doesn’t need to be heavy. In fact it doesn’t have to be a knife. I made a stainless steel pimp ring to saber at parties. REMEMBER: you are using the back (dull) side of the knife. I saw a drunk friend one night forget this and ruin a good chef’s knife.
super-saber pimp-ring
- Find the seam running up the side of the bottle. The seam is a weak point in the glass and further concentrates the stress when you hit the lip.
- Angle the bottle away from you, your friends, glass, and food (don’t want any glass getting in your food).
- Place knife on the bottle’s seam at the bottom of the neck making sure you keep the knife flat against the bottle. If you don’t, the knife has a tendency to pop over the lip of the bottle.
correct knife angle
- The moment of truth. Slide the knife smoothly, surely, and SQUARELY up the neck of the bottle and sever the top. It doesn’t take force, just confidence. The biggest and most common mistake is to swing the knife in an arc. If you swing in an arc, even a small one, you won’t hit the glass in the right place and you won’t sever the neck. Embarrassing – see the video at the end of the post.
proper way to saber
don't swing like this
- If it doesn’t work, try again. Don’t try 5 or 6 times on the same bottle. Seems desperate and if the bottle doesn’t want to saber and you force it to, you might get a bad break.
- Remember that the momentum carries all the glass shards away from the neck and your drink (that’s why I told you to hold it at an angle).
Well, there it is. We are starting a list of which bottles saber well and which don’t, so please leave comment to tell us. Here is the video, enjoy:
I'm sorry I missed the annual fundraiser at the garden, but there is a nice three part video of the music and dancing.
Who was Abner Graboff? I had no idea. So, I decided to find out on my own.
Artist, illustrator & designer with a career that spanned several decades, from the 1940’s to the 80’s, Abner was best known for creating some of the most ingenious and vibrant children’s books during the mid-century era. But you’d never know it. There was practically nothing on the guy if you did a search online. It was frustrating for me, because I felt that his sense of construction and concepts when it came to designing children’s books was so fresh and bold. Surely there had to be something about the artist out there, right? Nope. Nothing. So I contacted his son, musician and producer Jon Graboff, and interviewed him about his father’s background, his influences, and overall career. The result of our conversations can be found on my blog in three posts:
Who was Abner Graboff?
The Art & Life of Abner Graboff Part 1
The Art & Life of Abner Graboff Part 2Featuring scans from some of his kid’s books, cook book illustrations, jacket cover designs, as well as family photos. Jon’s been very cool in sharing with us his father’s fascinating life & career as an artist. A quote by Jon about his father says it all for me:
“He was artistically and intellectually curious by nature and he was always saying things like, I wonder why… I think that he believed that when you stop asking why, when, where, and what’s next… it’s all over.”
Who was Abner Graboff? Now, we can know.
More on Abner can be found here:
My Abner Graboff Flickr set
Abner Graboff in The Retro Kid
Abner Graboff on Biotope (Japanese site)
I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Mike “King” Kelly. I do however know that when it comes to cool baseball cards, this might be the coolest ever done. It comes from 1888’s Goodwin Champions set, which was set to compete with Allen & Ginter.
What’s incredibly ironic is that Upper Deck will soon release 2009 Goodwin Champions to once again compete with Allen & Ginter, now a Topps Company brand. As for King Kelly, he was a great player who won the batting title twice, led the league in runs three times, and even had some pop (by 1800 standards).
Despite all those accolades, King Kelly was quite the bad ass. He often cheated by stealing bases when the umpire wasn’t paying attention and perfected the ‘King Slide’, which is now commonly done to break up double plays.
From Wikipedia:
“Baseball games had only a single umpire at the time, and Kelly would watch the umpire to see if he was watching the play at first base or looking to see if a ball landed fair or foul. When convinced the umpire’s back was turned, Kelly would immediately run across the diamond to the next base, skipping either second or third, in full view of thousands of fans.”
The King died just one year after his last game in 1894 after contracting Pneumonia. He left his wife and daughter with nothing and when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1945, no one could track down a single family member of Kelly.
The King was 36 at the time of his death.
