« January 15, 2012 - January 21, 2012 | Main | January 29, 2012 - February 4, 2012 »
Here a new magazine thats looks very aesthetic, ESsAY magazine: "a biannual journal published by Studio Ahira, on culture, art, fashion, photography, politics and design" For sale at on sale at the Tate, the Design Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Foyles, Magma, the Serpentine Gallery, Artwords and a few other small indi outlets. It is also available here Design Balwant Ahira and
The truth is, software is research. It’s a matter of discovering the solution, not plodding through it. This is implicit in your story, because they keep encountering unexpected problems. But let’s make it explicit. via laughingmeme.org Kellan quotes a Quora comment.
I've been promising this for a while. I apologize for the delay, but it's been a hectic month and I wanted to write up instructions that were easy to follow. I also wanted to make sure my desk continued to be sturdy and usable before writing it up. Finally, I'm ready, and this post will detail how I built the treadmill desk I've been blogging and tweeting about for the last month.
I've been using this desk for a little over a month now. Since December 21st to be exact. Despite Christmas (and multiple Christmas parties), New Year's Eve, socializing and drinking after the New York City Tech Talks, and a family vacation, I've still managed to lose 23 pounds, and I've done it just by going to work. To say I'm happy about how this is working out would be an understatement. I still have quite a bit more weight to lose, but it all seems very doable now.
Before you decide to build a desk like mine, there are a few things to consider. First, the reason I built one rather than buying one is because my rig is much heavier than the typical one. I have a Mac Pro with two 27" ACD monitors and a large number of peripherals. If you work with a lighter setup, like a laptop plus monitor, or an iMac, then you might want to consider buying a pre-made treadmill desk. Building the desk won't save you a significant amount of money and it will take a fair bit of your time. Plus, it requires you to already have a number of tools. Plan to spend at least a full day building this. For me, it was closer to three, but that's because I had to experiment a lot to come up with a design that was sturdy enough to make me feel comfortable putting 200+ pounds of expensive kit on it.
A company called LifeSpan makes a treadmill desk that looks sturdy and may be a better option for many of you. It's not cheap, but when you factor in your time, it's probably not much more expensive than buying a treadmill and building a desk according to these plans. I would have bought one if I had been confident I could buy one that would work with my setup.
Also, before committing to a full treadmill desk, you can setup a makeshift desk for considerably less money in order to try it out and make sure it's going to work for you. I didn't have any problem adjusting to walking while working, but building a treadmill desk is a significant investment of time and money, so you might want to make sure it's going to work for you before investing.
Finally, make sure you go slow when you start and that you get good shoes that fit you well. Here's another tip: Definitely consider getting some underwear designed for exercising. Though this isn't really exercise, it is a lot of movement over the course of the day and something like Under Armour instead of regular cotton underwear can save you some definite pain and suffering.
When I first started, I was averaging about 1.3 miles per hour and was spending between three and four hours a day on the treadmill desk, then working from my laptop the rest of the day. I could have handled walking faster, but I kept my speed slow so I could adjust to typing and mousing while walking. The point of the treadmill desk isn't to work up a sweat (though you may if your office is warm), but to be in constant motion. Long and slow is better than fast and short.
I find I tend to increase my speed and/or time each Monday. After taking a day or two of rest, I come back able to walk longer and/or faster. After 5 weeks, I'm now averaging about 2.2 miles per hour for about six hours per day, which equates to about 1500 calories burned per work day. I don't think I'll increase my speed any more, as my ability to mouse precisely seems to degrade when I hit 2.3 or 2.4 miles per hours (I might be able to go a bit higher using the trackpad, though, which seems less impacted). I do plan to keep increasing my time on the treadmill until I'm spending every working hour on it.
So, if you're still with me and still intent on building your own heavy-duty treadmill desk, let's start.
Note that this desk is designed to be used with this treadmill, so if you're planning to use a different model, some adjustments might be needed. This treadmill is designed just for walking, is shorter than most treadmills, and has the speed and other controls on the handle in addition to the console, which is important because the console will be hard to reach while using the desk unless you disassemble it.
Last thing before we begin: I'm providing the information on what I did. It's your responsibility to make sure the desk you build is sturdy enough for your gear and to make sure you're taking necessary safety precautions while building it. While you don't need to be an expert carpenter to build this desk (I'm certainly not), you do need to know how to use a variety of different tools and to use them safely.Tools List
- Table saw or circular saw
- Saber saw, or jigsaw
- Drill with ¼" bit and 1" bit
- Phillips head screw bit for drill or electric or manual Phillips head screwdriver
- Swage tool for ⅛" wire rope crimping sleeves, or alternatively a hammer and anvil or heavy-duty pliers (but a swage tool like this one will make your life easier)
- Heavy duty cutters capable of cutting ⅛" wire rope
- Palm router, router (the power tool, not the networking device), or router table with ½" or ¾" rounding bit (optional)
- Respirator (for sanding and for applying paint, lacquer, and/or polyurethane)
- Safety goggles or glasses (no, really)
- Rotary sander, mouse sander, or lots of elbow grease
- Sawhorse or cinder blocks to put wood on while cutting, sanding, and painting it
- Level
- Ruler or measuring tape
- T or L Square
Parts List
- 8 - equal lengths of 1¼" diameter galvanized steel threaded pipe (20"-24" see pre-build instructions to calculate length)
- 2 - equal lengths of 1¼" diameter galvanized steel threaded pipe (20")
- 8 - 1¼" diameter galvanized steel flanges
- 4 - 1¼" diameter galvanized steel T-couplings
- 4 - 5" long threaded pipe nipples (1" diameter galvanized steel)
- 8 - 1" diameter galvanized steel flanges
- 1 - 10' length (or longer) ⅛" wire rope
- 48 - ¼" (#20) wood screws (½" long)
- 6 - crimping sleeves for ⅛" wire rope (actually, get a few extra, they're cheap)
- 3 - ¼" eye-eye turnbuckles (not eye-hook or hook-hook)
- 2 - 1¼" thick wood boards, 24" x 48" (if you are getting them custom cut instead of using stock pieces, get one 24" x 48" and the other 18" x 38" instead)
- Wood stain or paint, shellack, polyurethane - depending on how you want to treat the wood. I went with black gloss paint followed by a coat of shellack, followed by a coat of polyurethane, (optional - even just plain wood will work and I won't be giving detailed instructions on how to paint or polyurethane)
Pre-Build Instructions
Determine the pipe lengths for the 8 equal length threaded pipes. Threaded pipe comes in standard pipe lengths (24" is one of the standards), but most hardware chains (in the US at least) along with most plumbing supply shops will cut pipes to length and thread them. It is important that you get your desk the right height, otherwise it will be uncomfortable. I'm 6'3, and I used 24" lengths, which is comfortable for me, but if it were any higher, it would not be. If I were building it again, I'd probably use 23½" lengths. Unfortunately, because of the treadmill's arms, if you go less than 20" on these supports, you may have problems. If you're short enough that this will be a problem, you may need to look at a different treadmill model. You can accommodate a slightly shorter desk by moving the desk back from the treadmill console a bit, but if you move it back too far, you'll run out of room to walk.
Keep in mind, as you're calculating the lengths, that reducing the pipe length by one inch will reduce the desk height by two inches. If you're unsure about what lengths to use, your best bet is to stand on your treadmill, put your arms out as if you were typing, and measure the distance from the ground (and make sure that position is above the arms of the treadmill).
The completed desk height will be approximately equal to (2 * pipe length) + 6". The flanges, desk surface, and T-coupling contribute to the height and amount to approximately 6" in height.
Threaded pipes don't all screw together to exactly the same point, so the height will vary a small amount, and you may need to adjust the height of some legs by adjusting the flange tightness or using shims to get the desk exactly level.Build Instructions
- Take one of the two wood boards to serve as the desk surface (if using custom cut pieces, this will be the larger piece).
- Using the 1" drill bit, drill two holes Using the diagram at the end of this blog post as a guide. These holes will be used for attaching guy wires.
- Again, using the diagram at the end of the post as a guide, cut out a 24" x 6" notch at the back (the same side of the desk that you cut the holes for the guy wire) using a jigsaw or sabersaw. This notch will be for the treadmill console panel and to make sure you have enough tread in front of the desk to walk comfortably.
- (Optional) Using a router with a ½" or ¾" self-guided rounding bit, bullnose the desk edges to get rid of the sharp edges and corners. This is optional, but it makes the desk look nicer and decreases your chances of a deep forehead gash should you ever stumble while walking. You can, of course, use more decorative edge treatments if you are so inclined, but a simple bullnose looks nice, is less deadly, and won't accumulate dust, crumbs and other detritus of your workday the way some of the more ornate edge treatments will.
- Sand the surface and edges of the desk very, very well, starting with a medium grit and working up to a finishing grit. When done, you should be able to run your palm over the entire surface area without feeling any grit or imperfections or getting slivers . A circular or mouse sander will make your life much easier.
- Paint or stain the surface to your tastes, making sure to let it dry completely. If you choose to shellack and/or polyurethane, you'll want to let it dry for 48 hours after the final coat before assembling your desk (even if the instructions say you need less time - trust me on this one).
- Take the other piece of wood.
- If you didn't get the pieces custom cut, cut the second piece down to 18" x 38". This will be the riser for your monitors.
- Repeat sub-steps 3, 4, and 5 that you did on the larger piece of wood on this piece of wood (in other words, do the same edge treatment, if any, then sand and paint or stain just like you did with the other piece)
- Assemble the legs. The following instructions need to be done twice, one for each pair of legs. From here on, you'll want to assemble the desk where you want it to go. Once assembled, it will be very, very heavy and difficult to move. Please note: pipe threads, especially if you had the pipes custom cut, will potentially be very sharp. Be careful. I learned this the hard way; learn from my mistake and save yourself some pain and blood loss.
- Take two of the eight equal length pipes and screw them into opposite sides of a T-coupling. When done, you should have one long, straight piece with a perpendicular opening for another pipe to be attached. Make sure you have tightened them as tightly as you can.
- Screw a flange onto each end of the connected pipes. Screw until they're tight, but don't go too tight - you can unscrew the flanges to make minor height adjustments for leveling.
- Repeat the previous two step to create a second identical piece
- Take one of the two 20" lengths of pipe and screw it into the remaining socket on the T-coupling of one of the pieces you just constructed. You should now have a very big, very heavy "T". Set this aside for a moment.
- Attach the other assembled piece to the other end of the 20" pipe to create an even bigger, even heavier "H". Make sure all pipes are tightly screwed in and aligned
- You've just completed the supports for one half of the desk
- Once the paint, stain, or other treatment on the wood is fully dry (48 hours… really!), take the larger piece of wood and put it top down on the floor so the bottom is facing up. You're going to screw in both leg pairs (the Hs you built out of pipe) into the wood using the flanges and wood scres. You want them just far enough apart for the treadmill to fit between them. Measure the treadmill width to determine the distance. I used the actual treadmill width plus one inch. Once positioned, secure the legs tightly to the bottom of the desk surface using 16 wood screws.
- Attach the guy wires
- Cut two lengths of wire rope. Take one length, loop it around one rear leg just below the T-coupling (the rear leg is the one on the same side of the wood as the notch and holes) and secure it with a crimping sleeve. Make sure you really crimp hard to make sure the wire rope can't slip out when you tighten the turnbuckles later.
- Repeat the last step with the other piece of wire rope on the other rear leg.
- Take one turnbuckle and unscrew it as far as you can without it coming apart.
- Loop one of the two wire ropes you connected to the legs through the turnbuckle and crimp with a crimping sleeve.
- Repeat with the other wire, attaching it to the other end of the turnbuckle and making it as snug as you can. Now, you should have a wire that stretches from one rear leg to the other, but is probably not too tight and may even sag a little.
- Tighten the turnbuckle until just barely snug. DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN. This guy wire provides inward lateral support. Until we have balanced it with outward pulling guy wires, tightening can actually harm the stability of the desk and rip out the wood screws securing the leg. Err on the side of under-tightening at this stage.
- Repeat the steps above, this time running a wire from the cross support near the rear leg to the hole in the corner of the desk, again, tightening the turnbuckle until just snug.
- Repeat the previous step for the other rear leg.
- You now have wires pulling both inward and outward, so you can alternate tightening turnbuckles until the wires are good and tight. Don't tighten any turnbuckle more than two full turns without turning the others. Stop when the wires are taught. The inward guy is much stronger than the outward ones because it pulls straight, so once you've got the guys taut, you probably want to match a single turn of the turnbuckle on the inward guy turnbuckle with a turn and a half of the outward.
- It's time to stand your desk up. You might want help from a second person while doing this, as the desk will be very heavy, and you don't want to put too much pressure on the legs while lifting. Once the desk is stood up, it's time to check to make sure the desk is sturdy enough for your kit. If all went well, there should be very little lateral play and none forward and back. There will be a small amount of side-to-side play, but it shouldn't wobble, it should move no more than maybe a half inch and should come immediately back to its original position. It should feel sturdy. If not, play with the turnbuckles, or consider adding more guys. An additional set of guys that run from the bottom of the rear legs should give additional stability, though I didn't need to on mine. Make sure to add inward pulling guys only to the rear legs. Adding them to the front legs will interfere with your ability to walk on the treadmill.
- Take the four pipe nipples and the eight 1" flanges. Attach a flange to each end of each of the pipe nipples. These will form the supports for the monitor stand.
- Position the four supports on the desk. There are two approaches you can take here. The obvious one is to center the supports and monitor riser. If you're not using a Mac Pro, this is probably the best bet. If, however, your setup contains a Mac Pro (or other large tower computers), you're probably going to want to offset the riser to one side or the other. The Mac Pro is 9" wide, so you need at least that much space from one end of the riser to the edge of the desk. I have my Mac Pro on the left, so the riser is off-center to the right leaving a little more than 9" on the right side of the desk. Place the riser on top of the supports and adjust until the configuration works for you, then use the remaining wood screws to screw the riser supports into the desk and the riser. You may need a short screwdriver or a screwdriver with a 90° bend to tighten all of the screws, as the 5" pipes don't leave a lot of room between the two boards.
Guess What? That's it. Position the treadmill if you haven't already, and you're ready to go.
Here's the desk diagram showing the placement of the console notch and the two holes for guy wires.
Here's a better view of the "H" legs and guy wires. Please excuse the mess. I can't currently get behind the treadmill desk to clean it, and haven't had the gumption to relocate it yet.
Here's a picture of the desk and riser. Notice how my riser is off-center to make room for the Mac Pro:©2008-2010 Jeff LaMarche.
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com
"Pizza, unlike old coca-cola, is best served flat."
Hannah Hart of the always entertaining My Drunk Kitchen tackles pizza and proves once again that it's really really hard to mess up a pizza. Or as she says, "even when it's all f&*ked up, you still love it."
