Software, Work

Quora for research

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I’ve been checking out how useful Quora is to new business research recently and it really is a wonderful network for getting under the skin of a company. You find questions from marketers, strategists, analysts, customers and beyond, answers from the same and from the companies themselves.

I’m a bit of a leech on this social network  – as with Twitter I find it hard to stay close enough to the topics I’m interested in or qualified to respond to to contribute meaningfully. But many good questions have been asked and answered (even one of mine). Definitely recommended – don’t think Facebook has manage to build the same cult of users for this particular service of theirs as yet, and its unlikely to be useful for professional insight (for me, anyway) just yet.

Food

British names for American ingredients (and American names for British ingredients) – a 101 guide (basic tutorial)

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(Warning: the following video contains some classic Izzard swearing and might therefore be NSFW. It however perfectly sets the scene for this post, so watch it anyway).

I read a lot of American food blogs – as you may have gathered from my Kenji tribute. But one of the things that grates slightly is the fact that we have slightly different vocabularies for a number of common (and some not-so-common) cooking ingredients. I asked my friends on Twitter and Facebook to help me come up with some key points of contention and here’s what everyone came up with…

  • American – British
  • Cilantro – coriander
  • Rutabaga – swede – wtf???
  • ‘erbs – herbs
  • frosting – icing
  • Zucchini – courgette
  • Maize – corn
  • Eggplant – aubergine
  • Soda – soft drinks
  • Tomayto – tomato
  • Chips – crisps
  • Fries – chips
  • Jelly – jam
  • Jello – jelly
  • Baysil – basil
  • Arugala – rocket (seriously wtf?)
  • Scallions – spring onions
  • Baking soda – baking powder

Contentious

  • Noodles – Pasta (I thought they just called it paaaasta)
  • Entree – main course (Isn’t this a French thing?)
  • Corned beef – salt beef (I thought American corned beef was tinned, processed beef hash)

Can anyone clarify?

and also…

  • Budweiser – beer (not sure these are synonymous)
  • Potato – potato
  • American cheese – wtf? (via @qwghlm, I actually think there’s a time and a place for American cheese)

Thanks to friends on Facebook – Farrah, Mary, Kate, Caroline, Lucy, James, Graham and on Twitter – qwghlm, AndreLabadie, jogblog and gateauchateau for the suggestions.

Any more for any more? I think we have the Spanish influence to thank for some of these (cilantro I think is Spanish for coriander, for example) but absolutely no idea where some of the others come from and my curiousity doesn’t extend far enough to investigate.

It’s amazing how much difference a few short centuries can make to linguistic divergence. In another few months, we probably won’t understand anything the Americans say!

In a side note, that’s the single most successful crowdsourcing request I’ve ever made. I guess you have to ask the right questions for your network!

Food

On the greatness of Kenji Alt-Lopez, food blogger supremo

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NYC: Meatopia - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Kenji’s posts on all things food continue to be nothing less than inspired. I still use some of his tips for making the perfect french fries for my roast potatoes (add vinegar to let you par-boil for longer without losing structural integrity), his posts on pizza, burgers and general knife and other skills inform an increasing number of aspects of my cooking. Let this post serve as the beginnings of a tribute.

The posts that inspired this one were two fold; first, Kenji’s efforts at improving the Big Mac – genius! The scientific method here – rather than the letter of the process that our friends Messrs Blumenthal and Myrhvold espouse, provides a wonderful, iterative, Macgyvery feel to the way he reverse engineers a food classic.

Secondly – Pizzagna. So wrong, and yet so right. Almost something that should appear on Epic Meal Time – but because it comes from Kenji I actually kind of want to eat it.

Be assured, however, the majority of his posts are on more everyday helpful things, including avocado knife skills and general basic cooking principles, so he’s a resource for the world, not just fast food aficionados.

Anyway, if you’re interested in food you should follow Kenji’s work across the Serious Eats blogs. Despite the moderately US-centric nature of it, a lot of the content is fascinating and useful wherever you are – and he seems a pretty global-outlook-kind-of-guy, so there’s some International content too.

Coming soon: a dictionary to help interpret American food names for Brits. And vice-versa.

Crowdsourced and 100% delicious.

Technology

A week with the Blackberry Torch

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BlackBerry-Torch

I’d previously mentioned that my brother-in-law was trialling a Blackberry Torch after the best part of two years on an iPhone 3GS.

How did it go? Well, after a week with the Blackberry – he took it back to the shop. There were a multitude of reasons from BIL, but first and foremost amongst them was the multiple-clicks-to-do-anything nature of the BB platform, something that was unsurprisingly frustrating to an erstwhile iPhone user. Three clicks to check the weather, too much use of the Blackberry buttons, etc.

Whilst he liked the email, industrial design and feel of the phone etc., the performance and interface marked its demise out. After using an iPhone, it seemed that little about the BB interface was intuitive.

Which makes sense I guess – indicative excerpt from the Gizmodo review captures it:

The distillation of this grand mishmash of observations and scenarios is this: BlackBerry isn’t good enough anymore if you’re comparing it to other smartphones. What does it do better than the rest? That’s the fundamental question. And the answer is that for most people, in most situations, compared to Android and iPhone, not a whole lot.

It also brings to mind what is possibly one of the most sensational pieces of review-contempt I’ve ever read, courtesy of Infoworld, on Blackberry’s new tablet – which, I gather, like the Groslch adverts, is ‘not ready yet’:

After spending a couple days with the final product, it’s clear that the PlayBook is a useless device whose development is unfinished.

And that’s just the opening paragraph – they don’t really cut loose until they start talking about the idea of tethering the Playbook to a Blackberry for data usage!

Next up – BIL’s trying the HTC Sensation – a beautiful piece of Android hardware with an interface I’m sure he’ll find far more familiar and usable. We’ll see what happens!

