Ryan Tate

"We need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application..."

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:51:43 -0700

“We need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves… For the time being anyway, until the age of Terminator.”

- Yukihiro Matsumoto, inventor of the Ruby programming language, enemy of robot collaborators.

emilygould: The Saddest Shelf In The Library Fuck that!...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:37:00 -0800

emilygould:

The Saddest Shelf In The Library

Fuck that! “Philip and Alex’s Guide To Web Publishing” changed my life. You can read it here, though it’s been heavily revised since the original (per Philip Greenpun’s very practical philosophy of what a book should be), so anyone with a library this cool should check out a copy (and then somehow transport yourself to 1998, if at all possible, for context).

In all seriousness, Greenspun set a bar and a vision for long-form web writing that has been sadly marginalized. There’s something very touching, 13 years on, about the “Philip and Alex’s” chapters in which he argues for the web as an accessible form of education. This is a book that can remind those of us writing online what the hell we’re working toward.

Rainz :-(

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:39:10 -0700

Rainz :-(

"For all the talk of “bubbles” and crazy valuations, I think most overlook something very..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:03:00 -0700

“For all the talk of “bubbles” and crazy valuations, I think most overlook something very fundamental: technology continues to permeate all of our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine just yesterday.”

- TechCrunch writer turned venture capitalist MG Siegler, using in 2011 a bubble rationalization that would have sounded just as accurate in 1999, when he was in high school, or in 1845, when 30 little TechCrunches were published on paper.

"By 1845 a full railway mania was raging. By the summer new schemes were being floated at the rate of..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:54:00 -0700

“

By 1845 a full railway mania was raging. By the summer new schemes were being floated at the rate of more than a dozen a week. Scrip was sold by alley men, and the stock exchange resembled a country fair… Schemes for direct lines connecting little-known towns to other little-known towns became a craze, launched more with an eye to garnering investment than actual profits… “We see nine or ten proposals for nearly the same line, all at a premium, when it is well known that only one CAN succeed,” said The Economist.

Trouble began in October 1845, when scrip ceased to pay a premium and shares in established railways began to fall.

”

- W. Brian Arthur comparing the first dot com collapse to the railway mania of the 19th century, in a paper I fact checked for the March 2002 edition of Business 2.0. At one point in 1845, some 30 different railway investment publications were in circulation. Sound familiar?

When everyone else calls you a “hopeless alcoholic”...

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:31:07 -0700

When everyone else calls you a “hopeless alcoholic” or whatever, Grüner Vet has your back. Eight million quietly desperate Austrians can’t be wrong!

Ashton Kutcher’s special “Social Issue” of...

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:34:46 -0700

Ashton Kutcher’s special “Social Issue” of Details seems to have a certain theme.

"[Page view statistics] are, in particular, helpful as a counterweight to the kind of complacency..."

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:35:25 -0700

“[Page view statistics] are, in particular, helpful as a counterweight to the kind of complacency that all too easily sets in at major news organizations, where you assume that what DC insiders consider good work is also what readers care about.”

- Paul Krugman weighs in on the benefits of being at least slightly obsessed with pageviews. Now someone needs to ask the economist to turn his Nobel prize winning mind on pageview bonuses. (CoughFelixCough)

richardturley: There will be many MANY 9/11 covers in the...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:34:21 -0700

richardturley:

There will be many MANY 9/11 covers in the coming weeks. I’m certain that this will not be the best one of those. But, I’m a sucker for aerial photography so I’m easily sold on this one…

These are the issues that posturing editors like to make big grand statements with enormous single topic zeitgeist-capturing feature wells - photo essays, first persons, graphics, essays by eminent thinkers, artist commission photography, covers and imagery, crowd sourced content.. the whole shebang. The pressure to perform and make stand-out issues is intense as magazines compete for the imaginary ‘who did the best 9/11 coverage’ awards. I’m already finding it all a bit tiring…

As Dan Frommer writes this morning, it’s a breathtaking cover. All the more impressive because it’s so easy to get trapped in cliché when visualizing this topic. (This makes me wonder if I should be paying more attention to Bloomberg Businessweek.)

"He was a Nobel Laureate in economics, and generally is portrayed by his commentary as a..."

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:48:30 -0700

“He was a Nobel Laureate in economics, and generally is portrayed by his commentary as a macroeconomist sympathetic to Keynesian views”

- Wikipedia entry on Josiah Barlet. Oh, sorry, whoops, wrong link.

Death To McDonald's Programming Books

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:51:52 -0700

Gruber:

Hot off the O’Reilly presses: Matt Neuburg’s 834-page iOS programming tome.

Oh boy: An obese time suck whose reference section will probably be obsolete by the time FedEx drops it off on my doorstep.

Is it still 1991? Do we still need every class and function call documented because gopher is slow on our 1200 baud modems? Are our lives less busy than they were then? Has the number of technologies we need to read about gone down? Are languages developing less quickly?

