Quick Bite at Madras Pantry

Thought I’d go check out the new hot spot near Trinity Bellwoods on my way home from softball last week.  Having never even conceived of eating a dosa in burrito-form I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect.

The space itself has a warm, informal and welcoming feel to it.  Beyond the food there are sales of a variety Indian spices, foods and products (even, amazingly, Neem toothpaste).  The communal table welcomes groups of friends to have a seat and socialize while eating.  Unfortunately, we were in the mood for ordering and leaving which was the main reason for wanting to try the dosa-to-go.

We picked up a butter chicken and a masala dosa.  The masala dosa was the better of the two with a great balance of savoury potatoes and crisp watercress.  The slightly bitter, toothsome feel of the dosa itself provided great context and mouthfeel for the whole dish.

The butter chicken dosa, while reasonable, tasted a bit out of kilter.  The butter chicken seemed to create a slightly bitter forenote that was extenuated by the dosa throwing off the overall flavour balance.  Again, the textures and combination of the watercress worked very well but the butter chicken seemed to be lacking, well, butter.

Either way, a return visit is definitely warranted.  Next time, perhaps, it will be the jerk chicken.  The szechuan beef seems like a bit of a reach for me but only time will tell.  When you’re in the mood for food to go and you happen to be in West Queen West, Madras Pantry certainly is worth giving a whirl.

Writing Software for the Keyboard

Over at Punished by Rewards, Pete’s thrown out some ideas on how to improve the Remember the Milk web user interface.  Actually, maybe it’s not so much how to improve it as it is complaints about how it is currently designed.

Either way it is interesting to see how one’s personal preferences around the use of software in general colour one’s opinions about how software is designed in particular.  I don’t pretend to know what the RTM design team is thinking but one thing that is relatively clear to me is that they’ve designed the website to be manipulated using the keyboard, not the mouse.  This is a particularly interesting design choice given that web design typically favours mouse-based navigation and interaction.  Also, for people who use OSX regularly (which basically treats the keyboard as an optional accessory) it is easy to see why the mental model of RTM does not suit their typical usage patterns.

That being said, does this mean that RTM is designed with a particular set of users in mind?  Again, without being privy to the design decisions of the development team it’s hard to say conclusively.  What I have noticed is that the RTM user experience does seem to be geared towards the power user.  Using the Windows metaphor as a guide, we see that novice users begin with the mouse and progress increasingly to shortcut keys and keyboard interactions as their familiarity and speed increases with experience.  The concept here is that the hand movement from keyboard to mouse is an expensive operation and with experience can be avoided to make for a more efficient sequence of use.

The design of RTM asserts that, since text has to be typed for the substance of the task, the UI should attempt to keep the user at the keyboard for as much of the experience as possible.  This can be a huge irritant for new users but incredibly efficient for power users.  It’s hard to say if this is the right or wrong decision since it really boils down to usage.  But as Pete has said before “good software is opinionated”.  The design team at RTM has made a decision about who their target market is and (since I feel I’m part of that group) it really does work well for them (us?).

On the other hand, there are some odd/poor choices in the way the UI provides feedback to the user.  What is that arrow on the first task of each list?  If multi-edit mode is not enabled, why allow the user to select multiple tasks?  Why is task sorting exclusively by priority and date? Why are there no keyboard shortcuts to move tasks from one list to another?

It is tough to write truly useful, inclusive software.  I would be hard pressed to hold up RTM as a shining example of a universally appealing success.  Nevertheless, for my usage scenarios, it does what I need it to do brilliantly.  Like all good software, it lets me do what I want (manage my tasks) and gets out of the way.

Windows 7 on a Dell Mini 9

So I jumped ship off Jaunty yesterday morning with build 7600 (RTM!) of Windows 7.  The install was smooth using a bootable USB drive and isn’t really worth describing in detail here.

In general, nearly everything seems to have worked right off the bat.  Video, sound, network – everything is up and stable.  Immediately I was surprised at how clear the fonts and general rendering are in Win7 (far more clear and precise than in Ubuntu).

A few issues have presented themselves:

• The Synaptics touchpad wasn’t recognized but installing the Vista drivers seemed to do the trick.
• 3 devices are listed as unrecognized in the Device Manager (two “Base System Devices” and one “Unknown device”). Good to see that the help on getting devices working has improved since Win95… :(  This doesn’t seem to have any meaningful impact but I’ll update if/when I figure out what they are.
• I’ve been reading a lot about how fast Win7’s boot times would be but that hasn’t played out.  Where Ubuntu was loading in sub-30 seconds Win7 is at least double that. Interestingly, it does appear that the boot up process is freezing just before showing the login screen but there is nothing in the event log to explain this.
• While Sleep mode generally works, in one case this morning it caused the computer to reboot.  The event viewer – as informative as always – says there was an “unexpected system shutdown”.  Thanks.