Have I mentioned recently that I love this book? Because I do. And it’s worth mentioning again. Because even if you haven’t visited Scott’s stomping grounds (Cafe Myriade in Montreal), you can still appreciate the level of dedication that Scott brings to our craft.
Cafe Myriade
And even if you haven’t visited Cafe Myriade, you can rest assured that they’re not waiting for you to make improvements:
But even if you’re not a Fleetwood Mac fan (what? really? c’mon…), if you’re reading this chances are you’re a coffee fan. And if you’re a coffee fan, you should own a copy of The Professional Barista’s Handbook. Whether you’re a home barista, work in a cafe, or own a cafe, I guarantee you won’t regret this purchase. If you live in Montana, they give autographed copies of the book away as prizes! So seriously. Order a copy. It changes all you thought about coffee. No brewer’s library is complete without it.
Posted in coffee, espresso, training Tagged: brewing, coffee, espresso, science, taste
[That's light coming from within Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch early this morning, near Los Olivos, CA; image via Getty]
After seeing VerySmallAnna's cute paintings of animals and food, I knew I had to make a request. A week later, Monsieur Manatee was born. This red beret-clad manatee likes to nosh on crusty baguettes and bags of treats from Pierre Hermé—just like me!
Thanks so much to Anna for making my office space a little bit cuter. If you commission a painting from her, I'd love to see what you end up with.
A 64 year old woman developed a phantom third arm after a stroke, but unusually, the patient was able to see and feel the illusory limb. A study just published online in the journal Annals of Neurology used brain scans to examine the patient. They established that the phantom sensations were accompanied by similar sorts of brain activity as you'd get from a real arm.
Unlike a classic 'phantom limb', where a patient feels sensations as if they're coming from the previously amputated body part, a 'supernumerary phantom limb' is where a phantom seems to appear additional to the already existing arm or leg.
The condition is rare but has been reported before and is known as the 'supernumerary phantom limb' in the medical literature. As we discussed last year, it is usually associated with strokes that affect the subcortical areas of the brain.
One of the reasons this new case is so interesting is because not only could the patient feel their additional limb, but they claimed to be able to see it and feel touches from it as well.
Tactile sensations in the SPL [supernumerary phantom limb] happened when she clenched her hand (she could then feel her phantom palm with her phantom fingers) and when she “touched” certain parts of her body (in which case, the sensation was felt both in the phantom and the touched body part).
She could touch parts of her head, as well as her right shoulder. She claimed to be able to use the SPL to scratch an itch on her head (with an actual sense of relief). Moreover, she reported that the phantom could not penetrate solid obstacles (see supplementary materials for more details).
While a handful of cases of 'visible' supernumerary phantom limbs have been reported, this combination of seeing and feeling the touch of one is unique.
Importantly, the patient was not delusional - they didn't believe they had an extra limb - they knew the sensations were unrealistic, but the experience was still there.
The limb was also not permanently felt - the patient could trigger it at will - and it appeared "pale," "milk-white," and "transparent."
The researchers were keen to see if these sensations were reflected in the activity of the brain by using fMRI scans.
They found that 'moving' the phantom limb in front of the line of sight caused increased activation in the visual cortex of the brain.
Most strikingly, they found that when asked to 'touch' her cheek with the illusory hand, activity in brain areas representing cheek sensation increased.
There is always the chance that someone with very bizarre symptoms could be lying, but it is also the case that brain disturbance can cause all sort of confusions and distortions - so in some cases a patient's description of what's happening may not always be a reliable guide to exactly what they're experiencing.
In this case, the brain imaging suggests that the 'supernumerary phantom limb' was genuinely being perceived as a visible additional arm and that its 'touches' were being processed by the sensory system in a similar way to touches from existing limbs.
Because the condition is so rare, and so conceptually bizarre, there is no good explanation of why it occurs except that it may be linked to the disturbance of our already established body and action 'maps' in the brain.
Apparently, there is more information about the case in supplementary material which can be found 'in the online version of this article', but the additional information doesn't seem to be online. Ironically, the study seems to have a phantom of its own.
Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Tags: baseball Ben Fry infoviz sports
From Peter Bodo's Tennis World blog.