I’m sure Neuberg has some stellar writing in this thing; his Frontier: The Definitive Guide was the third programming book I ever owned and was immensely helpful. I remember being grateful that someone cared enough to write such a thorough book about such a small platform. I’m also sure that many people will get a lot of value out of this. It may prove to be the definitive iOS guide.

But how long is it going to take to teach technical publishers — and readers — that brevity is a feature, not a bug? If O’Reilly were to cut this book to a quarter of its size it would make it exponentially more useful. Ditto for the Rails book (Pragmatic), Learning Jquery (Packt), and the JavaScript Rhino (O’Reilly).

Paper and bandwidth are cheap, but reader time is valuable.

If you want to “get a solid grounding in all the fundamentals of Cocoa Touch,” you need something that will nestle snugly your skull, not rapidly distend it. Besides, valuing quality over quantity is what made the iOS platform successful in the first place, isn’t it?

[Related]

'San Francisco is becoming Silicon Valley' -- but keeps bleeding itself

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:36:00 -0700

There are many reasons the payroll tax break San Francisco extended to Twitter was horrid public policy; here’s just one: San Francisco is a high cost, high service city in the mold of New York.

It’s a premium product, albeit not as premium as Gotham — the transit and nightlife are inferior, for example, and it’s not dense enough. But then SF’s payroll tax rate is less than half that of New York’s personal income tax. You get what you pay for.

San Francisco, then, should not be trying to compete on cost with dreary suburbs like San Bruno, where Twitter threatened to relocate. Doing so just leaves less money to maintain the services that make SF unique (to say nothing of improving them). And it’s a losing game besides. There will always be a cheaper location than SF.

It’s especially bizarre that San Francisco supervisors caved to Twitter and handed over a $22 million tax break at the precise moment the city’s cosmopolitan advantages are finally pushing it past the unremarkable cities clustered around Stanford University.

Here’s Y Combinator partner Harjeet Taggar in 7x7 magazine yesterday:

San Francisco is becoming Silicon Valley. The city used to be seen as not part of the Valley. But Twitter, Zynga, Square, and our most successful companies from YC — Airbnb and Dropbox — are all there.

The biggest problem I’m seeing our graduates having is the problem of hiring. The main demographic they seek is engineers in their 20s and those guys want to live in San Francisco. The majority of YC grads head to the city now.

Why do engineers want to live in San Francisco?

Well, the startup geeks at Hacker News say they like “not driving — I work at Dolores Labs and live 5’ away.” They also like “having options when I don’t feel like working. I can walk to the park where beautiful girls do non-programming things like laughing while blowing bubbles! I can go get a beer and watch a movie. I can walk and grab a quick bite at taqueria cancun. I can go to a club. I just love the energy and excitement here.”

For the record, payroll taxes like those dodged by Twitter are what pay for parks with beautiful girls, mass transit to avoid driving, etc.

Then there’s this, also from Taggar:

Besides, in my opinion, if you have a social product, it’s really important to live amongst your users. For example, if I were building an app to target bartenders to help them build their own brands, I would want to be in San Francisco, not the Valley.”

Being closer to users and customers; exploiting the rise of urban-centric mobile tech; attracting young talent; proximity to a diverse array of non-tech experiences — these also happen to be the very things said to be combusting New York’s “exploding” tech scene.

A similar cluster of urban advantages is also apparently making UBS come back to New York from Connecticuit (“the best and brightest young bankers want to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn”).

Just for the record again: When the economic meltdown sent its budget into a tailspin, New York’s business savvy Republican mayor knew exactly what to do. And it didn’t involve issuing a crony capitalism groupon to a lavishly overfunded “business” with no plan for generating revenue. Bloomberg maintained the quality of his offering. New York didn’t get on its knees and neither should San Francisco.

[Montgomery St. SF photo via Thomas Hawk/Flickr; Mission hipster photo via Dustin Diaz/Flickr; picture of bullshit Twitter philanthropy via this video of endless naked hypocrisy]

When people ask me why I have a “thing” for the...

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:08:01 -0700

When people ask me why I have a “thing” for the Japanese civil service, I say, “It’s the little things. The little things make all the difference.”

“Your future dream is a shopping scheme… I use the...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:48:00 -0700

“Your future dream is a shopping scheme… I use the enemy, I use anarchy.” But so gently! The Dealerkids really know how to soft sell it.

The most liberal city in America is now caving to monstrously entitled corporate interests, too, just like the executive branch and everyone else. #Uplifting (Apologies to readers who despise hash tags. I swear this is a special case!)

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:49:33 -0700

The most liberal city in America is now caving to monstrously entitled corporate interests, too, just like the executive branch and everyone else. #Uplifting (Apologies to readers who despise hash tags. I swear this is a special case!)

Gawker.com, where the author is employed as a staff writer,...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:29:00 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Gawker.com, where the author is employed as a staff writer, declined to publish this story.

