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! :)