What I’ll miss from Ubuntu:

• Gnome Do: a simple, clean application that just helps you do things and gets out of the way.
• Tomboy: absolutely fantastic for taking notes in meetings (which is the primary use of my netbook). I’m switching to OneNote for now but I miss it already.
• Ubuntu Netbook Remix: it really was a nice metaphor for dealing with a cramped space and small screen.  Maximus in particular.  Win7 can be customised to use as much of the screen as possible so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
• Snappiness.  This isn’t exactly a fair comparison since I’m running Win7 with all of the Aero on.  Of course, if I wasn’t running the Aero chrome I’d be using WinXP so maybe it is fair.  Either way, Ubuntu seemed to just zip along a little more smoothly than Win7 which tends to freeze and hiccup.
• Nerd factor: there’s something that just gets me juiced about Linux.  Win7 is pretty new and running it pre-RTM release date tweaks my inner geek enough to make this worthwhile.

On the other hand, being back in the warm embrace of Windows does carry some benefit.  A simple example is being able to run Firefox 3.5.  It’s been weeks since it was released and it still isn’t available through the core repositories for Ubuntu.  Yes, I know I could hack it in but why the hell should I have to?

Windows Media Player is another thing I’m happy about. I’m not a big fan of it one way or the other but frankly, it just works.  I can play music off my file server.  I don’t have to open configuration files in VI.  Thanks but that’s good enough for me.

Finally, I certainly won’t miss the constant stream of update patches that had unintended consequences without any supporting documentation (support for 802.1X, I’m looking at you).  You can fault Microsoft for many things but their patch release management and documentation is absolutely top notch.

Anyhow, so here we are back in Windows.  I still need to find some webcam software but otherwise I should now be into stable daily use.  I’ll write some further thoughts as I get the chance to test this over the long term going forward.

Wild-Caught Perch in Parmesan Breadcrumbs

Wild Caught Perch in Parmesan Breadcrumbs
Originally uploaded by The Cooking Coder

This was a super easy appetizer that I put together to get our engines going on a nice Friday evening meal. I got the Lake Erie perch from the Healthy Butcher and put it in a breadcrumb mix with grated parmesan and fresh oregano from the garden.

It's then fried up in a little bit of butter and olive oil to keep it simple. It's garnished with a stripe of sriracha Thai hot sauce and fresh chives. Simply fantastic! :)

Reminiscing about Software Engineering

Jeff Atwood’s recent blog post about why software developers hate software more than anyone else is a great read.  It’s even funnier for me since his example of installing digital camera software is the exact same thing I experienced with my new camera a few weeks ago.

Interestingly he links to an interview with David Parnas from 1999 and quotes the following:

What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?
Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

What I find interesting is that Dr. Parnas was the Director of the Software Engineering program of which I was in the first graduating class.  In the 12 years since I made the decision to opt for software engineering over computer engineering I’ve given a lot of thought to what I was taught in my 4 years at McMaster.  Reading this quote brought a lot of those thoughts back up to the surface:

What are you doing now?
We've started a new Software Engineering program that I think is the first real SE programme in the world. It is an undergraduate program treated just like the other undergraduate programs in engineering. It is designed to get people licensed by the Professional Engineers and I agreed to direct it while it was getting started.

The trouble with teaching the first software engineering programs is that you don't have any software engineers to teach them. There is a bootstrapping problem because there are no graduates yet. Today's programmers may call themselves "Software Engineer," but most do not have the right to call themselves "Engineer." Most do not know what we expect our graduates to know. The best programmers are self-taught. We very much need Engineers who understand software but they are very hard to find.

Ours is the first software engineering program that wasn't started in a computer science department or in computer engineering. The concept of this department is based on an intriguing idea: consider the meaning of the phrase "software engineering." If you look at the history of engineering, you can see that over the years, different branches have split off from engineering, introducing disciplines such as mechanical, civil, electrical, chemical engineering. As our knowledge of science and mathematics grew, it was no longer possible to teach every engineer all that we knew. We were forced to identify various disciplines within Engineering.

At McMaster, we regard software engineering in the same way. There is a great deal that I believe all engineers should know about software but we only have four years to teach them. We decided to address the problem by treating Software Engineering exactly as we treat Chemical Engineering. That way of thinking leads to a program that looks very different than a conventional computer science program. The conventional program considers software engineering to be a specialty of computer science with a few more courses in software. We view Software Engineering as a specialty within engineering. Our students take most of the standard engineering course. There are 42 required technical courses of which about 19 deal with "core" engineering material and the rest are specialized material that is needed for software engineering. This includes some CS material and a lot of mathematics as well as software design courses that include projects. It is important to understand that this is education, not training. We teach fundamentals throughout. None of our courses center on current products or languages but we use practical tools in the many laboratory experiences that are part of the courses.

