Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: May 2011

Umami Paste Review

I am mostly indifferent to sweets, but I absolutely love all things savory, so when I heard about a paste billed as “the ultimate cooking tool to enhance any savoury dish”, and more than that called “taste number 5 umami paste” — well, I had to buy it, even if it meant buying it on eBay and having it shipped from the UK.

Umami is probably the most highly prized taste in Japanese cousine, the taste of salty meatiness. Interestingly enough in pure form umami can be mostly attributed to monosodium glutamate. Mostly – in the same sense that the addictiveness of cigarettes can be mostly attributed to nicotine. The overall picture is very complicated – there are many amino acids similar to MSG, I suspect just as “sweetness” can’t be attributed to a single molecule.

But back to the umami paste. When compared to dashi broth, which for me is an etalon of complex umami taste, Taste No. 5 is somewhat disappointing in its simplicity. There’s an overpowering taste of tomato – the primary ingredient seems to be tomato paste. The second strongest tasting ingredient is anchovy, which is great, but kind of stale. You can also taste olives, but for whatever reason these flavors fail to harmonize. The paste is a bit too oily as well.

A half-used tube of Taste No 5 sat in my fridge for a good while, but it’s far from a miracle ingredient, and is mildly disappointing. I think the main flaw is the heaviness of tomato taste. I give it 3 out of 5. A high quality tin of anchovies is a much more versatile ingredient, and so is a bag of kombu kelp.

May 29, 2011
My Favorite Google Chrome Extension

[Update] The latest iteration of JoinTabs extension contains ad malware. Which sucks, because this used to be a useful extension.

I open a page in a new tab. Then another, then another. A bit later I pop a new window. More tabs. Then another window. By the end of the day not only do I have a bunch of tabs, but also multiple browser windows. Hunting for one of the windows is difficult – it can be just about anywhere. The solution? Join Tabs for Chrome. It’s creates a little horseshoe icon, which when pressed moves all of your open tabs into a single browser window.

Now if I could only import all the open windows into Evernote in one key press I’d be set.

May 29, 2011
Conspicuous Placement of Meat Byproducts

May 28, 2011
Self Portrait

May 28, 2011
How To Get People To Help You

Have you ever had your breath taken away by somebody’s ungratefulness? Has anybody you’ve benefited in dozens of way ever refuse to grant you a tiny favor? Well, you were doing it wrong. You ran afoul of something that I call the “Rolf Rule”.

The “Rolf Rule” comes from a book that I read as a child, a Russian translation of an Ernest Thompson Seton’s 1911 classic “Rolf in the Woods: The Adventures of a Boy Scout With Indian Quonab and Little Dog Skookum”.

The book is about a boy who becomes a successful outdoorsman and hunter under the guidance of an American Indian named Quonab. I’ve read it over 20 years ago and don’t remember much of Rolf’s adventures, but this passage that explained why Quonab was willing to help Rolf out, stuck in my memory:

“The man who has wronged you will never forgive you, and he who has helped you will be forever grateful. Yes, there is nothing that draws you to a man so much as the knowledge that you have helped him.”

Indeed, the person who is most likely to help you is not the one that you’ve helped in the past, but the one that helped you. This jives very well with the famous study by Freedman and Fraser, “Compliance Without Pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique“. It is probably included in dozens of self help books, but the gist is the same: people are much more likely to comply with an outrageous request if you get them to agree to do something easy first.

May 27, 2011
Mentorship

The opportunities to be a mentor or, as Jack Donaghy would say, a mentee, are few and far between in the world of web development. On one hand, few potential mentors want to sacrifice the precious, precious time on junior developers who will likely be gone in less than a year. And then there are the developers who scowl at any attempt to share knowledge believing that to be a mark of showing off.

Besides spending your own time and being a showoff, there’s another mentorship prevention layer: the direct management of junior developers and tight deadlines. A developer once asked me to show him how to do something, but as I was explaining, I could see my other co-worker in a neighboring pod getting more an more frustrated. After 5 minutes, as I was getting into a little more detail, he piped up – well, let’s not confuse […] there — just tell him what he needs right now, Michael.

Some mentorship styles are harsher than others. Here’s an excerpt from most excellent “Coders at Work” about the schooling that young JWZ received from some dude named Skef:

“Like the guy who was sort of our manager—the one keeping an eye on us—Skef Wholey, was this giant blond-haired, barbarian- looking guy. Very intimidating-looking. And he didn’t talk much. I remember a lot of times I’d be sitting there—it was kind of an open- plan cubicle kind of thing—working, doing something, writing some Lisp program. And he’d come shuffling in with his ceramic mug of beer, bare feet, and he’d just stand behind me. I’d say hi. And he’d grunt or say nothing. He’d just stand there watching me type. At some point I’d do something and he’d go, “Ptthh, wrong!” and he’d walk away. So that was kind of getting thrown in the deep end. It was like the Zen approach—the master hit me with a stick, now I must meditate.”