One of the themes emerging from this edition of the Championships is that the Williamses may have gotten better with age, even as they've had to struggle with (or simply endure) waning motivation as the siren song of "normal" life has lured them toward the shoals of inconsistency. The girls may not be as reliably destructive as they once were, but when they paint on their game faces, they may be playing the best tennis either of them has ever conjured up. This may not be true at all tournaments, either, but if you're going to pick one event at which to go medieval on your rivals, this one would be it.
I'm in the middle of re-reading Infinite Jest, and so I can't help but be obsessed with tennis lately, and look at everything through the lens of Enfield Tennis Academy. The Williams sisters :: The Incandenza brothers as Richard Williams :: Himself? (Yeah, on second thought, maybe not.)
Smart essay from Daniel Jalkut on how the GPL discourages participation from many (if not most) developers.
This is even worse than the Bush Administration’s TARD fund.
This very post is delivered to your browser or news reader by the famous and fabulous WordPress blogging system. In my work as the developer of MarsEdit, I am exposed to countless blogging options, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. And yet, I stick with WordPress because it strikes a balance of power and ease of use which feels comfortable to me. Not to mention that Joseph Scott and others are tirelessly working to improve its API.
WordPress is licensed under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL) which, in a nutshell, stipulates that you are free to use the software however you like, but if you make changes and distribute those changes, then you must share those changes under the same terms. This simple, radical restriction means that you are prohibited from taking a GPL project and incorporating it with a closed-source project.
Violating The GPL
Violating the GPL is easy. All you have to do is write some code, intermingle it with some GPL code, distribute a changed copy of the original, and refuse to share your contributions. Bam! You’re toast. Assuming the original authors discover your violation and decide to pursue a resolution.
Once a violation occurs, it might be settled privately, or could escalate to legal court procedures. But the most obvious form of resolution is for the author of the changes to release their code to the public under the terms of the GPL.
Depending on how much code you “mixed” with the GPL code, this could mean only a small portion, or it could mean the entire source code of your project. This so-called “viral nature” of GPL is what scares the bejeezus out of companies, large and small, who fear the consequences of having to give up their own intellectual property to the public.
The terms of the GPL sound pretty simple at first read, but due in part to the epic consequences of a violation, there has been a great deal of debate and uncertainty about what legally constitutes a violation. Most of the debate seems to boil down to two questions:
- What counts as a change to the original product?
- What counts as distribution of those changes?
If you can legally justify that your additions to a GPL project either don’t change or derive from the original product, or haven’t technically been distributed, then you are not subject to the restrictive terms of the license.
Take GIMP, the popular GNU-licensed image editing application. The application supports plugins, analogous to the types of plugins you might find for the commercial, closed-source application Photoshop. A savvy developer may argue that a plugin doesn’t meet the criteria of changing the original application, because the original application still runs in its unaltered condition whether the plugin is there or not.
But promoters of the GPL take the position that plugins, by nature of being loaded into the same code space as other GPL code, do constitute a modification of the original, and are therefore subject to the terms of the GPL. As far as I know this is not a question that has been well-tested in courts.
Let me take a moment to make this abundantly clear: I respect the rights of authors to license their software under whatever terms they choose, including the GPL. In my opinion, all the legal mumbo jumbo ceases to matter once the original author’s intentions are made clear. So if the author of GPL-licensed code clarifies to me that it cannot be run on Sundays, then their GPL means it cannot be run on Sundays. But this is one of the problems with the GPL: its terms are not often understood, even by the authors of GPL-licensed code.
WordPress Themes & Plugins
WordPress supports two explicit forms of extension, each of which may affect the appearance and functionality of the product. Themes tend to work as a “skin” for the appearance of a blog, while plugins tend to introduce completely new features. Since plugins in WordPress are analogous to GIMP or Photoshop plugins, it would stand to reason that they would also be covered by the terms of the GPL. But what about themes?
Themes have been controversial in the WordPress community, as a few commercial business models have sprung up to take advantage of bloggers’ desires for high quality themes at an affordable price. One approach is to distribute “free” themes that contains commercial ads. So you might stumble upon the perfect theme for your blog, only to learn that the glaring “Brought to you by Hostess Cupcakes” line near the bottom of your page cannot be removed.