How many of you use pizza as your go-to drunk food?
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
Hill Country Chicken (1123 Broadway at 26th Street) has a community bulletin board for the neighborhood where you can find neighborhood specialists and events, or post one of your own card or flyer. It's free and a great resource for the neighborhood. Find a photographer, a dentist, a cleaner, a dog walker, a tutor, an acupuncturist, etc. And pick up some amazing fried chicken while you are there.
Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal - 11 (by Subjective Art)
There’s a hilarious answer to the question Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? floating around now. Hilarious, deeply knowing, but not terrible accurate or actionable.
But buried in the comments was this gem from Neil K, which I’m going to quote, in it’s entirety, for truth (Neil has, after all, seen more sausage getting made at more of the places whose tools you use then nearly anyone):
This is really good, but if I can offer a suggestion — the analogy could be even more apt with a slight shift. Currently it only shows how people go wrong when they develop software in a naive way — by starting at the beginning, and coding each step to final quality, in order. The story, as written now, makes it look like writing software is just an impossible slog and nobody can do it.
The truth is, software is research. It’s a matter of discovering the solution, not plodding through it. This is implicit in your story, because they keep encountering unexpected problems. But let’s make it explicit.
Imagine, instead, that our intrepid pair is charged with mapping the coastline of California from SF to LA. Mapping is more like software development because it involves discovery, and getting things right at multiple “points”.
The naive mappers start off from SF and it all fails exactly as you outline. A more clever pair of mappers instead decide to hire a boat, and map just a few points on the coastline precisely, just to get a rough estimate, and to survey the coastline for the tricky places. Then they know where to apply their efforts — an intern can be hired to pace out some of the easy bits, and a team of well-equipped hikers can be brought in to handle the hard parts.
They can even stop when they have a map that is just good enough.
Distro magazine is available for iPad and Android Issue #25, january 27, 2012 Editor-inChief, Engadget: Tim Stevens Managing Editor, Distro: Christopher Trout Creative Directors: Jeremy Lacroix, Josh Klenert
New cover British Ligature magazine: "an online magazine created to showcase fashion, arts and beauty. We like to keep it simple." EDITOR Sarah Michelle EDITOR AT LARGE Pietro Pravettoni
Today Pixlr-o-matic received a 2011 Best App Ever award for the Best Photo Editing App on Android.
This is an annual set of awards hosted by 148apps.com. It’s particularly special because the award doesn’t come from an individual or editorial team. Apps are nominated by users and the winners are chosen by users, so this award is truly from you.
Thanks to all the Pixlr-o-matic fans that made this possible!
[Photographs re-published with permission from 1 Fine Cookie]
Man, it's rare that anybody beats Slice to a story about pizza madness in the universe, but we gotta give props to bon appétit's blog for out-scooping us on this one.
The basic premise is simple. You've all seen pie in a jar, I'm sure. You bake a tiny pie in a jar, seal it, and give it away as gifts. Well ain't one pie as good as any other? What's to stop you from baking a pizza pie in a jar? The ever-creative 1 Fine Cookie wondered the same thing and actually did it. So here you go: pizza in a jar.
That would be dough, sauce, cheese, and toppings all layered into a mason jar and baked as-is, to be eaten with a fork.
Personally, I'm wondering how you get char and what the hole structure of the bottom crust is (unfortunately, she didn't supply an underbelly photo), but having plumbed the depraved depths of pizza weirdness myself with pizzagna (that'd be thin-crust pizzas layered with cheese and sauce and baked like a lasagna), I can imagine this being a pretty tasty portable snack.
What say you, Slice'rs?
If I learned anything from Moneyball, it’s that they do everything differently out in Oakland.
And, yes, this was my favorite part of the movie, and the reason why Jonah Hill is nominated for an Oscar. What a fist-pump. What a performance.
A fist-pump of my own to my man James. Yes, he’s the same brilliant soul that brought us the bunny-hopping Blue Jays. Keep up the great work, mate.
In this transcript of a talk given to the attendees of the Joint Summits on Translational Science, Carl Zimmer highlights an important aspect of understanding the human body and how to treat its many maladies: the ecosystem of microbes.
Tags: biology Carl Zimmer scienceThe microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species -- somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.
Now you could say "Who cares? They're just wee animalcules." Those wee animacules are worth caring about for many reasons. One of the most practical of those reasons is that they have a huge impact on our "own" health. Our collection of microbes-the microbiome-is like an extra organ of the human body. And while an organ like the heart has only one function, the microbiome has many.
When food comes into the gut, for example, microbes break some of them down using enzymes we lack. Sometimes the microbes and our own cells have an intimate volley, in which bacteria break down a molecule part way, our cells break it down some more, the bacteria break it down even more, and then finally we get something to eat.
Another thing that the microbiome does is manage the immune system. Certain species of resident bacteria, like Bacteroides fragilis, produce proteins that tamp down inflammation. When scientists rear mice that don't have any germs at all, they have a very difficult time developing a normal immune system. The microbiome has to tutor the immune system in how to do its job properly. It also acts like an immune system of its own, fighting off invading microbes, and helping to heal wounds.
While the microbiome may be an important organ, it's a peculiar one. It's not one solid hunk of flesh. It's an ecosystem, made up of thousands of interacting species.
[The sound of wind and an animal howling in the distance.]
Photo by niderlander, via Shutterstock
---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
New cover Populous magazine: "a global design practice specializing in creating environments that draw people and communities together for unforgettable experiences." Design Tony Richardson from Alma Media
Welcoming @sheilacalla back to New York (temporarily) for her birthday (Taken with instagram)
[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Note: For the four weeks between January 14th and February 11th, I'm adopting a completely vegan lifestyle. Every weekday I'll be updating my progress with a diary entry and a recipe. For past posts, check here!
Day 12: Wednesday
Breakfast: None (per doctor's orders)
Lunch: A half falafel sandwich with a ton of salad from Maoz
Dinner: Smoked eggplant puree with an herb salad on bruschetta and crispy orechiette with scallions, olives, and grape tomatoes from BalaboostaIt finally happened. The first major downside I've discovered about being vegan. Here's how it went down.
A couple nights ago, I realized we were running short of leftovers in my fridge. Eh, I thought, no big deal, I'll grab a sandwich from Maoz for lunch and I have a dinner appointment already at Balaboosta. I'll just cook a few things tomorrow and we'll be fine for the rest of the week.
Yesterday morning I gave a quart of coconut-lentil soup to my mom for her and my grandfather to eat for dinner, as promised. My wife took the last of the leftover stir-fried bok choy and chow fun for lunch, which completely depleted my fridge of everything save raw ingredients. After a long day of various doctor's visits (myself, my mom, and my dog, all on the same day) and meeting after ever-so-interesting meeting, I finally got home around 10:30 pm, completely exhausted. My wife had eaten an omelet for dinner last night.
Too tired to bother cooking food for the next day, I resolved myself to another couple meals of eating out. What I didn't count on was having a second crazy-day in a row. After having a slice of toast and some avocado for breakfast, I was so swamped all morning that I didn't realize until 2:20 in the afternoon that I hadn't eaten all day. With another meeting starting at 2:30, I had mere moments to figure out some way to fill my belly.
I ran around the corner to Golden Steamer thinking I'd order a steamed pumpkin bun before I realized that while Chinese bao dough is often made with shortening, it can also be made with lard. So which does Golden Steamer use? Either the nice lady who runs the place doesn't know, or more likely, she didn't understand my question or why I'd even care.
With minutes to go and another long, dark meeting ahead of me, I did the unthinkable: I pulled out a pre-fab frozen vegan pizza from the fridge, tossed it in the toaster oven, and—gulp—ate it.
The product was kindly sent by the producer as a sample after they read about my Vegan Experience, so I don't want to name brands here, but judging by the various reviews I've seen on vegan blogs online, these pies are in the upper echelon of the frozen vegan pizza pile.
I gave Robyn a bite. Here's what she thought:
They were miserable. Truly and utterly terrible, tasting of nothing but dried oregano, tomato paste, and tears. A crust with the texture of, as Erin put it, dense mashed potatoes, combined with a completely non-existent hole structure (did I mention it was gluten free as well?)
In place of cheese was some sort of white product (again doused with dried oregano) that browned fine but completely failed to melt. It was everything pizza is not supposed to be, and everything that I hate about faux products. As a professional pizza enthusiast, I'm ashamed to admit that I finished it off—that's how hungry I was. All that it left me with was a full stomach and a deep, dark, sense of shame.
I came up with all kinds of excuses in my own head. But I was hungry! Or it looks like pizza, and all pizza has some redeeming characterstics, right? But the fact of the matter was this: I'd been lazy, I'd planned badly, and this is the price I had to pay for it.
Now I know some people really do like the taste of vegan pizzas, tofu dogs, and the like. If you're into frozen vegan pizza, you'd probably love these ones. I have no (faux) beef with you. Taste is, after all, a matter of opinion. At the same time, I know that there are others amongst the vegan/vegetarian crew that are with me here: faux products have no reason to exist.
In some ways, this experience can be seen as one of the truly negative sides of veganism. As an omnivore, you can find any number of tasty fast foods and snacks no matter where you are (though of course, tasty is not the same thing as healthy or good). As a vegan, your options are severely limited—you're bound to end up eating something like this frozen fake pizza at some point in your diet. That kind of stinks.
But I see a good side to this: I can guarantee you that I'm never going to be lazy about cooking or planning my meals again. Too tired at 10:30 p.m.? Too bad. Better to do a bit of extra work when you're tired and earn your lunch. I think any incentive to get you into the kitchen and cooking or to get you to give your lunch more thought and make better choices is a good one. It's a lesson I can take even after I return to omnivorism.
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
Typographica shares their favorite typefaces of 2011.
(via ★essl) Tags: best of best of 2011 lists typographyThe idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.
Human kind cannot bear (by Hollis Johnson)
Happy birthday Angela Davis. The quote is from this talk of hers on how change happens. If inclined you can download the image as a PDF.
Writer Connie Bruck wrote this piece that ran a few weeks ago in The New Yorker about the men behind a plan to build a new NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles. One of them, Phillip Anschutz, is a politically conservative billionaire seven times over, who made his fortune in oil and gas, real estate, railroads, telecommunications, and sports and entertainment. It’s a fascinating article, even though I’m not particularly sympathetic to his agenda or that of his compatriots. But I did really like this quote from him:
“It helps to have your back against the wall. Adversity is a huge advantage — as long as you think of it as an advantage — because it helps you do things you never thought you were capable of doing.”
Words to remember. You can read the full article here — but unfortunately, only if you’re a subscriber.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
New guide to switching to OpenStreetMap: switch2osm.org Everything you need in one handy place: how-tos, links, and why. #switch2osm
— Stamen (@stamen) January 25, 2012I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was hoping to see more adoption of Open Street Maps this year, and the new site Switch2OSM.org is a clearinghouse for resources to do just that, ranging from "Why Switch?" to different tiling sets & server strategies. With Google's recent announcement that they're going to share data and identity between projects & products, I expect this initiative will find the wind at it's back.
People don't think about location search as something that betrays confidential data, but of course it does — starting with where you live, work and shop. Of course lots of people proactively share this data with Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and other products, but as Google reduces the number of privacy controls that they allow users to control, they cede one of the last philosophical differences (advantages?) they had over Facebook.
It was many and many a week ago,
In a YouTube by the 'net,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Lana Del Rey;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to sing and to videotape herself.I was a blogger and she was an uploader,
In this YouTube by the 'net;
But she did not know me, although that is okay-
I and my Lana Del Ray;
She had lips that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted, except the top one is fake, at least, and I'm not sure why it drives me so crazy, but it does, especially because in an interview she said they're real.And this was the reason (well, not exactly!) that, a week or two ago,
In this YouTube by the 'net,
A meanness blew out of the websites, chilling
My beautiful Lana Del Rey;
So that her public relations people emailed around
Asking people to change their online content about her,
To prepare for her upcoming album release
In this YouTube by the 'net.The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying* her and ... her alone, because almost no one envies bloggers-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this YouTube by the 'net)
That the meanness came out of the websites by night,
Chilling and possibly killing the album sales of my Lana Del Rey.*Again, not really! And Nitsuh Abebe's review on Vulture is terrific.
But our love, it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the commenters down under the jump,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Lana Del Rey. She just doesn't know it yet!For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Lana Del Rey;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Lana Del Rey;
And so, all the day- and night-tide, I read internet comments
Of my darling- my darling- my imaginary friend,
Wherever she lives, I think Brooklyn, too,
In an apartment with YouTube, on the internet.Lana Del Rey's debut album Born to Die is due out January 31.
---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
Some of the best decisions and designs at 37signals have emerged from intensely contested debates. Not just between Jason and me, but from anyone in the company. When sparks fly, some truly great ideas come to light.
The catch is that the heat must arise around the decision itself. Debates go off track when personal biases or old grudges come into play. So long as each party sticks to the merits, adding some fire will only unearth new angles and concerns.
This energy is so important to how 37signals operates that I consider it every time we make a hire. Is this person willing to fight for what they believe in? Will they stand up to me, Jason, or anyone else in the company if they think we’re wrong?
Detecting this rebel streak requires looking at a person’s full persona: online debates, choice of technology, writing or work samples, often just the ability to debate or question the interviewer in person.
Sometimes it’s easier just to detect a negative. Someone who’s unlikely to ever question you or your ways. A “yes man” who has only wonderfully great things to say about everything we’ve ever done. That’s a red flag.
Regardless of how you do it, find people with enough spark to care, fight, and campaign for what they believe in. What pushes you and makes you question your beliefs will make your company that much better.
MongoDB’s new aggegation framework is now available in the nightly build! This post demonstrates some of its capabilities by using it to analyze chess games.
Make sure you have a the “Development Release (Unstable)” nightly running before trying out the stuff in this post. The aggregation framework will be in 2.1.0, but as of this writing it’s only in the nightly build.
First, we need some chess games to analyze. Download games.json, which contains 1132 games that were won in 10 moves or less (crush their soul and do it quick).
You can use mongoimport to import games.json into MongoDB:
$ mongoimport --db chess --collection quick_wins games.json connected to: 127.0.0.1 imported 1132 objectsWe can take a look at our chess games in the Mongo shell:
> use chess switched to db chess > db.fast_win.count() 1132 > db.fast_win.findOne() { "_id" : ObjectId("4ed3965bf86479436d6f1cd7"), "event" : "?", "site" : "?", "date" : "????.??.??", "round" : "?", "white" : "Gedult D", "black" : "Kohn V", "result" : "1-0", "eco" : "B33/09", "moves" : { "1" : { "white" : { "move" : "e4" }, "black" : { "move" : "c5" } }, "2" : { "white" : { "move" : "Nf3" }, "black" : { "move" : "Nc6" } }, ... "10" : { "white" : { "move" : "Qa4" } } } }Not exactly the greatest schema, but that’s how the chess format exporter munged it. Regardless, now we can use aggregation pipelines to analyze these games.