I was and continue to be proud that I was educated as an engineer first and a software specialist second.  Nevertheless, the program did have a certain learning-on-the-fly quality to it that I felt left me very unprepared when I graduated.  By its nature I left university with what felt like an incomplete skillset.  What does rigorous software specification have to do with building enterprise-class software?  How does tautological logic help me to sell my product?

To expect any school program to prepare all of its students to be ready to hit the ground running in industry is obviously unfair.  There is, however, an obvious tension that is created when you release “real” software engineers out into a marketplace where their skills are not necessarily valued nor are they demonstrably better at the craft of writing software.  This is especially troubling when taken in the context of Tom DeMarco’s recent writings.  Is software engineering dead?  Was it ever alive to begin with?

This isn’t going to be answered anytime quickly.  I do still believe that there are elements of this business that fall squarely in the realm of engineering.  Alternatively, there is an art to software that is very real.  It is this creative side that separates the journeymen from the truly great programmers.  To some degree it is a passion for the craft – a passion to learn more and to solve harder and harder problems.  It reflects a natural aptitude that some programmers possess and others do not.

So am I happy to have been trained as one of the first software engineers?  Absolutely.  Did my education lead to what has – to his point – been a successful career?  Probably.  Is engineering the road that all great (or even competent) programmers must follow?  Probably not.

Possibly the Best Pea Soup

I haven't actually had the chance to try this recipe as yet but it certainly sounds good. I'll update when I do (hopefully this weekend!).

Creamy Sausage Orecchiette with Garlic Scapes and Summer Peas

Creamy Sausage Orecchiette with
Garlic Scapes and Summer Peas

I had the chance to put together a nice improv meal on Friday by basically raiding the fridge. Here's what I cooked up (the quantities are approximate, to say the least):

Ingredients

• 1/2 kg hot Italian sausage
• 1 pint of fresh peas, shelled
  
• 5 garlic scapes, chopped finely
  
• 1 onion, diced
  
• 1 cup of cream
• 1 cup of parmesan cheese, grated
  
• Handful of fresh parsley, chopped roughly
  
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 500g orecchiette pasta
  

Prep

1. Take the casings off the sausage and brown them in a deep pan. Remove and reserve.
2. Throw in the onions and sweat them for a few minutes followed by the garlic scapes. Once they've softened throw the sausage back in and mix it up.
   
3. Add the peas and cheese and allow it to melt. Stir in the cream and cook it on low then season to taste.
4. Hopefully by now you've got your pasta ready, if not, travel back in time until step (0), boil water, make pasta, etc.
5. Mix the pasta and the cream sauce, garnish with the parsley and serve.

One final note, I'm pretty thrilled with the garlic scapes that Karen picked up at the Liberty Market last weekend. They've been delicious in pretty much everything I've used them in. Between the Liberty and the St. Andrew's Markets it's great being able to access to fresh produce every weekend.

The Complimentarity Between Cities and Skills

Interesting article [PDF] on the concentration of skills and knowledge in big cities.  The abstract:

There is a strong connection between per worker productivity and metropolitan area population, which is commonly interpreted as evidence for the existence of agglomeration economies. This correlation is particularly strong in cities with higher levels of skill and virtually non-existent in less skilled metropolitan areas. This fact is particularly compatible with the view that urban density is important because proximity spreads knowledge, which either makes workers more skilled or entrepreneurs more productive. Bigger cities certainly attract more skilled workers, and there is some evidence suggesting that human capital accumulates more quickly in urban areas.

Page Numbers in SSRS

So I just spent 30 minutes trying to get a page number on the bottom of a report I’m building in SSRS.  30 minutes for a feature that I get in a button-click in virtually every other application that I have installed on my computer.

The adventure starts with this TechNet article that seems to indicate that this is all simple to do:

Adding a Page Number to a Header or Footer

Footers commonly display a page number. To display a page number in the header or footer of a report, create a text box in the footer and add the following expression:

=Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages

Ok, let’s do that.  Sounds straightforward enough.  Oh wait… then I get this:

The Value expression for the textbox ‘textbox1’ refers to the global variable PageNumber or TotalPages.  These global variables can be used only in the page header and page footer.

What the hell?  Ok, let’s do some Googling (which reminds me, I love that “To Google” is now a valid part of the English language… what a world).  This lead me to a few different forum and blog posts.  All of these seemed to indicate that I had to write backend code to make this work.  Stupidly, I thought “sure, why not? It seems totally reasonable that I should have to write custom code to get PAGE NUMBERS ON A REPORT”.

I realize I don’t get to write code that often anymore, never mind writing a report.  So I’m a little rusty.  But am I so rusty that I’ve forgotten my core lesson that “if it seems too complicated you probably screwed up”?

