I wish more papers would figure out that their current websites are a hindrance to readers. I”m looking at you, KC Star.
WordPress drives both our website and our print edition — you can’t put an article into the print edition of the paper unless it’s been put into WordPress
My kitchen has an absurd number of implements for making coffee. I’ve got my automatic Cuisinart (which I love for the insulated carafe), an Italian moka pot (takes me back to my travels in Europe), a French press (the only way I made it through college) and of course a cappuccino machine that is jammed into the back of my cupboard. Each creates a slightly different cup. At this point, I’m standing by the Chemex as the best contraption…if you want to take the time.
The Cuisinart Grind and Brew is a solid day to day coffee pot. Having the ability to just dump the filter, pour in water and push the Program button to have fresh ground coffee in the morning is great. I’ve got a couple of beefs with this thing though. The grinder is incredibly inconsistent. What ends up in the filter basket is too course for the drip method and there are fine grounds that need to be cleaned out of the hopper each time that you add beans. There is also the issue of the filter itself. It’s a flat bottom contraption instead of a cone, which I think is inferior. I also have a suspicion that the boiler doesn’t heat the water enough…a common complaint over at the Amazon reviews. The combination of these three things means that you don’t really get that strong of a cup and you go through tons of beans.
Back on the positive side of things, having a thermal carafe makes all the difference in the world. Without a heating element and with great insulation you can make coffee at 5:30 and still have piping hot coffee at 11:00 without any degradation in flavor.
All in all, though, it’s a great everyday machine but not something you want to use for that extra special batch of coffee that demands some attention.
This little guy is nice if you’re in the mood for espresso, but don’t want to drag out the gigantic espresso machine that’s in your cabinet behind the hand blender and the stand mixer. When I was in italy’ this is how all the espresso we drank was made so there is a lot of nostalgia associated with it. It’s easy to clean, but doesn’t crank out a lot of volume making it impractical if you’ve got guests. Over time, you’ll probably accumulate some calcium deposits in the lower unit which means it has to be replaced after a while. On the upside it doesn’t take up much room, and looks nice enough to leave on the stove all the time and makes a great cup of espresso.
The staple of the 1990s kitchen is a workhorse that probably should be relegated to storage depending on how much counter space that you have. I’ve got one, but it probably hasn’t come out of the cupboard for a few years because of how easy the Italian pot is. On the upside, it will steam milk but it’s a hassle to clean once you start down that path.
The French press is probably my second favorite method of making coffee. It’s always nice and strong and extremely convenient. I wont drink that garbage that comes out of a Bunn-o-matic so in college I used nothing but a press. The traditional size makes enough for two people and takes under 10 minutes to make. Clean up is a huge pain, though, and the coffee can sometimes be overly acidic. That second cup probably has sat in the beans for a while resulting in over extraction and you’re guaranteed to have a little grit in the bottom of each cup. Not that this is always a bad though. It’s part of the experience.
Overall, this comes in at a close second.
I picked up a Chemex for my wife to filter her cold-steep coffee just a few weeks ago. Little did I know that this would emerge as my favorite coffee implement. I also bought one for my dad for fathers day, and his reaction was probably typical.
Making coffee with a Chemex isn’t a quick affair. I made a batch this morning and it took about 20 minutes for four large cups of coffee. But much like the extra time it takes to use a charcoal grill instead of a gas unit, it’s worth spending the extra time. The coffee is strong, but has no bitterness or acidity. While you’re watching the water flow through, you can see the stuff that typically ends up in your cup being trapped by the grounds and the filter. The end result is every bit as good as the French press, but without the downsides of cleaning (just drop the filter in the compost bin) or the unwanted acidity and grit.
I figure my ratios with a food scale based on one of the many tutorial videos I found online. 33 grams of beans to every 15 ounces by weight of water is almost perfect for my tastes.
I worked from home one day last week, and while I was going through email I made about 60 ounces of coffee and tossed it into the thermal carafe from my Cuisinart. It was fantastic.
Is this something I make every day? Nope…decent bean juice can be had with no drama every day from the Cuisinart. Coffee from the Chemex is good enough to be enjoyed early on a Sunday morning along with a weeks worth of articles saved to Instapaper or a copy of the Economist.
I cannot express how deeply sorry I am. Dropbox is my life, and I know that we are only as good as the trust we have built with our customers. This should not have happened, and I am hopeful that you will give us the chance to make this right and regain your trust.
Excellent counter point to many of the false analogies that have been passed around over the past few weeks.
So after a week of letting the WWDC Keynote sink in, I think I’m pretty excited about what’s coming over the next few months. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, my trusty Rev A MacBook Pro has seen its last major OS release with Snow Leopard but all good things must come to an end. Some of the changes with respect to iCloud make me worry about a couple things, but there’s more on that in a bit.