Experiment #1: First Mover Advantage
White has a slight advantage in chess because you move first (Wikipedia says it’s a 52%-56% chance of winning). I’d hypothesize that, in a short game, going first matters even more.
Let’s find out.
The “result” field in these docs is “1-0″ if white wins and “0-1″ if black wins. So, we want to divide our docs into two groups based on the “result” field and count how many docs are in each group. Using the aggregation pipeline, this looks like:
> db.runCommand({aggregate : "fast_win", pipeline : [ ... { ... $group : { ... _id : "$result", // group by 'result' field ... numGames : {$sum : 1} // add 1 for every document in the group ... } ... }]}) { "result" : [ { "_id" : "0-1", "numGames" : 435 }, { "_id" : "1-0", "numGames" : 697 } ], "ok" : 1 }That gives a 62% chance white will win (697 wins/1132 total games). Pretty good (although, of course, this isn’t a very large sample set).
In case you're not familiar with it, a reference chessboard with 1-8, a-h marked.
Experiment #2: Best Starting Move
Given a starting move, what percent of the time will that move lead to victory? This probably depends on whether you’re playing white or black, so we’ll just focus on white’s opening move.
First, we’ll just determine what starting moves white uses with this series of steps:
- project all of white’s first moves (the
moves.1.white.movefield)- group all docs with the same starting move together
- and count how many documents (games) used that move.
These steps look like:
> db.runCommand({aggregate: "fast_win", pipeline: [ ... // '$project' is used to extract all of white's opening moves ... { ... $project : { ... // extract moves.1.white.move into a new field, firstMove ... firstMove : "$moves.1.white.move" ... } ... }, ... // use '$group' to calculate the number of times each move occurred ... { ... $group : { ... _id : "$firstMove", ... numGames : {$sum : 1} ... } ... }]}) { "result" : [ { "_id" : "d3", "numGames" : 2 }, { "_id" : "e4", "numGames" : 696 }, { "_id" : "b4", "numGames" : 17 }, { "_id" : "g3", "numGames" : 3 }, { "_id" : "e3", "numGames" : 2 }, { "_id" : "c4", "numGames" : 36 }, { "_id" : "b3", "numGames" : 4 }, { "_id" : "g4", "numGames" : 11 }, { "_id" : "h4", "numGames" : 1 }, { "_id" : "Nf3", "numGames" : 37 }, { "_id" : "f3", "numGames" : 1 }, { "_id" : "f4", "numGames" : 25 }, { "_id" : "Nc3", "numGames" : 14 }, { "_id" : "d4", "numGames" : 283 } ], "ok" : 1 }Now let’s compare those numbers with whether white won or lost.
> db.runCommand({aggregate: "fast_win", pipeline: [ ... // extract the first move ... { ... $project : { ... firstMove : "$moves.1.white.move", ... // create a new field, "win", which is 1 if white won and 0 if black won ... win : {$cond : [ ... {$eq : ["$result", "1-0"]}, 1, 0 ... ]} ... } ... }, ... // group by the move and count up how many winning games used it ... { ... $group : { ... _id : "$firstMove", ... numGames : {$sum : 1}, ... numWins : {$sum : "$win"} ... } ... }, ... // calculate the percent of games won with this starting move ... { ... $project : { ... _id : 1, ... numGames : 1, ... percentWins : { ... $multiply : [100, { ... $divide : ["$numWins","$numGames"] ... }] ... } ... } ... }, ... // discard moves that were used in less than 10 games (probably not representative) ... { ... $match : { ... numGames : {$gte : 10} ... } ... }, ... // order from worst to best ... { ... $sort : { ... percentWins : 1 ... } ... }]}) { "result" : [ { "_id" : "f4", "numGames" : 25, "percentWins" : 24 }, { "_id" : "b4", "numGames" : 17, "percentWins" : 35.294117647058826 }, { "_id" : "c4", "numGames" : 36, "percentWins" : 50 }, { "_id" : "d4", "numGames" : 283, "percentWins" : 50.53003533568905 }, { "_id" : "g4", "numGames" : 11, "percentWins" : 63.63636363636363 }, { "_id" : "Nf3", "numGames" : 37, "percentWins" : 67.56756756756756 }, { "_id" : "e4", "numGames" : 696, "percentWins" : 68.24712643678161 }, { "_id" : "Nc3", "numGames" : 14, "percentWins" : 78.57142857142857 } ], "ok" : 1 }Pawn to e4 seems like the most dependable winner here. Knight to c3 also seems like a good choice (at a nearly 80% win rate), but it was only used in 14 winning games.
Experiment #3: Best and Worst Moves for Black
We basically want to do a similar pipeline to Experiment 2, but for black. At the end, we want to find the best and worst percent.
> db.runCommand({aggregate: "fast_win", pipeline: [ ... // extract the first move ... { ... $project : { ... firstMove : "$moves.1.black.move", ... win : {$cond : [ ... {$eq : ["$result", "0-1"]}, 1, 0 ... ]} ... } ... }, ... // group by the move and count up how many winning games used it ... { ... $group : { ... _id : "$firstMove", ... numGames : {$sum : 1}, ... numWins : {$sum : "$win"} ... } ... }, ... // calculate the percent of games won with this starting move ... { ... $project : { ... _id : 1, ... numGames : 1, ... percentWins : { ... $multiply : [100, { ... $divide : ["$numWins","$numGames"] ... }] ... } ... } ... }, ... // discard moves that were used in less than 10 games (probably not representative) ... { ... $match : { ... numGames : {$gte : 10} ... } ... }, ... // get the best and worst ... { ... $group : { ... _id : 1, ... best : {$max : "$_id"}, ... worst : {$min : "$_id"} ... } ... }]}) { "result" : [ { "_id" : 1, "best" : "g6", "worst" : "Nc6" } ], "ok" : 1 }“Nc6″ means “move the knight to c6.” Or, rather, don’t, because it doesn’t tend to work out that well.
I like this new aggregation functionality because it’s feels simpler than MapReduce. You can start with a one-operation pipeline and build it up, step-by-step, seeing exactly what a given operation does to your output. (And no Javascript required, which is always a plus.)
There’s lots more documentation on aggregation pipelines in the docs and I’ll be doing a couple more posts on it.
"Designed to be 100% off the grid, the 150-square-foot unit can be flat-packed and shipped in a box that is 4 x 10 x 3 feet in size."
—The perfect and adorable House Arc can be put together easily, they claim, although it's unclear how much it costs or how to buy one immediately. There is a rentable one beside a swimming pool in Hawaii, however, although you have to bring your own tiny bathroom. [Thanks, Kirsten!]---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
When Daniel Reis isn't looking at pizza calendars, he's asking "Do you need five-and-a-half hours of Beyoncé and Jay-Z videos? Wait, let me rephrase that: here is the five-and-a-half-hour Beyoncé and Jay-Z playlist you desperately need." Thank you.
---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
Oh boy do i love their covers! Collect magazine from Australia, a 64-page magazine published 10 times each year. Creative Director Adam Johnson Editor in Chief Josh Fanning Josh tells me: "COLLECT IS ALL ABOUT OLD FASHIONED GOODNESS. It was only two generations prior that we all had vegie patches and fruit trees in our gardens and rode bikes to work. We want civilisation to be critical of its progress. Are we heading in the right direction? I think we must view technology as a me...
There will be no shortage of talk about the size of the contract Detroit gave to Prince Fielder ... not to mention the size of the player himself. But for the moment, let's look at teams that have had two hitters as good as Fielder and Miguel Cabrera.
Among all MLB hitters over the past 3 seasons, Cabrera and Fielder rank #2 and #5(t) in OPS+:
Read the rest »
Great product design involves thinking about what features to prioritize, planning the user flow from screen to screen, getting user feedback and lots more, but at the end of the day, someone is going to be in Photoshop pushing pixels. The final visual design of a digital interface isn't going to design itself, and when a designer is crafting the look and feel, here are some elements they're typically designing:
- Buttons
- Panels
- Windows
- Profile Pictures
- Icons
If you really think about it, most interfaces (especially for iOS apps) use tons of rounded rectangles in different shapes and sizes. Long and skinny ones with lots of shine. Squarer, flatter ones with some texture. Smaller, slightly inset ones with photos inside. The list just keeps on going. I actually joke around with friends that my main job is making rounded rectangles look great, so I thought it was time to show off some common techniques.
Drawing Them
It's important to keep your elements in Photoshop in vector format as long as you can because they can be scaled and re-styled easily. To draw a rounded rectangle, I use (gasp!) the Rounded Rectangle Tool with Snap To Pixels turned on. This is incredibly important or the edges of your shape will lie on a half-pixel and look blurry. There are some other ways to draw rounded rectangles in Photoshop (which Marc Edwards has conveniently outlined) but I typically stay with the vector shape tool because it's easy.
If the edges of your shape aren't sharp, then strokes/gradients/highlights/shadows you add later won't be perfect.
Up or Down?
If your goal is to craft subtle and realistic user interfaces that look and feel like real world surfaces, you'll be making a choice: is this element popping off the screen (convex) or indented into the screen (concave)? Buttons are convex whereas large panels containing text and other elements are typically concave.
On the left is a convex button that is designed to look like it's bulging off the screen. It appears bulged out because it's made to appear just like a convex object would appear in real life if it had 90°, top-down lighting. That means that 1) the light catches the top of the object and adds a lighter stripe of highlight, 2) as the bottom bends back down towards the screen, the light is blocked and it gets darker (light-to-dark gradient), and 3) it casts a very subtle shadow, indicating that it's sitting on top of the surface. This specific combination of highlights, gradients and shadows is the most basic way to make a rounded rectangle appear bulged out and convex.
On the right is a larger panel that is designed to look inset into the screen. The fill color is a mostly-transparent black, it has some inner shadows, and then a thin white drop shadow at the bottom. If we analyze this using the same lighting conditions as the previous example, it's made to look sunken in because 1) the edges or lips of the shape are at the surface and cast an inner shadow inside (these edges block light like an awning off a building blocks the rain, causing a shadow) and 2) as the bottom edge of the shape comes back up to meet the surface, the light catches that lip and causes an edge highlight.
Pictures
Most iPhone apps that display profile images have them look slightly sunken into the surface or popped out and semi-glossy. This is achieved with mainly the same techniques from above, but for the glossy one I added a diagonal gloss line (a white-to-transparent gradient cut into a triangle) as a separate layer.
Mixing It Up
Although there are distinct elements common in most convex-or-concave elements, there's no special formula for how to accomplish these effects in Photoshop. I typically tweak size and opacity sliders on Inner Glow, Inner Shadow, Stroke and Drop Shadow layer styles until things look good. Other people are Bevel & Emboss specialists. Here are some more examples of rounded rectangles styled in some different (but reusable!) ways.
Scratching The Surface
These are just some of the myriad ways you can style and use rounded rectangles in your interfaces. If you really want to see some creative designs, check out some icon designs on Dribbble. All it takes is some imagination and experimentation, and you can use gorgeous rounded rectangle designs throughout your interface.
Stunning photos today of the millions of Egyptians out in the streets to commemorate the start of the revolution a year ago that turned out Mubarak — and to demand transition from military to civilian rule.
A few things have been written on the supporting role of design in the revolution and the urban landscape as both site and medium of protest:
- The role of protest signage
- Graffiti and murals
- Planning, public squares and cities as tools of rebellion
- Flyers, manifestos and ephemera
- Cellphone cameras and social media
- Even product labeling.
But I think my favorite detail is in this annotated overview of Tahrir square by BBC News.The authors of direct action (particularly in West Asia and North Africa) are often depicted as a rowdy mob of thugs. But instead of the usual sea of angry Arab men so often shown by the mainstream media, the photo shows a kindergarten set up in the square. Schools in Cairo had been closed during the protests, but many mothers wanted to attend the demonstration as well. So demonstrators organized an impromptu kindergarten.
The image captures the spirit of mutual support that sprang up around the occupation. And my favorite detail: the newsprint under the paintings to keep the square, the city and country they love, free from spills. No random acts of violence here, but using the city to create something new, a different future, with hope and love.
Here's a creative solution for city dwellers looking to maximize space: Brooklyn-based architect Peter Pawlak integrated a pair of built-in desks right into a couple's bedroom, creating a home office that can be hidden away when not in use.
Pawlak found a way to provide a versatile work area for the couple, who envisioned a functional space that would conceal all evidence of their work lives; when the desk tops are closed, the built-in unit acts as a console.
Above: Pawlak used anigre wood veneer for the built-ins and seagrass wallpaper to echo the color of the veneer. A pair of Eames Soft Pad Chairs from Herman Miller have rubber wheels, which protects the fumed oak floors.
Above: The desks feature unobstructed legroom; when closed, they function as a console for art and books.
.
Above: The desktops open and close with spring-loaded levers on both sides; the lid raises to reveal a corkboard on the underside. The drawers hold files and also conceal the printer.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo today to mark the anniversary of the uprising that eventually led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak. Political divides are still in force with liberals and Islamists differing on their visions for the future of the country. Mubarak is now on trial for complicity in the deaths of protesters. The uprising in Egypt last year was one of the initial protests of what is called the Arab Spring, which has included the slaying of Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy and the ongoing protests in Syria. -- Lloyd Young (31 photos total)Egyptians gather in their thousands in Tahrir Square to mark the one year anniversary of the revolution on Jan. 25, 2012 in Cairo Egypt. Tens of thousands have gathered in the square on the first anniversary of the Arab uprising which toppled President Hosni Mubarak. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Here we go again.
It looks like Red Hat is distributing Perl without the core library
ExtUtils::MakeMaker. If you're not familiar with the details of the Perl 5 build chain, all you need to know is this: without MakeMaker, you're not installing anything from the CPAN.Ostensibly Red Hat and other OS distribution vendors split up Perl 5 into separate packages to save room on installation media. Core Perl 5 is large and includes many, many things that not everyone uses all the time... but the obvious reaction to defining a core subset of Perl 5 that a vendor can call "perl" is another of those recurring discussions which never quite goes anywhere.
For example, who needs the documentation just to run code? (Except that the
diagnosticspragma relies on the existence of perldiag.pod to run.) Who needs the huge Unicode encoding tables for ideographic languages such as you might find in Japan, China, Korea, and other Asian locals? (Answer: Asia.) Who needs the ability to install code from the CPAN? (Answer: users.)While there's a lot of stuff in the core that probably doesn't need to be in the core, or at least installed by default (a LaTex formatter for POD, the deprecated Switch module, Perl 5.005 Thread emulation), one thing is both clear and almost never said.