Gardening

Fiskars weedpuller review

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fiskarsweedpullerAfter having it demonstrated by Amanda’s cousin Tomas in Denmark, having my mother-in-law educate me on the perils of Dandelions and on reaching the end of my tether with regards to a few very specific weeds in the garden, I invested in the Finnish-designed Fiskars weedpuller.

The device operates by extruding four sharpened stainless steel teeth into the ground. You lower it over where you imagine the root of the problem to be (pun intended), apply pressure, and as you lean back on the handy foot press the teeth clamp over the root of the weed and pulls it out of the ground, alongside a small, manageable clump of turf and soil. There’s a satisfyingly clunky ‘reload’ mechanism which throws the weed off the end of the weedpuller.

Doing our entire garden – which is relatively clear of dandelions, but has a few other weed issues – took about an hour and a half and resulted in a wheelbarrow load of weeds. I’d estimate that in about two thirds of cases I got the whole root up, which I thought was a good result. Hopefully as an iterated process in the future it’ll be pretty quick and painless – and more eco-friendly than weed poison alternatives.

The small holes dotting the garden may or may not need filling with compost and replanting with fresh grass seed at some point, which I guess is the only negative – but then, this would be significantly worse if you were trowelling weeds out of the ground by hand! I need a backpack mounted metal-detector shaped compost deployer to save my lower back from the patching work…

Gardening, Software, Technology

Weed or plant? A new game…

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weedorplantThis is a picture of a weed. Or possibly the leaf of a Lapland potato I brought back from Finland for planting. I have no idea.

My plan is to leave it for a bit until there is more discernible growth and to try to make a less than completely arbitrary judgement then. That’s when I read of LeafSnap – Leaf recognition software developed by Columbia University in the US. You take a picture of a leaf and it pattern matches against a database to tell you what it is. Could this make the difference?

Reviews of the app are not good on the Appstore. “Only works on US trees,” “Primitive pattern matching that returns dozens of matches”… and then there’s the fact that it only makes claim to cope with tree leaves.

But it’s a start. Technology will find a way to help my garden grow…

Dadblogging, Technology

The right here, right now generation

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After my blog post on VAT on eBooks and reading Lucy’s comment on Facebook about the government being keen on Kindles for schools… I paused to think about Emily’s use of technology. My parents have had decades to get used to the idea that I’m more technologically proficient than them, but I’m still coming to terms with the fact that my hand-wavy daughter that will giggle for minutes at a bouncing pink rabbit will, in all likelihood, supersede me for technology proficiency – and (if there was a chance Amanda would allow it, which she won’t) grow up reading eBooks.

The economics of eBooks, VAT issue notwithstanding, makes them ludicrously compelling for schools. Textbooks are expensive, in tediously short supply, subject to loss, damage, graffiti and the like. Desk-embedded eBook readers? Well, a little more resilient, one would hope – infinitely cheaper in long-term materials… and a whole new world of opportunity for the education system.

30 years ago, I grew up in a world of scheduled TV programming (my sister and I would argue over watching Transformers vs. My LIttle Pony), of chunky textbooks and even chunkier files when I got to secondary school; where it was a  novelty that I typed my essays and at a time when touchscreens were a ludicrously expensive, almost magical novelty. And the Internet? Well, there wasn’t much of that around for a while.

Today, the magic is everywhere, almost mundane (although I still pause to wonder at it). What this means for a kid’s need for instant gratification, I shudder to think (I guess patience will need to be trained in elsewhere).

I’m kind of keeping up with the kids at the moment (although I don’t believe in BBM and I’m not as obsessive about Twitter or Foursquare as many), but I have a feeling my days as the tech supremo of the household are numbered.

Technology

Moore’s law, suffering

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In the 90s, as a PC-gaming geek, I bemoaned Moore’s law; Intel’s founder’s dictum that the processing power of computers would double every two years or so (technically, the dictum might be that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double, but the former sounds more comprehensible and comes to much the same thing).

Why did I care? Because every new piece of software required a faster computer, and that meant, when I was trying to play Dune 2 on an ageing Amstrad PC2286 (clocked at a staggering 12 megahertz, costing the best part of £2k) that I had to do some considerable Macgyvery hackery to free enough system resources to allow the game to load – and it dragged agonisingly slowly when I’d built too many Harkonnen Devastator tanks (we didn’t have the money or inclination to upgrade every two years, certainly not so I could game more).

Today, over 40 years on from the original prediction, material and manufacturing limits are slowing the pace at which hardware becomes defunct. That is to say – the processes by which CPUs are created are reaching the point where we simply will not be able to make the processing elements any smaller, and so Moore’s law is slowing. Intel’s website explains, and gives us this handy graph:

Source: Intel

By 2020, Moore’s law will not apply to traditional CPU development. So one of two things will happen; first, companies will continue to shift multiple cores onto CPUs (dual, quad-, octo-core machines already exist) to allow for even more parallel processing. Second; we will move onto a new substrate for computer processing – potentially optical based computing or some such. I don’t think the technology for the latter is quite ready yet.

But the net impact for me, as a consumer and Deputy CIO for my company – lack of processing power no longer fuels hardware refresh in the way that it once did. A server I put in three years ago is showing no significant signs of performance degradation and the only real point of concern I have is that a hard drive will fail. Cost of replacement hard drive? A couple of hundred quid, if that. Cost of new server? In the thousands.

Of course, ideologically speaking, I’m looking to outsource all of this stuff (personally and professionally) to the cloud. But the UK’s internet infrastructure isn’t quite there yet – and neither are the services. But they move 10% closer every 6-12 months…*

 

 

 

* Yes, this is nonsense. I need to come up with some better laws.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.