But the terms of the GPL, if themes are covered, would require that end users be granted the legal right to modify and redistribute their own copy of the theme. Zap the sponsorship, reupload to your site, and you’ve got a free, high quality theme with no ugly ads.
Today, Matt Mullenweg of the WordPress project announced his lawyer-supported opinion that themes are partly covered by the GPL:
I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preeminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
If you’re starting with the understanding that WordPress itself is GPL, and WordPress plugins are GPL, then it’s not so much extra hay on the camel’s back, to also clarify that its themes are to some extent GPL. But it got me thinking again about my own blog, and about the restrictions the GPL imposes on the kinds of things I can do with the software that runs it.
GPL Stifles Participation
Now for the most controversial point of this article, where I suggest that the GPL does more to harm collaborative development than it does to help it.
For the purposes of this argument, let me reduce all the source code in the world down to three rough categories. I recognize I have omitted some classes of license here, but for the sake of argument, most projects fall into these camps:
- GPL code. Changes may be distributed only in other GPL products.
- Liberal-licensed code. (MIT/BSD/Apache/etc). Changes may be distributed anywhere. Appropriate origin-attribution may be required.
- Closed-source code. May be distributed only by the copyright owner and other explicit licensees.
Now, there are a few people in the world who, for political or philosophical reasons, will only participate in a GPL project. And for compariable yet opposite reasons, there are some who will only participate in commercial, closed-source projects. But I propose that the vast majority of developers will participate in any project that is advantageous to them.
So let’s imagine a representative, run-of-the-mill developer who is working on a project that falls into each of these three camps. If this developer is not radically committed to their own project’s license, they will naturally look to outside resources in order to bolster the success of their own work.
As the developer evaluates communities to participate in, they must evaluate the legal impact such participation will have on their own project. The closed source communities are, by definition uninviting to outsiders. GPL communities are open and embracing of other GPL developers, but generally off-putting to liberal-license and closed-license developers. Only the liberal-license communities are attractive to developers from all 3 camps.
I know what some of the GPL-enthusiasts are thinking now: “leeches don’t count as community.” Many GPL developers take comfort in the fact that their hard work can’t be quietly taken and incorporated into a commercial product, without any payback of time or money to the original project. But you’re piloting an open source project, and the first step of building a community is to get people in the door. Liberal licenses? Whoo-eee do they ever get people in the door.
If you operate from the presumption that great developers love to build great projects, the first step in any successful open source project is to get as many great developers in the door as possible.
It’s Your Party
Yes, this is just me and my crazy theories. I haven’t done exhaustive research to prove that liberal-license communities thrive more than GPL communities. But the anecdotal examples are staggering. The very foundation of Mac OS X, the operating system through which I’m typing, is thanks to the liberally-licensed FreeBSD operating system.
Looking over to the right of my screen, I’m watching this sentence appear in a live web preview as I type, thanks to the WebKit project, whose liberal license makes it compatible with closed source projects such as Safari, as well as open source efforts such as Google’s Chromium project.
For years, the problem of a generic HTTP client library that runs on every major platform has been addressed by libcurl, whose liberal license has caused it to be embraced by countless companies and projects.
The popular Subversion source control system’s liberal license enabled Sofa, a commercial software business to contribute value to the community with its extremely polished, award-winning client application. Meanwhile, the newly popular distributed source control systems presents three major choices: git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. All are restrcted by the GPL-license, and therefore none is likely to inspire development of a Versions-caliber client.
I’ve touched the tip of the iceberg, and yes I’ve neglected to mention some GPL success stories such as Linux, MySQL, and gcc. These communities have thrived to some extent because the passions of the GPL community are strong, but we can’t know whether their success is in spite of the restrictions their license places on participation by the broader developer community.
Speaking of GPL succeses, WordPress is itself an example of monumental success. All of its developers have something to be immensely proud of. But whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products. If a liberally-licensed blog system of equal quality, ease of use, and popularity should appear, my loyalties to WordPress would not last long.
It’s your party, and you’re entitled to write the guest list. But take a look around the room: not as many folks as you’d hoped for? Liberally-licensed projects are booming. Speaking for myself, a developer who has been to all the parties, I’m much more likely to pass through the door that doesn’t read “GPL Only.”