I think it’s a little early for everyone to start completely hyperventilating over everything[1] that was announced. It’s certainly not too early for everyone’s favorite troll to dismiss lion as the latest in "a decade’s worth of minor, purely evolutionary updates."[2]
Let’s break this down…
As a heavy user of Spaces, Mission Control looks like a nice improvement. Gestures will be welcomed, although there’s bound to be some confusion with the inverted scrolling. Airdrop will be nice for sharing things between my wife and I when we’re both working on something, but its reliance on zero-config (aka bonjour) networking will make sure that none of that will work at a big company office.
Launchpad isn’t something that interests me, but for people like my mother who kind of struggled with OS X but loves her iPad it will be great. Full screen apps (as well as resizing a window from anywhere) justifiably gets some eye-rolls from anyone who’s used Windows for the past 20 years but there’s a difference. Full screen means full screen. There isn’t some janky 3 pixel bright blue border around the edge, nor is there a task bar or menu bar at the top. It’s a subtle, but important distinction which is much nicer on the eyes for the user than the traditional maximized window. Oh…seeing the terminal in full screen was pretty badass. Full screen takes care of the kids running laptops, but those of us with giant displays still have to turn to third party tools like Better Snap Tool to help tile windows neatly.[^windowsnap] Now to the two big ones..
Mail on Snow Leopard and prior really kind of sucks. Not in the same way that Outlook sucks, but it’s certainly not one of the things that I cite to people who are interested in OS X. There is even something that seems lacking about Mail on iOS. The new version looks really slick, bringing in things like message threading, and therefore the ability to wipe out an overloaded mailbox in no time at all. Even bigger is search.
First a brief sidenote. I’ve spent hundreds of hours working with folks in all kinds of jobs sort through and search for mail. I’ve seen just about every kind of folder structure and scheme that you can think of. Even the most type-a engineer type still fails in some area, whether it be in sent items or deleted items you always end up turning to search in some way. 99% of the time, this means turning to the built in search in Outlook. I could write a thousand words just about the number of ways in which Outlook (2003, 2007 and 2010) utterly fail at this incredibly important task. In short, I would really like to be an email searching snob if there was any desktop email client that was well done.
When I was watching the keynote, I was one of those people that was making noises like a 4 year old on Christmas morning when they demonstrated search.[3] It’s not just the fact that Boolean searching is there for nerds who know that syntax. It’s the fact that they made building the query easy and flexible. My goodness it even suggests similar terms based on messages in the database. Are you kidding me? iCal can continue to suck as hard as it does now, and OS X still would be possibly the best OS for people who do a lot of email…Exchange or IMAP.
At this point, things are looking great from the perspective of an attorney working in e-discovery. Then the other stuff happened.
Auto Save is going to be a little more difficult for users to adjust to. Since the days of Windows 3.1, we’ve all been conditioned to save your work all the time. Some of the early screenshots had even removed the Command+S shortcut and option in the file menu. Whoa there. That’s a bit of a jump. Much like my perspective on iCloud, I’m conflicted about automatic versioning.
As an individual user, this is going to be nice. Not earth shattering, just nice. As someone who works in e-discovey this makes me want to crawl into the corner and weep. Even though “tracked changes” in Word are grossly misunderstood and feared in the legal community, their actual prevalence in data sets is relatively small. Now, tracked changes aren’t even an option. Sure, there’s no way to accidentally send your revision history to a professor, thereby proving that you didn’t do anything in that honors English class until the last day of final exams. The problem is that now lawyers have to figure out how to deal with all these revisions. Since they’re stored as deltas instead of full documents, can we open the prior versions on their own? Is there a duty to produce all of the revisions under a regular document request? It just makes my head hurt.
I can’t tell yet whether I’m excited about iCloud or not. On one hand, it will be nice to have some seamless communication between iOS and OS X. On the other, I understand the file system and approach things in terms of projects instead of contexts. iCloud document storage will be great for people who open documents from the list of recently opened files, but for nerds who like to woller around in their perfect little file system it’s really going to mess with people’s heads.
The impact on e-discovery is unknown. Obviously the file has to live somewhere, it’s just a matter of poking around with Lion once it comes out to find them. Security should be interesting, although I have as much confidence in Apple’s security in transit as I do Dropbox.[4]
I’ll admit that I’ve been a MobleMe user since the iPhone was released. Essentially I’ve been paying $99 a year to sync my contacts, which is way too much. It also gives me some perspective on how well Apple has done with internet based services. The short version is that they completely suck. iDisc sounded nice, but somehow ended up being worse than carrying around a thumb drive. Back to my Mac didn’t even work for the first 6 months or so after it was released and it’s still pretty spotty. Calendar syncing hasn’t ever really worked well, but I’ll blame that on iCal as much as the servers trying to glue all of these crappy calendars together.