Thankfully writing this blog rant reminded me of that fact midway through this and I thought “alright, it’s gotta be me, not the tool”.  Of course, as always, foolishness usually lies with the user of the tool not the tool itself.  Suffice it to say there’s a BIG difference between a table footer and a page footer.  Whoops.

In my defence, adding a page number in Word (or anything like it) is about as simple as can be.  Given that SSRS is meant to simplify the creation of reports, why is it so hard to do trivial tasks?  Ok, I’m exaggerating, it wasn’t that hard.  But it’s always fair to blame the tool, right?

Web 2.0 & SharePoint

Last week, I went with a co-worker to a seminar at Microsoft on social computing with SharePoint. It was an interesting discussion with some very smart people.  A few of the central themes were:

1. There are effectively two hierarchies that exist in every organization: a formal one and an informal one. The formal hierarchy is defined by reporting relationships and is generally well documented. It is also mostly useless. The informal hierarchy is the unwritten relationships that exist between people and forms the basis for how things actually get done. It is the reason why someone who is 4 levels down in the formal hierarchy is actually the most important person in the organization. This hierarchy is terribly served by IT.
2. The tools that we use to collaborate and communicate with all introduce varying levels of social friction that ultimately impair the activity itself.
3. There is an untold amount of tacit knowledge contained in people’s heads and that is flowed in discussions around the water cooler but is not captured or codified. This knowledge tends to disappear when staff leaves or when time erases our memories.

Successful social computing initiatives (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) seem to work because they manage to lower the social friction and distance between people.  And while the average person is using these tools more and more in their personal lives there is a great vacuum in their professional lives because “Corporate IT” has not kept pace.  A great example is the basic fact that the internet looks and works so well and intranets look like high school computer science projects.

SharePoint is a great tool for helping people to collaborate around documents but its “social computing” features (i.e. the My Sites) are still quite primitive.  SharePoint 2010 may bring new tools to the table but ultimately the issues to be resolved are cultural, not technological.

Over the next few months I will be spending considerable effort on attempting to solve some of the social friction problems that exist at my organisation.  How can we collaborate better?  How can we capture tacit information?  How do we capture ideas from the broader community and distil them into action?

Heat

I just finished reading "Heat" by Bill Buford. It's a must-read for anyone who's interested in the mysteries of a professional kitchen or the rhythm of preparing food traditionally.

When I started, I hadn't wanted restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn't want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it's true, those who do have it tend to be professionals - like chefs. But I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.

Personally, I can't think of a more perfect life journey.

Alice's Restaurant

Went for dinner yesterday to Alice's restaurant on College. It's a sparse dining area with some wonderful photos from a local photographer (oversight on my part by not finding out the name). Chef Jason Pekka Woods has cooked at Toque, North 44 and other places so he knows his way around.

First, the good. I started with a sea scallop appetizer. The scallops were well cooked with a satisfying crust and were paired with grilled apples, rocket and what I believe was strawberry puree. The dish was well executed overall but the fruit puree was too sweet and generally tasteless (hence the "I believe" in the previous sentence). A sharper raspberry with higher acidity would have played better with the grilled apple.

The main was a lamb shoulder confit on a bed of rice with other accompaniments. As in all confit preparations, the risk here was that the meat would be dried out and unfortunately chef Woods' lamb was not completely spared. While it was generally tender there was a distinct, unpalatable dryness towards the centre. Also, oddly, the lamb was couched on top of a candied orange slice (?). Normally this would have been fine but since the restaurant seems to market itself around seasonal, local food this was a bit of a cop-out (I fact admitted by Woods himself during a pleasant discussion after the meal).

The big disappointment in the evening was with the wine list. Chef Woods is attempting to cobble together an Ontario-only wine menu but unfortunately the wine does not match the quality of the food. Three bottles were put away with gusto: Legends pinot noir, an unremarkable syrah whose name escapes me and something called an "arcanum" (Peninsula Ridge Estates, 2001). All of them suffered from the same narrow, impoverished flavour profile. As always, Ontario wines continue to disappoint with their lack of character, overall thinness and simplicity. If I go back to Alice's I will most certainly be bringing my own wine.

That being said, will I go back? Possibly. The service was top notch, the food - while not mind blowing - was certainly reasonable and the pricing was not outrageous (it helped, of course, that I wasn't buying). Still, given the competition in this space (including restaurants close by on Ossington) it may be some time before I return.

Frozen Morning Sunrise

Frozen Morning Sunrise
Originally uploaded by The Cooking Coder

It's tough some days to get up in the winter given how dark it is. One redeeming factor is being able to watch the sunrise when I get into the office while drinking a nice, warm coffee.

Blog Editing with Google Docs

Testing the blog editing in Google Docs. Maybe this will work for me going forward.