Here is a very rare find: an interview of Michael Jackson on the set of “Beat It” with Tom Joyner.Watch how Tom had to ask him about having real friends twice. Sad. Hope you guys like the interview.-Dr.FB
Can anyone guess the entry codes for these door locks?
There are 10,000 possible four-digit codes, but you only have to try 24 on these keypads. The second is almost certainly guessable in one.
This morning, Politico published a story detailing an interesting flier apparently being passed around DC health care lobby circles: a dinner invitation from the Washington Post at the house of CEO and Publisher Katherine Weymouth, selling access to its news and editorial staff and top Obama officials for $25,000 to $250,000. A health care lobbyist passed the missive on to Politico staff because he felt "it's a conflict of interest for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its 'health care reporting and editorial staff.'"
Two and a half hours after the story was published, executive editor Marcus Brauchli sent an internal memo entitled "Newsroom Independence," in which he stated that the news department will not be attending the dinner. The sentiment echoes the statement WaPo spokesperson Kris Coratti made to Politico:
The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company's vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers.As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.
Read the full text of Brauchli's memo and the original flier after the jump.
From: Marcus Brauchli
Sent: 07/02/2009 10:33 AM EDT
To: NEWS
Subject: Newsroom IndependenceColleagues,
A flyer was distributed this week offering an "underwriting opportunity" for a dinner on health-care reform, in which the news department had been asked to participate.
The language in the flyer and the description of the event preclude our participation.
We will not participate in events where promises are made that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our independence from advertisers or sponsors is inviolable.
There is a long tradition of news organizations hosting conferences and events, and we believe The Post, including the newsroom, can do these things in ways that are consistent with our values.
Marcus
The original flyer:
"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth ... Bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders ..."Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama Administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. ...
"Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters' CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 ... Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m."
Via Serious Eats, here's Fancy Fast Food:
These photographs show extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants. No additional ingredients have been added except for an occasional simple garnish.
Did you catch the piece on writer/director/neck-lamenter Nora Ephron in this week’s New Yorker? It’s got some funny bits and nice moments, but there’s really nothing earth-shattering or new in it. And yet? I read the entire thing, a rarity for me. Which leads me to the conclusion that, at this point in 2009, writer Ariel Levy may be the best practitioner of longform profile journalism in the business. And I’ll stand on Vanessa Grigoriadis’ coffee table in my Kenneth Cole Oxfords and say that. (Kidding! You’re great too, Grigsy!) But, yeah… ever since she came to the New Yorker I have been consistently impressed with how compelling and well-written Levy’s stuff has been (this was probably the piece that sealed the deal); the craftsmanship is never ostentatious, but you’re always aware that her stuff reads much more easily than it must have been to put together. So, nice work, Ariel Levy! I salute you.
One thing I often lament is the lost art of the movie poster. Movie posters today are so slick and without creativity that it makes me sad. They all just feature a still from the movie, the title of the film, some pull quotes and the names of the folk’s involved.
It is for this reason that I was so excited when I first saw the poster for The Informant yesterday. It brought a huge smile to my face not only because it is hilarious but also because it is a welcome change in the slick, prepackaged world of movie posters. The text, Matt Damon, the colors and their placement all work together in the most wonderful way.
Also, if you agree with me about the current state of movie posters there are some sites out there that do a great job of reminding us of the good work being done and that has been done in the past. If you spend a few minutes looking at old movie posters you will quickly come to realize the potential that is out there and that is rarely being harnessed today.
I sometimes think that the state of movie posters reflects the state of cinema in general (at least when it comes to this country). If there is any truth in this than I am even more in anticipation of The Informant than before.
Editor's note: On Thursdays, Babbo pastry chef Gina DePalma checks in with Seriously Italian. After a stint in Rome, she's back in the States, channeling her inner Italian spirit via recipes and intel on delicious Italian eats. Take it away, Gina!
I live on the top floor of our six-story building, which takes the heat of summer to another level. As soon as the temperatures get warm and the days get longer, our tar roof begins to sop up the heat and then pump it into our apartment with the full-force vengeance of a busted furnace. If there are any other roof dwellers out there, you know exactly what I am talking about. It is a miserable, stifled, intensity that makes even the slightest bit of activity seem like torture.