Or here’s a passage about the concept of “nusumi-geiko” that is still alive in Japanese culture:

“The cabinetmaker’s training usually began in his early teens. In the ensuing ten years of apprenticeship, he endured a great deal of sweeping and menial tasks, but was also exposed to the work of the master craftsmen around him. The term nusumi-geiko refers to what actually took place in cabinetmaker’s training and many other trades. It means “stolen lessons,” alluding to the fact that the apprentices were not instructed so much as they learned the requisite skills by sheer determination through observation.”

I am very thankful to the people who took their time to show me the ropes: Lothar Krause, Bill Cunningham, Dan Tepper. They spent a lot of their time explaining things to me.

May 23, 2011
Arbitrage

It boggles my mind to think that I grew up in a country where most private enterpreneurship was a criminal offence, a felony. It was like this: create a business, be scorned by your customers at best, and at worst get caught and go to a labor camp.

There were of course people engaged in small business that escaped persecution. One particular example stuck in my memory: my father once pointed out a disheveled man rooting around in books at our favorite second hand book store. The store accepted books on comission, with the book owner setting the price. The disheveled man, my father explained, did not work anywhere. He made his living from his encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet book market. He picked underpriced books and relisted them at market prices. I did not know it back then, but this is a very common tactic called “arbitrage”. In the US it is employed by multitudes of people, from library sale scroungers as disheveled as that man, but armed with handheld computers and laser scanners hooked up to Amazon.com, to venture capitalists buying bad software companies from badly run companies and selling them to even worse run software companies at billions in profit.

In the US “Rich Dad, Poort Dad” author is making millions explaining the benefits of enterpreneurship over salaried proffesionalism, and I am in fact workin for not one, but two business magazines: Fast Company and Inc. I spent almost five years here, but it’s almost time for me to go. I did not line up the next job yet, but months ago I told my boss that I was leaving so that he could hire a replacement. My replacement is here, and I’m close to finishing knowledge transfer.

I have a few startup ideas, but what scares me is not the Soviet Militia, but the lack of affordable healthcare and the lack of a trusted technical co-founder. I am mulling taking another corporate job, and luckily Google and its ilk hoovered up web professionals, so the market looks promising.

For months I would tell myself that I would leave when the Freedom Tower would eclipse WTC 7 where I work. I’d say that time is near.

May 19, 2011
Cash register nunismatics

I spent two long summers working the seafood counter at Nathans at Coney Island. One of the few joys of a retail job like that is looking for foreign coins in the cash register at the end of the shift.

I was freshly reminded of that this morning, noticing that some generous soul donated what looks like 5 shekels at the local Dunkin Donuts.

A lame startup idea occured to me: building a coin counting machine that would OCR all the coins, sorting out any coins that have a nunismatic value higher than face value.

May 19, 2011
uni

Did you know that you can buy a whole wooden box of uni for 15.99 in K-Town? Uni is sea urchin “caviar”, the creamiest ingredient in the world, the second most oohed and aahed over thing on the original Iron Chef show (after “broth of vigor” aka dashi), the thing that you overpay for at the fancier sushi restaurant where it is doled out in smallest portions ever?

Well, you can. It cures a mild bout of depression if consumed in one sitting, with good quality soy sauce and guttural cat-like growling.

May 19, 2011
Presidential Visit

Once again most of Inc and FastCompany staffers spent hours gawking at the spectacle of our president visiting WTC site.

We could see the snipers on the WTC memorial

And on the top of Century 21 (as well as a few other buildings)

Our senator has arrived

The firemen lined up

Tourists were sardined a few blocks away

The presidential cortege was significant. It went on (notice the suv with a popped hatch)

and on

and on. And then it went on some more, but I got tired of clicking.

The black ambulance style car looks scary, but even scarier is the creep-o-van behind it. I later saw a few of similar cars outside our building – they were crazy eery, for inside was a full-size cubicle, complete with gray cloth pinboard and fluorescent light overhead. I can’t describe the look very well, but I did not have the nerve to take a picture. It was almost like a portal into a dreary office somewhere, but in a shiny black van.

They found a primo parking spot for the two limos

Some flesh was pressed

You probably saw the rest on TV

And away they went. From the looks of it the logistics of this were mind-blowing and the price tag was significant.

May 19, 2011