I'll give you a moment to think about it.
Here's a hint: you're usually better off compiling and installing your own Perl 5 under your complete control such that you can compile in options you want (64-bit integers, for example) and out options you don't (threading imposes a 15% performance penalty even in the single-threaded case) and so that you can manage your own library paths without changing the behavior of the system). perlbrew changes the game. Learn it, like it, love it.
The perpetual discussion misses one important point:
The vendor
perl—especially on installation media—is not for general purpose Perl programming. It's there only to support basic administrative programs provided with the system as a whole. That's why you don't replace the system Perl. That's why you don't mess with the system CPAN modules. That's why you fence off whatever's in /usr/bin/perl like it's Yucca Mountain and you're stuck with a '50s reactor design instead of something safe and clean.Vendors can tune and tweak that Perl to their satisfaction to provide just what they need to install and configure a working system. They can keep it as crufty and out of date as they like. When it breaks, they get to keep all of the pieces and sew them back together like some sort of Fedorastein's monster. They just can't let it out of the lab.
This of course means that they need to provide packages of Perl 5 Actual for users and developers such that it's the full core of Perl 5. (It'd be nice if they called not-a-perl as such, but one thing at a time.)
You can't predict what users will and won't do. That's why you code defensively. The moment distributions started carving up Perl to install just the little bits they needed in the hopes that their guesses as to what users wanted were right, they put everyone in a bind.
Certainly Perl 5 could benefit from a thorough review of what's in core and why, but I suspect that even if p5p came up with packaging guidelines for all of the imaginable use cases and combinations of distributor needs and user wants, it still wouldn't solve the real problem.
(Credit Allison Randal for pointing out the real problem years ago. We've discussed several times the idea of a stripped-down VM for a real language—something with better abstraction and reuse than Bash—with easy access to libraries and a very small footprint, but it's a bigger job than either of us could accomplish. It's still a righter approach than bowdlerizing an upstream distribution.)
doyle partners' design scheme helps visitors remember history at the former site of the yankee stadium.
read more
About the Author: You may have seen Michael Neff behind the bar at New York's Ward III and The Rum House. He stops by on Wednesdays to share insights on cocktails and the life of a barman.
More Behind The Bar
So You Want to Be a Bartender »
What Makes a Good Bar »
On Vodka Sodas and First Dates »
On Fernet Branca »
So You Want to Open a Bar »
My Cocktail Costs How Much? »
What I'm Drinking:
Great King Street Artist's Blend Scotch Whisky (neat)There has been an interesting comment that that keeps popping up in the threads of these columns. It goes something like this:
I'm sick of the trend where bartenders think that they are god's gift to humanity. Your job is to make drinks, not to educate, babysit, or judge people. So do us all a favor; stow the attitude, and do your job."
What, exactly, is my job? As a bartender, am I a nightlife impresario who is responsible for the totality of my guests' experience, or am I a robot trained to take a few spirits, pour them in to a glass, and take people's money? In the first case, I must rely on my judgement and perspicacity to make sure that the people who sit at my bar get the experience they deserve. In the second, my most valuable asset is my ability to make drinks quickly, efficiently, and correctly.
In reality, it's a bit of both. What my job actually is depends entirely on where I happen to be working.
For example: a big bar will often come equipped with hoards of employees and complicated management structures. Is there a fight about to break out? Let's get the security manager down here. Someone needs to be cut off? That's for the floor manager. Often, a bartender is neither expected nor allowed to do anything but call someone who has a higher level of authority when a situation arises that is more complicated than making a drink and serving it.
But that's not how it works in smaller bars. Most bartenders don't have the luxury of passing off their problems to other people. In almost every bar I've ever worked, the bartenders were responsible for everything from choosing the music, counting the money, cleaning the bathrooms, dealing with unruly guests, sweeping up broken glass, and everything in between. If a neighbor called to complain about the noise, we had to fix the problem. If a person fell down and hit her head, we had to call the ambulance and prevent a lawsuit. All while making drinks, serving food, and making sure that everyone was having a good time.
One of the best bars I've ever worked, a place called Grace, was exactly this type of gig. At Grace, there was no higher level of authority to call if we had a problem. We were managers, hosts, bouncers, and bartenders at the same time. While we would certainly have cut off someone who had too much to drink, it was more important that we monitor what everyone was drinking to prevent such problems from happening in the first place. We learned very quickly that, if a crowd of drinkers is not controlled, it can quickly get out of control.
Think of it this way. When you are standing at a bar on a busy Friday night, you see a bartender or two, a register full of cash, and a whole lot of booze. When I'm working, I see the opposite: one hundred fifty people, all well in their cups, any of whom could decide at any moment that they can do anything they feel like, and there is no one to tell them differently. How is it possible that so few people can keep control of so many? We do it by establishing our authority and dealing with any deviations from acceptable behavior as firmly and directly as possible. We have to; there are usually a lot more of you than there are of us.
Does this make me seem cocky? Probably, especially to the person testing my limits. Self-important? Maybe, but we bartenders are not only there to serve you, we are also responsible for your safety, and that of everyone in the bar. There is a big difference between acting important and having an important job to do.
So the question posed above—what is a bartenders job—has a third answer. In most joints, our job is not to just make drinks, it is managing a throng of drinkers. At the end of the day, most people just want to sit down and enjoy a drink in a cool bar that makes them feel good. We bartenders are there to make sure that is possible by controlling the chaos. If we do our jobs well, a balance is struck between adults having a few drinks, and drunks running roughshod over an establishment.
Hey, NYC fans of From Behind the Bar! Michael Neff will be teaching this class on tasting and understanding spirits from micro-distilleries at the Astor Center on February 10th.
From the 1890s until the 1960s, the location and orientation of stamps on postcards were used for the transmission of secret messages.
For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander, and similarly to them can only exchange secret signs about the feelings of their hearts, here we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don't write me any more. Top right, thwart: Write me immediately. Top right, upright [once more again???]: Your love makes me happy. Top left, across: My heart belongs to someone else. Top left, upright: I love you. Bottom left, across: Leave me alone in my grief. In line with the name: Accept my love. Same place, across: I wish to see you. Same place, upside down: I love someone else.
An interview with Jason Kottke on The Verge. Jason’s blog is still, consistently, the blog to read. Even more so now that he’s able to draw from Stellar.
I have two invitations to Stellar to hand out. Just ask: @torrez.
From a story in the Wall Street Journal:Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog...
Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates' suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether...
gopy everyday.
Clip after clip of formerly intact objects (boats, planes, buildings) being destroyed in a matter of seconds.
(via @unlikelywords)
Tags: video
Letters of Note ran a 1955 letter from advertising legend David Ogilvy that details his process for writing advertising copy.
Tags: advertising David Ogilvy writingI have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
Did you make a new year’s resolution to:
- find a new programming job?
- learn a new software language?
- finally build a Rails or iOS app?
Need some help keeping your goal? We can help. We have 3 upcoming Studios designed solely to help developers learn to build outstanding iOS or Rails apps for either themselves or their current company, or to find a new job doing so.
Ruby on Rails
March 20-22 in Reston, VA
Register
During this hands-on course, you'll learn the fundamentals of Rails by creating a full-featured app from start to finish. Over three days you will:
- Learn how to use the core features of Rails 3.2, and put them all together to build web apps like the pros.
- Get a jump start and get your questions answered so you can start crafting your own Rails applications with confidence.
- Save time and frustration by focusing exclusively on Ruby and Rails development for three days with expert guidance.
This course is intended for:
Web programmers looking to get into Ruby on Rails development. (There are a lot of companies actively hiring Rails talent!)
Small programming teams that need to get up to speed quickly on Rails.
New team members who are programming Rails for the first time.
You'll come away from this course ready to create your first Rails app, or improve your existing app! Check out the full course description and all the details.
iPhone/iPad Programming
March 6-9 in Denver, CO
April 10-13 in Reston, VA
Register
Attending this hands-on programming course is a great way to quickly become productive as an iOS developer. Throughout the course you’ll build 6 example apps to boost your confidence and gain valuable experience. Over four days you will:
- Learn how to use the major tools and APIs in the latest iOS 5.0 SDK
- Get hands-on coding experience through exercises and labs
- Become proficient using Xcode 4.2, Objective-C, and Cocoa Touch programming
- Save time and frustration by focusing exclusively on iOS development for four days with expert guidance.
This course is intended for:
Experienced programmers who are new to iOS development.
New iOS programmers who have started building an app and need help putting all the pieces together.
Small programming teams that need to get up to speed quickly on building iOS apps.
You'll come away from this course with the skills and knowledge to create your first iOS app, or improve your existing app. Check out the full course description and all the details.
Reserve your seat in the Studio today and make 2012 a great year for advancing your career! Register for March's courses by early February and save $400!
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC.[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!].
Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in escapes and heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.
Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.
The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that operate as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.
How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kind of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?
If burglary and prison breaks each require a kind of counter-manual of the city, then what might such a guide include—from precise time schedules and blindspots to the limits of surveillance—what points of weakness and unexpected parallels should it map, and what typologies of incisions or perforations would it posit to allow new routes through closed spaces?
The escape and the break-in here are both about illicit reinterpretations of space, sometimes violent, sometimes simply used against the grain, operating a building, we might say, in every way the architect—and the guards who police his or her creation—regrettably overlooked.
Conversely, how is space regulated and maintained from the standpoint of the police and the prison guard, or from the point of view of the homeowner who seeks to hide his or her private riches? What obstacles, blockades, misdirections, decoys, safe rooms, and security systems must be implemented to ensure that a given space is properly accessed?[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath].
These are all recurring themes here on BLDGBLOG, where, over the years, we've discussed how to plan the perfect heist or to perforate a skyscraper, and how to worm your way through the interlinked foundations of London; and perhaps we might say that 19th-century architect George Leonidas Leslie, who used his spatial skills to become "the head of the most successful gang of bankrobbers known," is, in a sense, our festival's mascot or patron saint.
Over the next four months, we will be discussing these questions and many more—from how certain sequences in these films were shot to the stage sets constructed to produce them—culminating in a public event at Studio-X NYC in April.
Of course, not all of these films are escapes from prisons as such or heists specifically aimed at banks; instead, we'll explore what it means to break out from an overly managed suburban life in The Truman Show and how an elaborate home invasion goes wrong in Panic Room; we'll watch the perfectly timed dream-physics kicks and corporate secrets of Inception as well as a team of German terrorists robbing the vaults of the Nakatomi Building of its negotiated bearer bonds. And our list is by no means exhaustive, with some films chosen less for their cinematic quality or the depth of their characterization than for their discussability or the originality of their spatial propositions.
So, in order of viewing, this distributed film fest of prison breaks and bank heists includes:
—Breaking Out—Friday, January 27, 2012—Breaking In—
Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)
Monday, January 30, 2012
A Man Escaped (dir. Robert Bresson, 1956)
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963)
Monday, February 6, 2012
Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
Monday, February 13, 2012
Papillon (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
Friday, February 17, 2012
Escape from Alcatraz (dir. Don Siegel, 1979)
Monday, February 20, 2012
Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981)
Friday, February 24, 2012
Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)
Friday, March 2, 2012
The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2008)
Monday, March 19, 2012Again, you can watch the films wherever you might be, from the Lower East Side to Rotterdam, from Toronto and Mumbai to Beijing, and then join the relevant comment threads here on BLDGBLOG (posted, I hope, within a day or two of the screening date). Further, look out for some original analyses on Filmmaker Magazine as the festival unfolds.
Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955)
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (dir. John Guillermin, 1960)
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Italian Job (dir. Peter Collinson, 1969) vs. The Italian Job (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003)
Friday, March 30, 2012
Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1975) vs. The Third Memory (dir. Pierre Huyghe, 1999)
Monday, April 2, 2012
Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)
Friday, April 6, 2012
Following (dir. Christopher Nolan, 1998)
Monday, April 9, 2012
Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002)
Friday, April 13, 2012
Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee, 2006)
Monday, April 16, 2012
The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008)
Friday, April 20, 2012
Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Finally, stop by Studio-X NYC on the evening of Tuesday, April 24, for a free public discussion featuring a stellar group of panelists soon to be announced.
I hope many of you will participate in this experiment in film curation!
(New Yorkers, note that Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped happens to be screening this week at Film Forum, so it might be a good idea to catch it before it leaves the theater).
David Galbraith updated his post on where the web was invented (which includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee) to include the juicy tidbit that the building in which TBL invented the web is in France, not Switzerland.
Tags: CERN David Galbraith France Switzerland Tim Berners-Lee WWWI'll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders.
If you're participating in Paper Garbage/Write Your Friends month, here's an additional way to pass them information:
[H]ere we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don’t write me any more.And so forth. (Including "You're right about my lady-friend" — right-hand top corner.) There doesn't yet seem to be code for "Inside this package you will find a piece of beautiful coded jewelry, from me to you, for no reason," but we could probably come up with something. [Via]
---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
PDFpen 5.7 now supports iCloud and has a companion iPad app. Since Apple doesn’t allow non–Mac App Store apps to access iCloud, people who bought PDFpen direct from Smile need to purchase the 99-cent PDFpen Cloud Access app. It looks like they’ve made the best of a bad situation.
Last March, I wrote “Would anyone be surprised if future versions of Mac OS X made additional features and APIs available only to App Store apps?” and was immediately called out for “blatant FUD.” Less than a year later, not only has this has come to pass, but people seem to be treating it as expected.
It’s no longer possible to write a single app that takes advantage of the full range of Mac OS X features. Some APIs only work inside the Mac App Store. Others only work outside it. Presumably, this gap will widen as more new features are App Store–exclusive, while sandboxing places greater restrictions on what App Store apps are allowed to do.
The latest instalment of Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist.
A series dedicated to explaining Britain's manufactured celebrities to an American audience.
Here’s a fun game to play—well, when I say “fun game to play” I suppose I really mean “grim illustration of late capitalism’s warped values that might fleetingly distract you from the pointless quagmire of your own existence.” Anyhoo, fingers on buzzers: of the following, which genre of news story has the longest shelf-life in our ADD-pandering global media landscape: missing white girl with pretty blonde hair; white girl imprisoned for grisly murder; or famous married man sexing women who aren’t his wife? The answer, as established by the indefatigable wonks at Princeton’s Department of Research Studies to Discuss on Buzzfeed or Reddit, is that all three enjoy a statistically equal claim on our attention, and on average will attract 1,250 times the coverage of an outbreak of war, the discovery of a contagious fatal disease or a celebrity’s rad new hairstyle (not counting Jennifer Aniston but definitely counting Jennifers Lopez, Garner and Love Hewitt).