It reminds me a bit of the kind of heat they get in Sicily, where at the height of summer it is not uncommon to awake at sunrise to soaring temperatures. Sicilians have unique coping mechanisms in place to deal with the inferno. They drive like maniacs in the streets of Palermo and Catania. They take to the seashores as much as possible, gathering on beaches and promenades, dangling off the decks of boats and rocky cliffs. And they eat ice-cold gelato, granita, and sorbetto for breakfast.
Starting your day with a huge mound of ice cream may seem decadent and misplaced to our somewhat Puritan sensibility of sweets and when they can be enjoyed. Remember when Bill Cosby fed chocolate cake to his kids for dinner?
Meh, meno male. Italians like to start the day with something sweet anyway, and the frozen part is purely common sense. Eating something very cold will lower the body’s temperature, a good idea when your clothes are going to be soaked with sweat by 9 a.m. In a larger sense it reflects the Sicily’s cultural history, an ability to adapt to any situation in order to further survival, as well as the ultimate enjoyment of life.
My favorite part is the soft, airy, buttery brioche roll that is the vehicle of choice for all of this frozen goodness. The bread is split open wide and stuffed to overflowing with gelato or sorbetto. Granita—basically liquid that is aerated and broken up by hand as it freezes—is looser and melts quickly, so it is usually served in a glass, layered con panna (with cream). Simply dunk and dip a piece of brioche into it, or load it on by the spoonful.
How can this breakfast be folly? There’s bread for energy, some dairy, maybe some fruit, and with Granita al Caffè Con Panna, your morning coffee all in one cool, heat-dissipating shot.
If you want to try your hand at homemade brioche, go for it, but since turning on the oven defeats the purpose of keeping things cool, I try to let someone else do the baking. It is hard to duplicate the kind of bread you would find in Sicily. Italian brioche differs from the French version; it is richer and fluffier, more like a cushy pillow, and the outer layer isn’t as flaky. If you have a good bakery near your house, you can get a brioche loaf and cut slices to fold around the gelato, or ask for a simple sweet roll.
To make the coffee granita, I follow this formula: 1/4 cup of granulated sugar for every two cups of brewed espresso or strong regular coffee. You can certainly adjust the sweetness to your taste. Whisk the sugar into the hot coffee, and let the mixture cool completely to room temperature before putting it into the freezer in a shallow metal or glass dish.
Monitor the freezing process; as the sides begin to freeze, using a whisk or fork to break it up and move it to the center. You’ll have to do this every 15 minutes or so, sooner as it freezes more; I like to use a little whisk for more aeration and to strategically target the frozen spots.
When there is no more loose liquid in the mix, give it a really good whisking and let it freeze for about 15 to 20 minutes more.
To serve, you’ll need some sweetened heavy cream whipped until it mounds softly. In a glass dessert dish or cup, put a generous layer of frozen granita. I like to add a small shot of ice-cold, brewed espresso here to get some extra coffee punch in the mix. Layer on some cream, then repeat the layers, ending with a mound of cream, which you can whip a bit stiffer for holding power. Top with some shaved chocolate and/or ground cinnamon and serve with brioche on the side. Dip pieces of the brioche into the mix, or fold pieces of it around spoonfuls of granita and cream.
Photograph from What I'm Seeing, which has a nice piece on the California museum.
Laughing Squid points to a story in the San Mateo Times detailing the copyright-infringement suit that Pez has brought against the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia.
The giant Pez dispenser that Gary Doss and Nancy Yarbrough Doss created that got them into Guinness World Records is at the heart of the lawsuit:
Attorneys for Pez Candy Inc. argue that the 7-foot, 10-inch dispenser, which is topped with the head of a snowman, and other uses of the company's trademarked products by the Dosses "deceive the public into thinking that the museum is operating under the authority of Pez."
Tonight I biked home with Chinese delivery. (It ultimately fit in my bike bag, not on the handlebars like the pros do it.)
Celebrities can be a boon to social networking sites, but they can also be a liability if they become unhappy.