In Berkeley, it’s a great morning for porchblogging. And...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:14:01 -0700

In Berkeley, it’s a great morning for porchblogging. And shorts! I love spring; it makes our yard look so much less trashy. Among other things.

Cleaning the house today, my wife found the directions to the...

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:16:00 -0800

Cleaning the house today, my wife found the directions to the NaNoWriMo afterparty where we first met going on nine years ago. I almost didn’t go because I had just come back from Thanksgiving in San Diego and was really tired. She almost didn’t go, either — look at all that driving! Also, “I didn’t know anyone.” Ya, I barely knew anyone either :-)

'I should have a right to use it for evil!'

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:45:00 -0800

From a 2009 lecture by Douglas Crockford describing the genesis of JSON comes this anecdote involving Crockford’s “no evil” licensing scheme (for related software). Someone mentioned the tale this morning in a book interview; I first saw it months ago but still get a kick out of it. I think the “minions” bit is what really seals it.

The lost Thanksgiving punch of San Francisco

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:33:00 -0800

Anne and I are hosting Thanksgiving for some family and friends this year, and today I went rummaging around for punch ideas. My favorite festive tipple was, of course, the one tantalizingly out of reach: In his great 2007 column on the dearth of Thanksgiving cocktails, in which he mines history for recipe cues, Eric Felten alludes to a candidate he’d commissioned from Greg Lindgren of the San Francisco bar Rye:

He proposed poaching quince in honey, water and mulling spices, and then using the warm fruity broth to flavor a glass of brandy. Very nice indeed — if you succeed in finding fresh quince.

Sadly, Felten never printed the recipe from Lindgren, a well regarded bar owner, drink crafter and cocktail contest ringleader. Nor could I find it anywhere online.

One whois search later, I fired off an email to Lindgren asking if he might share the recipe he’d sent to Felten. I didn’t expect he’d still have the thing handy, three years on, but in less than an hour he sent back full instructions, complete with pictures.

Even better, he’s given me permission to reprint the recipe here.

A bit of backstory: The drink is dubbed a “Metheglin” in reference to a spiced drink of fermented honey popular in England in the early 17th Century, when the Pilgrims headed out to start Plymouth Colony (and then promptly ordered two hogsheads of Metheglin from back home). Felten asked Lindgren and other bartenders for a drink inspired by the brew.

Although Felten worried his readers wouldn’t be able to source quince, I discovered a a nice trove at the first place I chcked, Monterey Market in Berkeley. They’re on your immediate left past the front door, inexplicably lodged between the lemons and grapefruit (related to apples and pears, quince is not citrus). Pic below. Admittedly, things won’t be this easy for all shoppers.

Without further ado:

Quince Metheglin

by Greg Lindgren

Ingredients

8 quinces (skins peeled)
16 oz wild honey
1 tsp cloves
1 whole nutmeg seed (crushed or chopped, not grated)
1 tsp chamomile
4 cinnamon Sticks
4 qt water
750 ml brandy (Germain-Robin Craft Method)

In a 4” deep baking pan (something sturdy):

Place peeled quinces in pan and drizzle the honey over all of the quince fruit.

Fill pan with water until the quinces are just submerged.

Use a mesh tea ball, or tea bag to contain crushed nutmeg, chamomile, and cloves. Drop this into the water along with 4 cinnamon sticks.

Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and put the pan in a preheated oven set at 425 degrees.

Let the quinces poach until they are soft all the way through. The poaching liquid will turn a sunset pink color from the quince flesh. Remove pan and let cool until it can be handled safely. Using tongs, remove all quince fruit, cinnamon sticks, and tea ball. Skim the poaching liquid if necessary. Reduce liquid on stove top. If neccessary add honey to sweeten. Combine quince poaching liquid with brandy to taste and keep warm on the stove top, or in a punch bowl that can hold warm liquid.

You can discard the poached quinces, or use them to make a quince paste.

What I like about this beverage besides the great flavor of quince, honey, brandy and spice is the vibrant color. My photos here don’t do it justice. (They appear amber/rust color).

In natural light the Quince Metheglin is slightly pinkish.

This was very easy to make, the hardest part was being patient long enough to let the quince fully poach. Readers would have different sizes of pans, so my instructions were to cook by color and tenderness rather than time and exact measure. I checked my quinces at one hour in the oven and they were still a little white in the center while the liquid was just turning from clear to gold. An hour and a half later the quinces and the poaching liquid were the right color, and all the flavor was there.

I wrote to mix with brandy to taste. The base is quite sweet at 1 part brandy to 4 parts base ratio. I liked mine 1 part brandy to 2 parts base. Water could also be added to make it less sweet if necessary without adding too much spirit for some palates.

[Recipe text and photos (top) by Greg Lindgren and reprinted with permission. Lindgren photo via Rebecca Chapa’s Slow Food Nation album. Consider a visit to Lindgren’s bars Rye (a delightful mixologist hub), Rosewood and 15 Romolo.]