Or rather, that was the status quo until very recently. But the British press, not content with its phone hacking and privacy debates and Liz Joneses and what have you, has willfully thrown the whole delicate system into disarray with its unstinting, unwavering and well-nigh heroic focus on the romantic infidelity of footballer Ryan Giggs, who, it emerged last June (or roughly four centuries ago, in Internet years), had been cheating on his wife Stacey with yet another woman. Admittedly, that the woman in question was married to his younger brother lent some piquancy to the tale, but it is nonetheless impressive to behold the sheer number of daily headlines still dedicated to the “scandal” at the expense of actual news, aka stuff people don’t already know about in byzantine and queasy detail. So why do the casual indiscretions of this 38-year-old Welshman—winger for Manchester United, father of two, millionaire many times over—exert such a powerful pull on the media’s prurient gaze? Since it is this column’s burden and honor to shine a light into the very realms others fear to contemplate, let us seek answers, even if our quest erodes the vestigial fragments of our innocence, as it surely will. Read the full story at The Awl
---
See more posts by admin
One of the more impressive DIY projects we've featured: a built-in desk made from plumbing pipes and wood shelving by Houston-based firm Analog/Dialog.
We've been admiring shelving made from plumbing pipes for a while now, every since we spotted them at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs (we hadn't seen a version that incorporates a desk until this project, however). The best on-line tutorial for creating something similar comes from Morgan Satterfield of The Brick House; she used different lengths of plumbing pipes (all measuring a half inch in diameter) and three types of fittings, which she spray-painted black. The shelving is made of pine wood planks which were sanded and given a walnut stain. For those intrepid enough to take this on, we refer you to Satterfield's step-by-step instructions.
Above: A nice example of the plumbing-fixtures desk by Houston-based firm Analog/Dialog.
Above: The entire shelving unit, impressive in size and function.
“You will not grasp how this furniture came into being or what it really means unless you understand this also about Charles Eames.”
Charles and Ray Eames have pioneered modernist furniture, carved out a new way to think about design, and even changed our understanding of the scales of the universe. Appearing in the September 1946 issue of arts & architecture magazine is a fantastic profile of Charles Eames (PDF) by industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, most famous for the IBM Selectric typewriter. Noyes captures Eames’ sprit and vision with equal parts creative admiration, entrepreneurial appreciation, and astute observation of the deeper cultural resonance — with a special emphasis on the designer’s personal values of integrity and intuition (more on that) as the building blocks of his professional legacy.
There is no need to qualify the statement. Charles Eames has designed and produced the most important group of furniture ever developed in this country. His achievement is a compound of aesthetic brilliance and technical inventiveness. He has not only produced the finest chairs of modern design, but through borrowing, improvising, and inventing techniques, he has for the first time exploited the possibilities of mass production methods for the manufacture of furniture. With one stroke he has underlined the design decadence and technical obsolescence of Grand Rapids.
When you stop and try to analyze how he approached the problem, it sounds very easy and obvious. Whatever good modern furniture we have had in this country has always been expensive. Eames wanted to produce a good set of designs and ‘take them out of the carriage trade’ by designing them so that they could be economically in quantity and sold cheaply. This meant that he must be able to use the best ways of doing things that the 20th Century could offer. Naturally he wanted his furniture to be as comfortable and useful as possible, because he never forgot that he was making his designs for use. This very direct approach made it comparatively simple. He never worried much (as many designers do) about ‘what the public wants,’ or ‘what the public will accept,’ because he had a profound belief in the public, and the conviction that if they didn’t want or wouldn’t accept the furniture which he was designing for their use, the fault lay in his designs, not in the public. He knew very well the absurdity of trying to design to an assumed public taste. It is important to realize that the furniture is an expression of this direct approach; each piece is composed as much of the personal ingredients of Charles Eames as of wood and metal. If you examine this furniture, you will find sincerity, honesty, conviction, affection, imagination, and humor. You will not grasp how this furniture came into being or what it really means unless you understand this also about Charles Eames.”
For more on the Eames’ work and legacy, don’t miss the fantastic recent film Eames: The Architect and the Painter.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.
Quick, name a website. Could be any, doesn't matter.
Photo by Simone Andress, via Shutterstock
---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
Mary Tremonte Wolf Hanky silkscreen printed bandana $7 AAAAAAOOOOOOO! Be part of the pack or a lone wolf, it's up to you... These Wolf Hankys were printed in honor of an "Up the Wolf Dykes" Operation Sappho queer danceparty, but I had been thinking a lot about the next animal to be honored with a bandana design, waiting for it to come to me... Wolves have so many connotations across cultures, I encourage you to make your own meaning with these enigmatic animals. Click here for a closeup of the full hanky: View image Please specify black, red, purple, or light blue, or we will choose for you! 22 x 22" hand-silkscreened on pre-sized 100% cotton
here's the awesome preview, with responsive design, new plugins, and tons of new components
"She looked quite uncomfortable and unstable. ... We began to consider what might be happening at the muscle and tendon level."
—Scientists Look at the Dangers of High Heels.---
See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
I’ve become fond of a weblog called Everyday Carry. When I decided to dust off my newsreader I asked some friends for their OPMLs so I could see what they were reading and Everyday Carry was one that came in a bundle of consumer-centric feeds Adam Mathes read for Decommodify.
The basic idea is people send in photos of what they carry every day, with a little summary of what the items are and possibly a little backstory on how they acquired the item. The goal seems to be minimalism crossed with preparedness, and so there is a theme amongst the enthusiasts that I’ve been able to observe. Most carry a light, a bit of rope, a hook of some sort, a small number of keys (usually one), a knife, a wallet, and a watch.
Each post has a followup by the editor thanking them for the contribution and praising or offering a gentle suggestion about how they could achieve a more efficient everyday carry.
There are no Amazon encoded links to buy your own, that feels noteworthy.
Some time ago I decided I would not carry a bag and laptop into work. I keep my work iMac at the office and commute with only my keys, a wallet, and iPhone (with standard earbuds). My keys have an Inka Pen keychain that has saved me more times than I can count.
I don’t imagine I would ever submit to Everyday Carry, but the site is a bright spot as I read through my feeds.
‘Help!’ by Carbine
A young Prince Fielder knew the future. I think this means the Giants are winning the Superbowl.
Today’s News in Pictures:
This has been Today’s News in Pictures. This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.
(Tiger-striped Zubaz pants: BTF)
This Madrid-based designer has a stunning portfolio that uses a contemporary, intricate take on modernism. He’s also apparently a collage artist, as suggested in this poster he designed for what looks like a show of his collage works.
He seems like someone I would like to meet. Visit his site here.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
I received a press release this morning from a new political action group; Patriots for Self-Deportation, announcing the launch of their website SelfDeport.org. Taking inspiration from Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's recent endorsement of self deportation as the only logical, humane and responsible solution to the cancer of illegal immigration, the group's spokesman Stephen Winters has this to say: "A surprising number of authentic patriots have found in their own genealogical searches that one or more of their ancestors came here or stayed here illegally, and yet continued to make a living in this country and have children who in turn became instant citizens. Some patriots, faced with this moral dilemma, have decided to set an example for others. Knowing that their own presence in this country is not on moral solid ground, they have decided to demonstrate the highest level of civic dedication and sacrifice, and engage in self-deportation. "As a newly-minted US citizen, it made me flush with pride to see that there are patriots out there willing to step up and kick themselves out of the country they call home, simply because of some irregularity in their ancestors' arrival proceedings. I'm looking into it myself.
It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
There are some folks out there—some call them purists, I call them nuisances—who are pizza prescriptivists. These are the folks who'll tell you that, say, Chicago deep dish isn't pizza, or that if it doesn't have cheese or sauce on it, it can't be pizza. Or that pizza is always round, or that if it's not made with DOP tomatoes, it ain't the real deal.
These folks are, of course, all wrong. For if lack-of-depth, Italian tomatoes, round shape, and cheese were all requirement for pizza, then vegans (like my temporary self), Chicagoans, non-Italians, and those suffering from elipsaphobia would not be able to eat much pizza. And according to my moral philosophy—let's call it pizzism—any set of rhetoric that results in less people eating pizza must be fundamentally flawed at some level, most likely a very deep one.
Pizza need not have sauce or cheese in order for it to be insanely delicious. Exhibit A: Pizza Bianca. The long, flat, lightly dimpled, flecked-with-coarse salt, crisp-on-the-outside, just barely chewy bread sold by the square in Rome (or Sullivan street, if you prefer). Jeffrey Steingarten wrote at length about finding the perfect slice of pizza bianca at Forno, a bakery in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. I've been there. It's f*&king phenomenal (just ask Ed—he tasted pretty much the whole menu last May. My goal this week at The Pizza Lab is to bring some of that crisp, chewy, olive-oil soaked magic into my own kitchen.
The Dough
At first glance, pizza bianca looks pretty similar to certain types of focaccia, the olive-oil laden Italian bread, but the similarities are mostly superficial. Focaccia is made with an enriched dough—it has oil in it—which gives it a moister, softer texture with far less chew than pizza bianca, which is made with a lean dough.
If you actually take a look at how the suckers are made, you'd notice an even bigger difference: While focaccia are baked in a pan, pizza bianca are baked directly on the floor of the oven, much like a neapolitan pizza. The pie-men (is a pizza bianca still a pie?) will stretch the dough out to a length of about six feet on top of a monstrous paddle before dimpling it with their fingers to prevent large bubbles from forming (a major defect, according to Sullivan Street Bakery's Jim Lahey). It gets drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, then folded up accordion-style before being inserted deep into a 500-600°F oven and stretched back out with an agility that'd put WilyKit and WilyKat to shame.
Bad bubble!
While large, cavernous bubbles that char are considered a defect in pizza bianca, you still want an extremely open, wide hole structure in the crumb. The holiness of bread is pretty much directly proportional to the amount of water you add to it. Adding more water to your dough works in two ways:
- It adds more steam. When your dough goes into a hot oven, you probably notice that it expands significantly. This is due in large part to the conversion of water to steam within the bread. More water = more bubbles = airier, bubblier bread.
- It makes your gluten network looser. Gluten is the network of proteins that develops in bread dough when you combine flour and water. This network, when cooked, firms up, giving bread its structure. For optimal bubble formation, you want gluten that is very strong, yet very stretchy. Adding more water to your dough allows those bubbles to be stretched out extra-wide.
If you've followed The Pizza Lab thus far, you might remember a post in which I talked about hydration in the context of No-Roll, No-Stretch, Sicilian Style Square Pizza (and if you haven't followed, then read up!). In that post, I inadvertently managed to perfect a recipe for a focaccia-esque square pizza by adding a ton of extra water to my dough. While most pizza dough is made with a hydration level of around 65% to 70% (that is, the amount of water added weighs in at 70% of the amount of flour used), I took mine all the way up to 80%, producing a dough that nearly pours out of the mixer, yet bakes up into a supremely stretchy, light, and airy crumb.
In other words, perfect for pizza bianca.
With very wet doughs, I find that using the No Knead method is the easiest way to handle it. To develop gluten, you generally want to knead your dough to speed-up the linking process between the proteins in the flour. With the no-knead method, you simply stir together your basic ingredients (in this case bread flour, salt, yeast, and water), cover them, and let'em sit around overnight. During this time, enzymes in the flour get to work snipping up proteins and allowing them to easily link up to form gluten. An overnight rest also allows for time for some good flavor development as the yeast slowly digests the flour, creating a wide array of flavorful compounds.
Surface Tension
While the pie-men of Rome might have the training and agility to deftly shuffle 6-foot long pizzas in and out of a hot oven, I'm after more modest goals here. A couple feet long is good enough for me. Yet because of its high level of hydration, I found it very difficult—nearly impossible—to slide a pizza off my wooden peel onto a hot pizza stone without deforming it in some way.
What if I used the focaccia method of letting the dough rise directly in a rimmed baking sheet which I could then transfer to the oven?
That method works, and it's really easy—I was tempted to sign, seal, and deliver this thing as-is, but it wasn't quite right. The problem is on the undercarriage which comes out with the fried texture of focaccia or Greek pizza, not the dryer floury texture of good pizza bianca.
Delicious, but not what we're after.
I tried letting the dough rise on a sheet of parchment paper, thinking this would make it easier to transfer it to the oven. Nope. Still too wet to move without difficulty.
Turns out the easiest way is to use a hybrid method: line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment and let the dough rise directly inside. When ready to bake, I can then simply transfer the entire baking sheet to a hot pizza stone.
With the high temperatures needed for baking (550°F, or the highest your oven will go), the parchment paper rapidly browns and threatens to burn.
I found that by allowing the pizza to bake for about 5 minutes on its parchment sling, it became firm enough that I could then easily slide the parchment out from under it to allow it to continue baking directly on the stone. This also helped the bottom achieve a nicer charred-in-spots color.
Ah, now that's more like it!
Unevenly charred, nicely floury, not fried at all, with an interior crumb that's chewy and full of holes and a crisp upper crust.
The only mildly difficult part of the recipe is working with such an insanely wet dough. Unless you're an experienced baker, I'm not going to lie—your first few pies will come out deformed and misshapen. The good news? Slice it up and serve it and nobody will be the wiser. Even deformed pizza bianca tastes awesome.
If you're the type who likes rosemary, you could sprinkle a bit on top before baking along with your coarse salt. It would not be an insult to tradition. Then again, if you're the type who likes tomatoes and cheese or anchovies or thyme or gigantic slices of steak, you could also tell tradition to screw itself and follow the basic tenets of pizzism* to forge your own path towards that pie in the sky.
*There's only one commandment: thou shalt make every reasonable effort to increase the production and consumption of pizza in the universe.
Get The Recipe!
No Knead Pizza Bianca At Home! »
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
Get the Recipe!
"Witches don't have children. Their bodies, creased and spidery, are not built for them. Children would distract and soften, steal attention from the spells at hand."
–"Toothed" is wonderful new short story by Leni Zumas about a modern day witch who drives a truck. It has a surprise ending!---
See more posts by Jane Marie
We like the Mondrian-esque palette of colors on these mirrors designed by Grain, which add both a touch of texture and color to the wall.
We've been keeping an eye on Grain, a Bainbridge Island, WA, collaborative, for a while now. Owners Chelsea Green and James Minola met during a course in Guatemala while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2008, the socially conscious couple launched a line of products created as sustainably as possible in the Pacific Northwest and in collaboration with artisan communities in Guatemala. We recently featured their popular shower curtain (see our previous post: Bath: Ty DIY Shower Curtain from Grain). The Bound Mirrors below feature hemp twine around the rim and are available in a selection of colors.
Above: Large Bound Mirror in Red Multi ($1,100) and Small Bound Mirror in Blue Multi ($750).