Ning, the service that lets you create your own social network, is growing quick and attracting some big names. Author Seth Godin used the platform to start a private forum for marketing experts. Rapper 50 Cent has attracted such a following on his network, Thisis50.com, that other hip hop artists have started advertising on the site to find new fans.
On Wednesday, Wyclef Jean announced to his Twitter followers that he was abandoning Clef Zone, the Ning network that he only recently created. His specific objection to Ning is unclear (we have a call out to Wyclef, who for some reason posted his phone number on Twitter the same day), but he says on Twitter that "i want my own server" and "I wanna be in full control of my vision." The performer also hints that he's concerned about the security of internal messaging on the site, saying (sic) "I DONT TRUST A SOCIAL NETWORK WERE THEY HAVE YOUR EMAILS."
Guess who responded? Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, who frequently gives her users with personal attention -- particularly the A-listers. Wyclef's complaint and Gina's response are below. I'll update this post if I hear back from either party.
This story in the Guardian has been making the rounds in the food blog world and people are rightly freaking out about it.
Guardian writer Tim Hayward is given access to a cache of books that celebrated British food writer Elizabeth David bequeathed to London's Guildhall library upon her death. In the margins and on slips of paper are "bitchy annotations," including one in which she designates the following recipe as the "most revolting dish ever devised":
Italian Salad
Ingredients
1 pint cold cooked macaroni
1/2 pint cooked or tinned pears
1/2 pint grated raw carrot
French dressing to moisten
2 heaped tablespoons minced onion
1/2 pint cooked or minced string beansProcedure: Mix the chopped macaroni and vegetables; moisten with French dressing, flavouring with garlic if liked. Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves. Decorate with mayonnaise and minced pimento or chives.
The recipe and note were found inside Ulster Fare, published in 1945 by the Belfast Women's Institute Club.
What do you think, serious eaters? Is that the worst recipe ever devised? Or have you seen worse? Please dish!
If you read Planet Perl Iron Man (and you should) or listen to the discussions of the corehackers project, you may have seen more discussion about Perl 5's DarkPAN problem.
One of the big tensions in the Perl 5 world is between progress and stability. (I use both terms with the same sense of distaste I hear the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life". Then again, I sympathize with linguistic prescriptivism, if only to clarify motives and intent.)
"Perl 5 must change," some people cry. "There's no good reason Perl shouldn't enable strictures and warnings by default for all new programs!"
"Perl 5 cannot change," retort others. "There's too much existing code to change Perl's behavior!"
I find the latter argument ridiculous such that withering mockery is the only good response. That's rarely useful, however.
When people say "Perl 5 cannot change its default behavior!", I believe they have in mind several other points. Some of them are good points. Yet until the Perl community as a whole can address those points directly, we'll remain at an impasse. (The word "impasse" overstates things; to a man, the active Perl 5 pumpkings appear to hew strongly to the "Change is painful and bad and wrong" philosophy, even going as far to say that frequent releases are undesirable hassles because
statcalls are not cheap.)Translation to English of Various Meanings of "Stability Über Alles"
With that in mind, here are several possible meanings of "You can't change default behavior!
- Distributors may upgrade Perl 5 in their installations and may have to upgrade packages which depend on Perl 5 to work with the new version. This is true. This is what distributors do. This is what distributors do with all of their dependencies. This is why distributors exist. This is also only a problem if no optional mechanism of disabling new features exists -- and such a feature needs to exist.
- Changing Perl 5's default behavior may render existing tutorials and examples obsolete. Good. Many existing examples of Perl 5 code are horrible. A steadfast refusal to run unmaintainable code may even encourage the creation of better tutorials and the publication of better examples.
Existing code -- left untouched for a decade -- may suddenly break.
I don't understand this point.
I ran into Perl 4 code the other day. Somehow the last sixteen years of Perl 5 releases have not yet managed to erase all
perl4binaries -- as well as the Perl 4 source code -- from the world's hard drives and tape drives and USB drives. Why should anyone believe that Perl 5.10.0 will not be available when Perl 5.10.1 comes out? Ditto Perl 5.12.0.Sometimes this argument has nuance to it. We must use a version of Perl supported by a vendor to whom we offer supplications of fresh fruits, wines, native crafts, and large checks. In other words, you're paying for the privilege of not upgrading. Good for you. Go bug the organization you're paying. That's why you're paying them.
Sometimes this argument indicates that the arguer has no business working with computers in a professional setting. We don't know what software we're running and we won't know what will break if we upgrade and we don't know how to fix it if it does. If that's you, write your stakeholders a letter suggesting that they try to avoid upgrading, ever. Then find another line of work, perhaps something involving no technology more complex than one rock stacked atop another.
If you can't test your software against newer dependencies, identify any potential problems, and work with upstream to resolve those issues before you perform an upgrade -- or if you're unwilling to do so -- then you are dangerously incompetent. That kind of incompetence is not the Perl community's responsibility.
Don't short your stock, either -- that smacks of insider trading.
Frequent, experimental, zig-zag changes to Perl 5 syntax and semantics will be confusing! Yeah. That's why no one's suggested doing them. Suggesting that Perl 5 could use real function signatures or strictures-on-by-default is very different from throwing every potential combination of hash-and-array-sort function into one big global namespace.
The desire to add missing features and the desire for more frequent releases by no means implies a lack of foresight or holistic design, nor a lack of comprehensive testing, nor thoughtful refinement of an idea and implementation to the point where it's obviously right.
Changes mean bugs, and we can't have bugs! There are already bugs. There are already regressions -- including a performance regression that would have affected only a few people if a stable 5.10.1 had come out in early 2008.
The only way to avoid bugs altogether is to avoid writing software. The best you can do is make them unlikely, catch them early, and fix them quickly (remembering that unreleased software may as well not exist to your users).
- It's irresponsible to break someone else's code, especially if you can't see it. It's insane to support invisible code that may not even exist.
- There are so many competing implementations of this idea on the CPAN, it's obvious there's no one right way to do things! There are so many competing implementations of this idea on the CPAN because there's no obvious good, default, built-in way to do things.
- My code has to run on several different major versions of Perl; I can't take advantage of these new features. You have a change management problem. Not me.
- I can't show you a test case, but this change breaks my code! There's an invisible sign on the road by my house that gives me the right to charge a $5 toll. Pay up.
- This is the way it's always been. How's that working out?
A More Serious Take on Stability
Change doesn't have to be painful. Change doesn't have to be chaotic. It's possible to meet many of the real underlying goals with technical means.
The problem isn't technical, however. It's social. It's fear.
This is the fear of risk -- the risk that unknown problems lurk in seemingly minor changes. This is also the fear of the risk that the cost of mitigating this risk is too high. This is especially the fear of the risk that changing Perl 5 will appear so expensive that people will stop using it.
With all of that mockery out of the way, perhaps the Perl community can have a sober assesment of risk, bereft of fears and stupid technical blatherings that serve only to obscure the real question:
Whose needs do the features and policies and strategies and goals and visions of Perl 5 development serve?Change for the sake of change itself is useless. Stability for the sake of stability is equally useless. No one wants complete stability or complete chaos. (Even if you think you want complete stability, you don't; when you find a bug or a typo or a confusing section of documentation, you've found a place where perfect stability gets in your way.)
(You'd almost think the Perl 5 community didn't have a few experienced project managers, methodologists, risk managers, and software developers, if not several thousand people who know how to create, maintain, sustain, and release free software projects.)
There must be a middle ground. There must be a way to identify real needs, prioritize useful changes, and deliver those changes to stakeholders in an efficient and effective fashion. I reject the false dilemmas which state that we have to make a choice between relentless, plodding conservatism and Psychotic Hyperactive Purposless-esque change...
... especially when the alternative is to suggest that every file containing modern Perl code start with a wall of boilerplate:
use 5.010; use strict; use warnings; use utf8; use Carp; use Want; use CLASS; use SUPER; use autodie; use autobox; use signatures; use mro 'c3'; use IO::Handle; use File::stat; use autobox::Core; use UNIVERSAL::ref;I hate to channel John Stuart Mill, but if Perl 5 stays like that for long, it won't be a language suitable for novices to write new programs. It'll be merely a great language to maintain code written in the late '90s not yet replaced with something with slightly saner defaults.
That would be a pity.