Above: The mirrors are made with FSC-certified Baltic birch plywood and hemp twine.
Above: The mirrors have a touch of color and texture.
Was on IRC today and someone posted:
Which is a pretty handy guide to Catalyst dispatch flow. ++ to whoever did it!
I've been enjoying Tarajia Morrell's blog The Lovage recently, especially her appreciation of Harry Belafonte and the documentary Sing Your Song:
He used his gifts to shrewdly foster change and connect leaders to the masses. He is stoic and steadfast, refusing to be diverted from his path toward justice. At age eighty, he still tirelessly works on behalf of youths and minorities to try to right the mistakes that humanity can’t seem to stop perpetuating.
This seems like a decent time to remark how much I love this video of Obama singing the opening lines of "Let's Stay Together." Everyone's seen it but here it is again:*
It's not just a good video because everyone loves Al Green, but also seems to mark a general thawing of the anxiety and disappointment surrounding Obama's presidency. It's not just that the Republican primaries have gone further off the deep end than even the most cynical lefty could have imagined (or hoped), it's that Obama seems to have reclaimed a confidence that was feared lost.
This is the kind of moment that cannot be scripted or acted. As he sings, he looks downward shyly. He loves Al Green - who doesn't? When the crowd applauds he looks at once surprised, appreciative, and embarrassed at the raucousness of their response. There's a difference between Obama's real smile and his "picture taken with a politician smile," and his sincerity is intoxicating. He briefly nods his head to the side in deference — a posture he rarely takes in public — to let the crowd know how much he's enjoying their reaction. Then the moment is over. He throws his shoulders back and reclaims his campaign persona, talking trash to his staff — an underrated staple of his stump speeches. Addressing Al Green (who is in the audience) he says: "Don't worry Reverend, I can't sing like you, but I just wanted to show my appreciation."
That's the essence of leadership: "I can't do what you do, but I appreciate how well you do it."
*"Everyone's seen it but here it is again" is more or less my mission statement nowadays.
Introducing the newest member of the Streetsblog family… Luna Blue Evans-Snyder was born the afternoon of January 13. She weighed in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.
As you might imagine, Tanya’s byline is going to be a little scarce over the next several weeks. If you’d like to send her well-wishes and recommendations for a good balance bike, you can reach her at tanya.c.snyder@gmail.com.
It's January. It's cold. I'm shaking the cobwebs off Loge13. So why not remember what it looked like to walk into Shea Stadium:
Realizing this immediately raised my publisher hackles. “But, but, but,” I spluttered, “there’s no way in hell I’m going publish something that I can sell only in the iBookstore, and even then only if Apple approves it. There aren’t even any guidelines outlining what Apple will and will not approve!”
I think part of the complaining is about unrealized potential. Geeks don’t like to see what could be a general purpose tool limited for business or political reasons.
Jonathan Hoefler tweeted recently that he'd found a site that had digitized the American Type Foundry's 1912 Type Specimen book. It's true. If you don't know this book, next time you're at a bar with a typographer, mention that you've got a copy--your drinks will be free all night.Familiarity with the ATF book will only serve to increase your typography cred among your designer friends, too. Being able to present examples on your iPhone is even better. It's definitely worthwhile to spend some time looking through its pages.Get a PDF of the book here.Sample pages after the jump ...
What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.
A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is. In New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher — whose treatise on the myth of multitasking you might recall — explores the evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural forces that drive our deep-seated neophilia, our tendency to ceaselessly seek out the new and different. From how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty, Gallagher examines the past and future of the quintessential tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.
At this point in our warp-speed information age, our well-being demands that we understand and control our neophilia lest it control us. We already crunch four times more data — e-mail, tweets, searches, music, video, and traditional media — than we did just thirty years ago, and this deluge shows no signs of slackening. To thrive amid unprecedented amounts of novelty, we must shift from being mere seekers of the new to being connoisseurs of it.”
To be sure, Gallagher is careful not to paint a binary picture of good and evil in discussing neophilia, recognizing instead its dimensionality and balance of threat and benefit. She begins by citing a near-mythological anecdote about young Einstein:
A wonderful little story about five-year-old Albert Einstein, who was very slow to speak and whose parents feared he was none too bright, shows us how neophilia works and what it’s for. One day, when he was sick in bed, the boy was given the compass to fiddle with to keep him occupied. The new plaything made him wonder about magnetic fields, which got him interested in physics, and, well, you know the rest. Few of us are Einsteins, but all of us have the same capacity to be curious about something new that sparks the learning and sustained interest that lead to achievements great and small.”
Young Albert Einstein, 1882
From that perspective, neophilia can be a facilitator of serendipity, which can in turn be the gateway to discovery and creativity. The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,” Gallagher says, because they resemble thoughts in how they spur us to learn. Coupled with the capacity of the brain to act as a “surprise detector,” this makes neophilia a uniquely human adaptive advantage. In fact, as Gallagher points out, the failure to replicate this mechanism in artificial intelligence is the reason why robotic self-driving cars are still less able to detect and react to rapidly changing traffic conditions, and why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting — in other words, why the filter bubble exists.
To survive, you must be aroused by the new and different. To be efficient and productive, however, you must focus your finite mental energy and attention on those novel sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that somehow matter and screen out the rest. Just as arousal alerts and orients you to new things, the complementary process of adaptation helps you filter out the unimportant ones.”
(Cue in Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet.)
This, of course, is a double-edged sword. As far as the compulsion for novelty goes, a lens of particular urgency to me is that of information neophilia. As the editor of a site that features mostly evergreen content, whose interestingness quotient, meaningfulness, and relevance aren’t correlated with a date stamp, I am constantly troubled by the newsification of the web. The new floats to the top of our collective conscience, leaving boundlessly fascinating, timeless yet timely older “information” — old maps, archival photos, pioneering cinema, vintage design, out-of-print books — to rot away at the bottom, in obscure archives, away from the public eye and thus from our collective imagination.
My hope is that we, as a culture, as a society, and as individuals, will find ways to transcend this voraciousness for novelty and learn to celebrate the layered richness that lies beneath the surface foam of the new — something underlying Gallagher’s rhetoric in New, as she urges us to stay true to neophilia’s evolutionary purpose: to help us adapt, learn, and create new things that are meaningful and purposeful, discarding vacant stimuli as distraction.
Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.
We're delighted to welcome you to the new Remodelista, which we've been working on behind the scenes for several months now.
You might remember our questionnaire asking for reader feedback a while ago; we took note of your thoughtful suggestions and observations and incorporated your ideas (better search capabilities! easier commenting! huge photos!). In addition, we've combined some of the best features of a magazine (weekly issue themes, larger images on our post pages) with the power of the web to create a richer reader experience.
Here are a few of the features we're excited about:
- Read Anywhere: Our new layout adjusts to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, or any other mobile or tablet device), while maintaining the integrity of the site layout.
- City Guides: Our new City Guides feature more than 1,000 posts on hotels, lodging, and restaurants all over the world, organized by location.
- Improved Search and Navigation: You can now search by room, color, and type of product, from bathroom fixtures to flooring.
- Enhanced Sharing: Share content more easily via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
- Improved Comments: You'll be able to see (and make comments) immediately.
- Better Balance Between Content and Ads. As part of SAY's Clean Campaign, we'll be featuring a single spotlight ad, eliminating clutter and highlighting content. Read more at SAY.
This is just the beginning. Over the next few months, we'll be introducing more new enhancements and welcoming a roster of contributing editors (including paint expert Eve Ashcraft, among others). We hope you enjoy the new and improved Remodelista, and we'd love to hear your thoughts!
N.B.: A huge thank you to SAY's talented in-house Media Lab (thanks, Alex, William, Adrian, and Amy!) in San Francisco, who worked tirelessly on the Remodelista redesign.
Despite being a mad keen football fan since childhood I never really enjoyed kids football magazines (though I do remember having the little cardboard league tables with interchangeable tabbed team names that were published at the start if each season). Like so much sports coverage they were ahead of the publishing curve in the sense they too often descended to overawed celebrity worship. Even with today’s football magazines there’s a set agenda of celebs, top 100 lists and stats. So it’s good to see a few alternatives out there – Sepp from Germany, Spiel from Liverpool and London’s Green Soccer Journal. (and not forgetting The Blizzard, as Mathew points out in his comment).
The third GSJ is out now – here are some of the highlights that make it special for me.
The issue is a goalkeeping special, with a set of shots of England ’keepers hands from Harley Wier.…
…a clothes shoot based around the tradition of ‘jumpers for posts’…
…and an amusing look back at a 1974 soft porn feature for Viva magazine featuring NY Cosmos player Shep Messing. Unimaginable today.
Cover star Italian goalkeeper legend Gianluigi Bufon is interviewed by Paulo Bandini (the issue also has interviews with Everton’s Tim Howard and ex–Arsenal keeper Bob Wilson)…
…and this shoot based on goalie training drills made me laugh, as did a set of goalkeeper’s shirts positioned to recreate famous saves (shot by Neil Bedford).
In amongst all this are the more match-related details: a comparison of stud-tightening tools; a look at the perfect pre-match pie; a pair of young merseyside players to watch. Editor/creative directors Adam Towle and James Roper only put a foot wrong once – a shoot and fold-out poster of a glamourised nude streaker lacks the irony required to make it work.
Loving football almost as much as I love magazines, it’s great to have a publication that combines both things so well. I’ve written about new magazines taking on old genres before – Ride Journal, Carl*s Cars, Anorak, Fire & Knives – and the Green Soccer Journal is doing the same thing for football.
The Green Soccer Journal is the latest addition to the magCulture shop.
Chris Sacca nicely summarized today’s FB vs Google vs Twitter controversy:
It comes down to what each company has promised its users. Facebook promised its users their stuff would be private, which is why users rightfully get pissed when that line blurs. Twitter has promised users, well, that it will stay up, and that is why users rightfully get pissed when the whale is back.
Google has promised its users and the entire tech community, again and again, that it would put their interests first, and that is why Google users, rightfully get pissed when their results are deprecated to try to promote a lesser Google product instead.
It’s all about expectations.
I've been debating whether to post about the iBooks Author EULA or not. In general, I've been trying to avoid hotly debated and controversial subjects here for the simple fact that those discussions tend to eat up a lot of time and often aren't very productive. My opinion on iBooks Author and iBooks 2 is fairly close to some other authors I know. Because this is something that's near and dear to my heart, however, I figure it's worth a few words. And with me, a few words is usually more than a few.
There's been a lot of foofooraw since the iBooks 2 announcement last week. There's been all sorts of stories, tweets, and blog posts about how Apple is going to "steal your work" if you use iBooks Author. There's also been the all-too-familiar refrains of just how evil Apple is. It all seems vaguely familiar. Almost like… almost like we've been here before, what with all the people gnashing their teeth, rending their clothes, and complaining to the heavens about how evil Apple is because of thedeveloper agreementapp store guidelinesiBooks 2 EULA.
There's also been a lot of complaints about the fact that Apple is using a proprietary format rather than using and extending ePub 3.
None of this bothers me terribly. Oh, it's not that there aren't things I would want different if I were King of the World, but the reality is that deciding whether to use iBooks Author is just another business decision for me. Emotional outcries and hyperbole are all well and good, but they don't change the parameters of the decision. Business decisions inherently involve risk, and the risk here is at a level that I'm perfectly comfortable with.
Before I explain why, though, I want to put up front that I'm not a lawyer. Well, that's not technically true, but I'm not a practicing lawyer and I'm not YOUR lawyer, so don't take anything I say as legal advice. I'm just explaining why I'm not concerned. If you have concerns, you should take those concerns to your lawyer before making up your mind.The EULA
Make no mistake, the iBooks 2 EULA is poorly written and vague. The mere fact that people are up in arms is testament to that fact. And if the ambiguity that is there bothers you, don't use it. There are plenty of tools for creating eBooks, so if you think the risk of Apple "stealing" your work is too high, using another tool solves the problem.
There are several reasons why I'm perfectly comfortable with the risk involved. In no particular order, those reasons are:You can go on about what Apple "might do" or "could do", but the fact is that contracts aren't magic. If Apple wanted to screw me, there's no doubt they could, with or without this language. They've got a disproportionate amount of power in this contractual relationship because they have the audience and the platform, and they also have a ton of money and lots of really, really good lawyers. If they came after me, the merits of the case would matter little because I couldn't afford to defend myself against them, anyway. That's a risk, sure, but based on my past dealings with Apple, them trying to use the legal system to screw me seems a very remote possibility, and I'm willing to accept that risk. The language of the contract does almost nothing to change the amount of risk here for me. It's little more than a red herring as far as I'm concerned.
- It's simply not in Apple's long-term interest to take ownership of authors' books and Apple can almost always be relied upon to do what's in their own long-term best interest. Getting 30% of every iBook sale means they are motivated to keep authors happy. More than that, though, they need authors to want to write for this new platform in order to establish it as the dominant interactive next-generation eBook platform. Stealing books won't get them to that goal. Suing authors who publish non-interactive versions of their content for other platforms like the Kindle or ePub won't either.
- Although the wording is certainly vague enough that you could argue more than one interpretation, the capitalization of "Work" in the EULA (meaning it has a specific contractual meaning) combined with the verbiage, "Work you create with this software" implies that the intent is to restrict only the application-specific output. In other words, the most likely intent as I read it is to cover the proprietary file format used for the new features not supported by other existing eBook platforms.
- Even if that weren't the intent, from a purely evidentiary point of view, the other file formats that iBooks Author exports to are open, standard formats and it would be difficult for Apple to prove a particular non-interactive work was "generated" with iBooks Author even if they really did want to try and "steal our books". A PDF generated from iBooks Author would be nearly impossible to distinguish from one generated using Pages by simply copying and pasting the content from iBooks Author .
- The EULA contains the following phrase: Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner. Basically, it explicitly states that the ownership of any content you create outside of the app and import into it is completely unaffected by any "book stealing" clause, even if such a thing existed. This seems to counter the notion that Apple is trying steal our intellectual property in the first place because unless the words and images were created directly in iBooks (as opposed to being imported from Pages, Word, Photoshop, etc.), Apple would have no claim to the content anyway. Their claim would be limited to the way the content is formatted. Again, from an evidentiary standpoint, it would be incredibly hard for Apple to prove you created the content in iBooks.
- The deal we're getting with iBooks Author isn't all that different from the deal we get when using Xcode as iOS developers, and the language of the agreements aren't all that different from each other either, and that's worked out pretty well so far.
- And last, but not least, the kicker: Let's say, for giggles, that "book stealing" was Apple's intent, and such an intent was found to be both legal and the actual intent of the contract, and Apple decided to exercise those rights to steal my books. You know what? Even with all that, it's still a hell of a lot better deal than I've ever gotten from a traditional publisher. Apple is offering 70% of the sale price to me. The most favorable contract I've ever gotten from a publisher starts at 12% of the net price the publisher gets from the distributor, wholesaler, or retailer (which is half or less of the retail price). That percentage does slowly escalate up to 20% if I sell a ton of books, but if I publish a new edition of an existing book, the escalators go back down to 12% and I have to start all over. To put this in more concrete terms, if I were to sell a book in the iBooks Store for $9.99, I would get $6.99 per book sold, which is about four times what I get when one of my current $39.99 books sells, and I'd get that money months sooner. Oh, and guess what? I don't own those books published through a traditional publisher, either. My publisher can even have someone else update the book and can continue to use my name to promote it, even if I don't like the revisions or think the update sucks.
ePub 3 vs. iBooks 2
Many people have suggested that Apple should have used the existing ePub 3 standard and worked with the standards body to extend it in whatever ways Apple needed it extended. Instead, they decided to create a proprietary file format using the older ePub 2 specification as a starting point. It is important to note, however, that Apple is not advertising this new format as being ePub; we only know it's based on ePub 2 because people have reverse engineered the generated .ibooks files.
Now, I'll be honest. In a perfect world, I'd prefer to see Apple using an open standard here. But, there isn't an existing open standard that does what Apple wanted to do, and working with a standards body to revise existing standards to meet their needs for a yet-to-be-released piece of software would have tipped their hand about the software they were developing. People would have known exactly what Apple was working on from the things they were requesting of the standards body, which would have given competitors an advantage and could have hurt Apple's negotiations with publishers. Apple's culture is steeped in secrecy, and many would argue that this secrecy has been a contributing factor to their repeated successes over the last decade. Anybody who follows the company and understands the way they work knows exactly why they made the choice that they did here. Was it the best choice for Apple? Only time will tell, but there are obvious reasons why they would think it might be.
It's also important to note that iBooks Author is completely and totally free. But really, nothing is free. TANSTAAFL. Developing both a platform to do what iBooks 2 can do and developing a tool to create content for that platform was not a trivial task and Apple almost certainly devoted a lot of resources to getting it done and to getting existing publishers on board. Apple doesn't write software to be nice, they write software to make money. In this case, they're not making money directly, but make no mistake, it was written to make Apple money. The fact that they are not letting people use this free product to compete with them, or to create works for competing platforms should surprise no one. We, as users, authors, and publishers might desire such a tool and might have all sorts of reasons why such a tool would be an awesome thing for us. But so what? I'd like a pink unicorn that farts money. That doesn't mean I should expect somebody else to find one and give it to me for free.Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Lastly, several people on Twitter have pointed out that Apple's move here seems frighteningly similar to what Microsoft did throughout the nineties with their infamous "embrace, extend, extinguish" campaign. There's definitely some uncomfortable similarities, but I'm not quite ready to put this in the same camp… yet.
First, iBooks is not the dominant eBook platform, so any suggestion of a monopoly would be silly. Amazon sells far more Kindle books than Apple sells iBooks, and there are other eBook platforms, including Barnes & Noble's Nook, Kobo, and Sony's eReader to name just a few of many. The very idea of embrace, extend, extinguish requires monopoly-like control of a market to be effective, which Apple doesn't remotely have here (yet). There's also been no evidence (yet) of an attempt to "extinguish" the open ePub standard, or to brand the proprietary extended version as the standard. iBooks still supports ePub, and until Apple moves to change that, we're missing the most important and deadly of the three Es, without which there's really no harm, no foul.The Bottom Line
To quote the narrator in Peter Pan, "all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." Many developers railed against the "unfair" restrictions of the iOS developer agreement, the inability to sell apps outside the App Store, and the review process. I'm sure there will be similar teeth-gnashing the next time Apple creates a new market or platform, or revises any of the agreements related to any of the existing ones.
And certainly, there have been bumps in the road, some of which are still around. But overall, iOS has proved to be a great platform for developers to be on. The number of iOS devices in the world now numbers in the hundreds of millions, and many of the owners of those devices have shown a willingness to pay for content, including apps, movies, and books. It's not the gold rush the mass media thought it was four years ago, but it has been fertile grounds providing a great many people with a living, including me.
It's not a perfect place, but personally, there's no other place I'd rather be. The fact that I can now do both of the things I do professionally (write apps and write books) on those same fertile grounds, excites me. The fact that I can do things while writing my books that simply weren't possible before excites me even more.
Absolutely, things could change in the future, but I'll worry about the future in the future if I need to. For now, I'm happy here and thrilled about the possibilities that iBooks 2 and iBooks Author represent.©2008-2010 Jeff LaMarche.
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com
I am just sick to my teeth of doing client work. And suddenly, I’m not sure if it’s even the right thing to be doing at all. A couple of things have led me to that statement.
First: I’m up to my nose in cause-related work from some organizations traditionally thought of as the ones advocating for The Common Man. Unfortunately, neither is doing much of interest when compared against the larger backdrop of the social web, and the work they’re asking us to do is utterly brain-dead. Every time we try to talk them out something ill-advised, the result is meetings, conference calls, requests for approvals from higher-ups, and then nothing interesting—but we bill a pile of cash for it.
Nobody’s willing to try anything new, nobody even understands what they stand to lose if they don’t try something new. I’m a little burned out with billing for stupid meetings that amount to nothing.
Secondly: We’re doing work for a restaurant called Yusho lately, a turn that’s making me reconsider about my market composition. A chef who’s been around for a while owns this place, but it’s is his first property under his own steam. And the people flocking to him are other cooks from other restaurants. So this means: the people building the hype are other practitioners. (Here’s a link to Yusho’s Facebook page, which is largely populated by local chefs.) Those same people are the ones spending money on his food.
Basically, this is going to create a ripple effect for the restaurant. Since these chefs are all talking in public about eating at the restaurant, their own fans are seeing it. Those fans are going to take advice from the chefs, and then those people will start talking. And so on and so forth.
Wonder how this would work in design, without the path to public mass-popularity? Would it simply stop comfortbale with designers financing other designers by buyng posters, clothing, typeface files, and so on? I’d love to know the dollar amount spent on designer-created objects by other designers.
This addresses something bubbling in the broader scheme of American culture too—the importance and meaning of work. Pretty much everyone likes the notion of being able to attach some grater meaning to their work, some way to get some self-worth from their occupation. But increasingly, that’s becoming more difficult.
So what would happen if people began to leave the larger economy and just focused on economies based upon a favorite vocation? Would we see a community of microeconomies flourishing for shorter periods of time, and under different rules? Would it be more conducive to a learning process, if we were freer to jump from vocation to vocation, knowing we had a pool of purchasers already in place? I’d love to know how to leave client work behind.
Maybe that should be my 2012 project to cure my overall disenchantment.
Last January I took apart my computer desk and rebuilt it at standing height. I've been standing at my desk every workday since. Just in my 2011 travels, I've seen standing desks everywhere from the offices of San Francisco startups to the White House.
Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life hacks meme to eyeroll-inducing sign of a certain type of tightly-wound techie, similar to emptying your email inbox. Several people have asked me if I'm still standing. The answer is yes. Here's what I've learned from 365 days of being a professional stander.
Sitting is essential
My typical workday starts around 8 or 9am and wraps around 5 or 6pm. I don't stand the entire time. I stand all morning till lunchtime, and then stand again for a couple of hours after lunch. By 3 or 4pm, fatigue sets in, and my feet need a break. That's when I sit down at a small table I set up in my office or, if I want to put my feet up, push back in an old recliner I commandeered. I also sit at lunch, often sit during conference calls and TWiG, and sit to do paperwork or work on my iPad.
The point is: a standing desk doesn't mean you're standing for 8 hours a day straight. That's just not healthy. For me, standing a few hours a day has had its benefits and drawbacks.
The upsides of a standing desk
My back feels great. My posture is better than ever. My default work position is standing on flat feet, with my shoulders back, and my back slightly arched. I have a makeshift foot rest (a box of unsold books), and I often shift from one foot to another when my knees feel stiff. I lost 3-5 pounds in the first couple of weeks from standing alone. I'm way more active throughout the day, pacing, dancing, fidgeting. Because I'm used to standing all day at work, standing in line anywhere for long periods of time on weekends doesn't bother me in the least.
Thanks to my standing desk, I began naturally splitting activities up into active work (while standing) and passive work (while sitting). Since my legs and brain are fresh in the morning, I start my day by diving into the most effort-intensive work first, like coding and writing. By the afternoon I'm fatigued and ready to sit, so I use that time to process email, read Instapaper, catch up on Twitter and Facebook. Explicitly shifting gears like that helps my brain tackle the right kind of work given my physical and mental capacity at the moment.
The downsides of a standing desk
Ever since I got used to standing all day, sitting for long periods of time became uncomfortable for me. By the end of cross-country flights and even long movies, my back and backside feel stiff and achy. In the past 12 months I developed a silver dollar-sized case of spider veins on my right calf, just below my knee joint. It's not sexy. These are common for women my age, and both my parents had them, so it's difficult to say if I would have gotten these without the standing desk. Excessive standing (and sitting) are both known causes of spider veins.
The fatigue of a standing workday makes getting to the gym at the end of the day more difficult for me. When I was sitting all day, I'd feel so sluggish and sedentary I'd look forward to getting sweaty and exerting myself at the gym. At the end of a standing workday, you just want to sit down. For me, the gym has to happen in the morning, or it doesn't happen at all. While my daily calorie burn is definitely higher at the standing desk compared to sitting, standing at your desk is not a replacement for a good workout at the gym.
Finally, I work at home, alone in a room. Several people have told me that they don't want to be at the one standing desk in a sea of sitters at their office. I understand that. I'm not sure I'd pull this off in an office where I was surrounded by sitting co-workers and didn't have the luxury of two desks, one sitting, one standing.
That all said, once I got past the first couple of weeks, I haven't once considered switching back to a sitting desk full-time. Honestly, I barely give it a thought at all anymore. If you're considering it, here's how and why I switched to a standing desk.
I promised in Testing Your Templates to explain how to solve the problem of the divergence between testable, debuggable code in your host language and a big wad of logic in a template language.
This problem is an example of the pattern of Why Writing Your Own DSL is More Difficult Than You Think. Certainly Template Toolkit is among the better templating systems (I've written a couple myself), but it exhibits problems endemic to the process. (Then again, so does PHP. Now multiply that by the fact that some people use templating systems written in PHP and if you have to lie down for a while before the feeling passes, please accept my apologies.)
The semantics of Template Toolkit are great, when they work, but then everything's great when it works the way you expect. Robust software handles the cases you don't expect with aplomb, or at least without a boom.
A simple workaround for Template Toolkit is to avoid the fallback from potential method lookup to keyed hash access when dealing with an object. In other words, if
$blessed_hash->do_something()fails, try$blessed_hash->{do_something}.... except that that doesn't work when you want to call virtual methods on unblessed references, such as calling methods on arrays or hashes.
Another option is to change the syntax such that calling a method is visibly different from accessing a member of an aggregate. Perl 5 does this. It works pretty well, in the sense that if you use the right operator (access element versus invoke method), you've expressed your intent in a visually unambiguous fashion).
... except that people complain about the Perl 5 dereferencing arrow quite a bit. (Okay, you don't need an arrow to do this; as the Modern Perl book explains, the postfix indexed access or postfix keyed operators of
{}and[]determine the type of operation effectively.)... and except that one of the design goals of Template Toolkit was to be robust in the face of changing values provided to the template, such that it provides a loosely coupled interface for the data it expects. That's a fine goal, but it isn't free.
Here's the thing, though. The last time I looked, Template Toolkit compiles templates into Perl 5 code as an optimization. (The last template system I wrote did the same thing, but not as well. We should have used TT, but in our defense, TT didn't exist then.) This transliteration/compilation stage must be very, very cautious to allow standard Perl debugging and introspection tools to treat this generated code correctly. That is to say, I don't want to debug a big wad of generated code. I want to debug the code I actually wrote.
As usual, the solution is another layer of abstraction.
Perl 5 exists in two forms. The first is the source code you and I write. The second is the optree which the Perl 5 VM executes. There's nothing in between. You have one or the other. When your code runs, you have the optree, and the optree has references to the relevant location in the source code it came from, but the correspondence is often less useful than you might like.
While the generated code from Template Toolkit could include the correct file and line positions from templates, that's again less useful than you might like. (It's useful, but it doesn't solve every problem.)
If Perl 5 had instead an intermediate form separate from raw code and raw optrees, something more suitable to introspection and manipulation, we could produce tools which worked with this intermediate form to improve debugging, introspection, and better code generation.
We could even inject new code to add features (fall back to attribute access; prevent the fallback to attribute access) to code, even within lexical scopes. That is to say, we could manipulate how libraries behave from the outside in, and ensure that our changes would not leak out from our desired scopes.
It's certainly possible to replace the Perl 5 opcodes yourself, if you're comfortable reading Perl 5 source code, writing XS, relying on black magic, and dealing with strange issues of thread safety and manipulating global or at least interpreter-global values in a lexical fashion (while dealing with the fact that
useis recursive in a sense)—but isn't Perl about not making people write C to do interesting things?Certainly this isn't a technique you'd use every day, and it's not obviously a way to make Perl 5 run faster (though many optimizations become much easier), but the possibility for better abstraction and extension and correctness has much to recommend it.
And, yes, Lisp demonstrated this idea ages ago.
Once I saw this I couldn't not do this:
I even used Cesar Cedeno's card for the template since they look so much alike.
(my pledge to avoid politics this year has really gone all to crap, hasn't it??)
I love this Straupian map made up of 10,000 NYC-based tweet locations on top of an Open Street Map rendering of New York City. A few quick observations:
- Staten Island gets cropped off! Lots of New Jersey though.
- I would have assumed Broadway would be the boldest stroke on the map, but not quite that bold.
- Why is the Williamsburg bridge shaped like a Charlie Brown stripe? Or is that something else?
- There's a tweet from the walking plank that bisects the reservoir. I wish I could read that tweet!
- People tweet over Roosevelt Island, but not on Roosevelt Island. No tweets from Islands Ellis, Riker's, Rat, Hart, or Governor's, but one from City Island. (I always misremember City Island as being called "Island Island").
- No tweets on Carnasie Pol (larger map here)
- One tweet going into Greenwood Cemetery. It could also be a stray geotag off 5th avenue, but I like to think it's "omw to grandpa's funeral."
- This looks a lot more like a map of class distribution or tourism & nightlife attractions than population density, ethnic or racial distribution.
- The Upper East Side barely tweets.
(Via Al)Is this the structure of New York City? flickr.com/photos/walking…
— Al Shaw (@A_L) January 23, 2012
I am so into this Old Chatham Sheepherding Company yogurt, which is creamy and yummy and provides 32% of your daily calcium. Yeah, calcium content excites me, especially since my mother cracked a vertebrae and suffers from debilitating back pain. I am trying to avoid such a future, or at last postpone it. I also enjoy Total, Brown Cow and Siggi's, which is an Icelandic yogurt called Skyr that has elevated calcium levels. But this one is the most delicious. It's expensive, but the Princess' bone density is worth it, no? I gots to get myself back to Whole Foods for some more. Speaking of Whole Foods, I read about "Whole Foods Parking Lot" in yesterday's NYT, watched the video, and laughed my ass off. It's old (came out in June 2011), but so am I. Some guy takes the piss out of uptight Prius drivers getting aggro by the quinoa.I like when this guy says "then I take it to the cheese counter." And "pay my 80 bucks for 6 things and get the heck out. The express line is moving hella slow." I drove my family crazy all day reciting from and riffing on the video: "I'm going to take it to the stove now to make the ginger chicken;" "You're doing that homework hella slow;" etc. I amuse myself. The video takes place in LA, but things get just as real in the Montclair Whole Foods parking lot, post yoga.You don't want to be around me when my blood sugar is low.
ENIAC programmers, late 1940s. (U.S. military photo, Redstone Arsenal Archives, Huntsville, Alabama), from Programmed Visions by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.After “getting fit” and whatever else people typically declare to be their new year’s resolutions, this year’s most popular goal is surprisingly nerdy: learning to code. Within the first week of 2012, over 250,000 people, including New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, had signed up for weekly interactive programming lessons on a site called Code Year. The website promises to put its users “on the path to building great websites, games, and apps.” But as New Yorker web editor Blake Eskin writes, “The Code Year campaign also taps into deeper feelings of inadequacy... If you can code, the implicit promise is that you will not be wiped out by the enormous waves of digital change sweeping through our economy and society.”
If the entrepreneurs behind Code Year (and the masses of users they’ve signed up for lessons) are all hoping to ride the wave of digital change, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, is the academic trying to pause for a moment to take stock of the present situation and see where software is actually headed. All the frenzy about apps and “the cloud,” Chun argues, is just another turn in the “cycles of obsolescence and renewal” that define new media. The real change, which Chun lays out in her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, is that “programmability,” the logic of computers, has come to reach beyond screens into both the systems of government and economics and the metaphors we use to make sense of the world.
“Without [computers, human and mechanical],” writes Chun, “there would be no government, no corporations, no schools, no global marketplace, or, at the very least, they would be difficult to operate...Computers, understood as networked software and hardware machines, are—or perhaps more precisely set the grounds for—neoliberal governmental technologies...not simply through the problems (population genetics, bioinformatics, nuclear weapons, state welfare, and climate) they make it possible to both pose and solve, but also through their very logos, their embodiment of logic.”
To illustrate this logic, Chun draws extensively on history, theory, and detailed technical explanations, enriching cursory understandings of software. “Understanding software as a thing,” she writes, “means engaging its odd materializations and visualizations closely and refusing to reduce software to codes and algorithms—readily readable objects—by grappling with its simultaneous ambiguity and specificity.” Indeed, Chun spends a lot of time specifying computer terms. What's the difference between hardware, software, firmware, and wetware? Source code, compiled code, and written instructions? What is a thing and how did software become one? Even for a fairly nerdy computer user there’s a lot to pick up on. The book really shines, however, when Chun waxes poetic on the more ambiguous aspects of software.
The term “vaporware” refers to software that’s announced and advertised but never actually released for use, such as Ted Nelson’s infamous Xanadu project. Vaporware is problematic when it comes to theory because grand ideas and slick renderings rarely (if ever) align with the way technology looks and works in real life. Geert Lovink, Alexander Galloway, and others have called to banish “vapor theory,” theory built on hypothetical ideas about software rather than instantiations of it, which Lovink criticizes as, “gaseous flapping of the gums...generated with little exposure, much less involvement with those self-same technologies and artworks.” Chun concedes that while this embargo on vapor has been essential to grounding new media studies, “a rigorous engagement with software makes new media studies more, rather than less, vapory.” Vapor is not incidental to software, she argues, but actually essential to its understanding. This is what makes Chun’s theories exciting to follow: she engages renderings, dreams, and misunderstandings about technology rather than casting them aside. The key source of these misunderstandings is the use of the computer as metaphor.
People in previous generations conceptualized the world around them using technologies like clocks and steam engines. While these analog, mechanical devices are intricate, if one were to take apart a clock and and put it back together its inner workings could be understood. Digital computers are more complex because they are made of both tangible chips and immaterial codes, neither of which are intuitive to deconstruct. Further, all software interfaces, like the “paintbrush” tool in Photoshop, are metaphors themselves. “Who completely understands what one’s computer is actually doing at any given moment?” asks Chun, knowing that the answer is nobody. Yet this murky recursion of “unknowability” and vapors is exactly why Chun finds software to be such an apt metaphor for the world we live in. Recalling Stewart Brand’s call for a picture of the whole earth in 1968, Chun poses the question: what would a picture of the whole Internet look like? Except, in this case, to find out may not be the point. In the way that the stock market is based on speculation—virally spreading fear about the future of a company (as opposed to concrete evidence or actual bad management decisions) can cause a stock to tank—a technologized world is increasingly based on conjecture. In its unseeable, untouchable, and effectively unknowable nature, the computer represents the lens we need in order to think about the enormous and incomprehensible forces of social, economic, and political power that govern our lives. “[Software’s] ghostly interfaces embody—conceptually, metaphorically, virtually—a way to navigate our increasingly complex world,” writes Chun.
The book looks at a broad range of examples from artists, scholars, and technologists to situate “programmability” in relation to everything from global systems like capitalist economics, neoliberal politics, and knowledge production to those of the mind and body: gender, race, and the structure of thought. The footnotes are full of interesting paths waiting to be followed: Frederick P. Brooks on why programming is fun and hacking is addictive, Ben Shneiderman on direct manipulation interfaces, Brenda Laurel on computers as theatre and how that relates to skeuomorphism, and Thomas Y. Levin on the temporality of surveillance, to name just a few. While it’s tempting to look to this web of ideas and the history of computing as an answer for why things are the way they are today, Chun's point in invoking all these voices is that it’s not that clear cut.
Some of the book’s propositions about our relationship to computers seem overblown: a priestly source of power, a form of magic, code as a fetish. If nothing else, these phrases are provocative and point to how potent Chun finds software to be in the world today. As more and more people find themselves able to create things out of code, it feels critical to understand software on both a practical and fundamental level.
...the divorce — and marriage — we know hardly anything about! Everyone fall back. Here are the things we do know:
They would use any excuse to throw a party or wear costumes.
They had babies.
They often publicly expressed fondness for one another — which is what is expected when you are asked about your spouse.
That's pretty much it. I'm serious, if you know any more actual details about what really went on inside their relationship, please let us know. Speculation here, but someone probably cheated, right? Then again, who knows? In summation: people break up, and sometimes we know why but other times we don't know why because we're not best friends with them or their therapist. I mean that we're not their therapist, not that we're not best friends with their therapist because then we still shouldn't know why they broke up because that would be unethical for our therapist best friend to divulge that information to us. *Looks up "summation."*
---
See more posts by Jane Marie
A huge thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered Issue 2. Just a quick update to let you know that the issue is printed and should be assembled by mid-week, ready to ship by the first week of February. Be on the look out for some preview pics later this week. Thanks for your support! Can’t wait to share the issue with you.
While busy with the latest Port iPad app I’ve taken my eye off DPS developments at Adobe, so a quick catch-up session at their Maidenhead offices last week provided some useful insight.
First, some figures: this time last year there were 13 apps in the Apple app store that had been created using Adobe DPS – there are now 1300; 14 of the top 20 grossing iPad apps have been created using the Adobe tools; the New Yorker app has taken $1.2m in digital subs, including a number of new non-print readers.
Highly selective I’m sure (do they count apps created using Woodwing, another supplier recently taken over by Adobe?) but even allowing for Adobe pushing the most useful figures forward these are positive numbers. For now at least, Adobe DPS has established itself as the default magazine app tool.
And the tools themselves? I worked with the Beta version at the end of 2010 and haven’t looked at it since, primarily due to the initial pricing structure (though the new single edition price makes does make a difference now). The latest DPS tools are far more integrated with InDesign, and share a common look and feel with the parent software. It’s satisfyingly simple and slick in operation, even if some of the quirks from before remain. The uneditable presence of the two control bars at top and bottom of the screen stills grates with me, for instance. But as a quick and easy add-on to the existing magazine production workflow it’s a solid, efficient tool. No wonder so many publishers are using it.
As for the end product, looking through a few apps made with DPS I got a sense that the initial rush to use every single capability on every screen has receded. The UK Wired app is looking particularly strong, and as Jean at the Magaziner tweeted yesterday, is looking considerably better than the US edition app. (I enjoyed the flash on a promo screen, above, in the UK edition app, that confidently subverts the usual ‘also available on the iPad’ line).
I’m about to start a new app project using DPS and will share what I find.
Okay this article made me mad. Are they NUTS?
Too much debt is what got America in the mess that it’s in and we’re supposed to follow suit?
In the article, on one hand, they say the amount of debt Canadians are carrying is not such a big deal and with the very next breath they say Canadians are approaching the debt levels that Americans were at right before the crash in 2008. I repeat. Canadians are approaching the debt levels that Americans were at right before the crash in 2008 We saw how well that worked out for them.
Interest rates at present are very, very low. Average government/provincial bond rates are closer to 5%. Look at your debt. If government bond rose to their historic average, that means any debt you have will rise as well.
Ask yourself, “With my income, would I be able to service a 3% increase in my mortgage, my car lease, my home equity line of credit?“
In order for you to pay a 3% increase, you need to look at your tax rate to see what that would really cost you in after tax dollars. For me to service an additional 3% on a $100,000 loan which would mean an additional $3,000 in interest payment due, and that would be around $4,290 of additional income I would need to earn before taxes. That’s just on $100,000. Look at your debt load. Do the math. Figure out how much more you will have to pay if/when interest rates rise. Can you do it?
Add to that the fact that the Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, just stated that we are losing $30 billion in exports to the US annually. And then goes on to say that it is likely that the U.S. will never return to the glory days of old. I agree him on that. I do not see a way out. The US spends over $4 billion more than it takes in EVERY DAY! Anybody out there ever seen some compounding charts. It’s not going to be pretty. Add in medicare, and aging population that is expecting S.S. to be there when they retire. It’s not looking pretty.
And that’s just the U.S., our biggest trade partner. Don’t even get me started on the Eurozone crisis. That is a time bomb just waiting for the right spark. There is no easy way out of that mess.
Um… So, the US economy sucks, Europe is ready to explode and when it does, its going to make the 2008 derivative debacle look like an Easter party.
Yeah, and all that…isn’t going to have a trickle down effect here in Canada?
Give me a break!
So, don’t tell us that it’s okay for our debt levels to be rising to these dangerous levels! What a misleading, dangerous article.
Everybody, please, get your financial house in order. Do whatever you can to pay down your debt. Don’t be lulled into complacency.
And if I’m wrong?
Well, hey, there is nothing wrong with having money set aside for a rainy day and being out of debt!
Rocky Agrawal on Google’s sometimes misleading stats that make Google+ sound more widely adopted than it might really be:
Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place.
The number of accounts created on a free web service is almost meaningless. Not only are some customers worth much more than others to a service, but a nontrivial portion of accounts on any free service often don’t correspond to actual humans using the service. Even if you somehow block all automated spam, spam-like human activity like bulk affiliate marketing will still distort the numbers. And a lot of accounts are duplicates created in error when people forgot about their original accounts or confused the registration form for the login form. Should all of these count?
When multiple services are bundled into one login, like Google’s, a very large portion of the bigger service’s userbase (e.g. Gmail) might not even realize that they have an “account” on the smaller one (in this case, Google+). Should they count?
Even for the real people who intentionally register to use the service, as this article points out, most abandon their accounts shortly after registering. I created an account to try Google+ and effectively abandoned it after a few minutes. I don’t consider myself a Google+ user. Should I count?
I prefer to gauge a social network’s success on more subjective factors: How many people do I know who use it? How much do I feel like I’m missing by not using it?
Commercial iBooks textbooks are a marketing head fake. They're the equivalent of carbon fibre buggy whips. iTunes U is the game changer. Put iBooks Author and iTunes U into the hands of great teachers, put iPads in their students hands, put them all in a room together then step back and see what happens. That's the ballgame. via speirs.org Fraser Speirs is one of the leading experts on using technology productively in the classroom. This goes beyond buying hardware & providing technical support; it includes writing curriculum, reinforcing basic reading and math skills, and training teachers. I couldn't agree more with his comment about iTunes U - it's much closer to my imagination of "the future of education" than iBooks, which reminds me of the Pat the Bunny app that Lev loves - lots of shiny, but very little meat on the bone. Also see Matt Jacobs' talk on The Multi-Layered iPad:
A definition of now.
A question that has been coming up a lot lately is how does one send a SAML bearer token to downstream WCF service? In each of the recent cases, a front-end app was being presented with a token that it needed to convert to SAML before calling the back-end service. To do this, the Web app would send the incoming token or some other credential to an STS, get the SAML token back, and include it in its request to the next service as shown in the following sketch:To create such a system using .NET requires certain config on the client and server, so I'll enumerate what's required on each. At the end of this post, you'll find links to other blog entries w/ more detail and a link to download a sample project.Web Service Client
- Get a bearer token from the STS using the credential the client has (another token, username/password, cert, etc.)
- Call the service
- Use the WS2007FederationHttpBinding binding and set the security mode to WSFederationHttpSecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential
- On the binding's security object, set the Message.IssuedKeyType to SecurityKeyType.BearerKey
- When creating the channel factory, call the ConfigureChannelFactory extension method from WIF
- When using the factory to create the channel, call CreateChannelWithIssuedTokenand and pass it the SAML token you got from the STS
Web ServiceIf you're self-hosting your WCF service on Windows 7, check out this write up from Aviad P. about using netsh to configure HTTPS. (This was the part of all this that took the longest for me. Grr!)
- Use the WS2007FederationHttpBinding binding w/ transport security (as in the client)
- Like in the binding of the client, set the Message.IssuedKeyType to SecurityKeyType.BearerKey
- Make sure it's expecting the assertion to be signed by the cert of the STS (by wiring up an IssuerNameRegistry that will check)
- Configure the audience restriction to be the same one included in the SAML assertion
If after reading the above, things aren't quite clear yet, check out these blog posts for more details:If you're still stuck, have a look at this sample (licensed under the GNU GPL), leave a comment here, and/or email me.