The iTunes store, on the other hand, seems to work without a hitch. This makes me pretty darn optimistic about iTunes in the cloud. As someone who has to share a wireless circuit with over a hundred people going through a 3Mb pipe when I’m at the office, streaming isn’t really a good option so being able to grab albums from my library a-la-carte on my laptop is going to be just fine.
iTunes Match is huge and as I’ve been browsing through the iTunes store, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little I’ll have to upload myself. Almost all the Dick’s Picks and a ton of Widespread Panic shows are up there and ready to go. Negotiating what is in effect amnesty for the millions of people out there who have acquired music through ripping CDs against the record industry’s wishes is great. There are some people who are concerned that this is some kind of trap for the RIAA to identify pirated music, but if that was going to happen it would have happened when iTunes added album artwork or the whole Genius concept. That said, a clear privacy statement from Apple before the thing goes live will be nice.
Overall, there are some really neat things coming out soon for those of us living in the Apple ecosystem.
What Apple is doing is really making corporate IT departments look bad. People are starting to realize that using a computer doesn’t have to be the hell on earth experience that is working in the Windows/Office environment at work. Legacy “enterprise” software packages unfortunately mean that for most organizations Windows will continue to linger for quite some time, but if you’re a user who spends most of their time working with a connection to Exchange and writing documents, OS X is probably a better OS than Windows. If the new Mail doesn’t completely destroy the Exchange server, then why not run OS X as the desktop operating system with virtual machines for those Windows tools that we just can’t shed?
Really…I love you guys but wow. You did use MobileMe, right?
It amazes me how wrong someone can be, no matter how clear their bias is. None of the people I know who have dumped Windows in favor of OS X did so because of what the hardware looks like. That includes nerds like myself and my parents alike. As is usual, great use of the straw-man though.
In one of the funniest moments of the keynote, Phil Shiller was interrupted by excited nerds in the crowd. His reaction was classic: “Boolean searches! Yes…it’s okay to be excited about that.” I suppose that’s when you know that you’re talking to a bunch of nerds.
No…that’s not really that much confidence but everything’s a trade off.
Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. Not better or worse, just different. You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like “nerd”. Maybe you will find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them.
To this I have one just piece of advice: they can go to hell. The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out. When they treat you like this, just remember that this is your journey, not theirs. Being different is not a crime, and people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire.
For a long time I’ve wanted to learn a serious programming language. I’ve been down with HTML and CSS for well over half my life now, but have always wanted a little more. With my web development days mostly over, digging into PHP or JavaScript didn’t seem very useful. Learning C (or C#, Obj-C or C++) is a little low level for the things that I’m looking to do. Perl has always had some appeal, primarily because it’s easy enough to read (mostly in issues of 2600) but I couldn’t find a great resource to get me from zero to fully functional scripts in enough time. I’ve used and loathed Java apps and read enough Joel on Software to be pretty bias against that nonsense too.
When I saw Adam Laurie give his talk about the RFID passports at LayerOne a few years ago, he raved about how nice it was to work in Python and that’s stuck with me. From time to time, I’d take a look at some samples of textbooks online, but never found anything that seemed to click.
I saw a recommendation for Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw and decided to check it out. I’m currently about halfway through the exercises and am extremely happy with the results. One of my favorite parts of this book encapsulates why I think that anyone who is ready to start making computers work for you instead of the other way around should learn Python or any other scripting language.
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. – Zed Shaw at page 155 of Learn Python the Hard Way
He left one discipline out there: Law. If you do a lot of repetitive calculations, such as document review estimates, spousal support calculations or estimates for lost income then Python gives you the opportunity to create a tool that is superior to doing calculations by hand or in Excel.
It’s not just Python that you end up learning though. You end up learning about how your computer works, why special characters like the \ character can cause problems in other software and most importantly how to use your keyboard.
When you’re working through the exercises, you’ll get really sick of using the mouse to move around and select text. Where you always might have known that you can theoretically use a computer without a pointer device you can see why that’s a good thing through banging out lines of code. Heck, I even have started to appreciate (although I haven’t made this nerd jump quite yet) VI and VIM key bindings.
The book is tremendous for anyone at any level of knowledge of technology and gets my highest recommendation.
Late last week, I saw Ben Brooks link to the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. Initially I was a little skeptical of Mr. Brooks’s claim that he was using it now “for everything,” and took a look. He was exactly right. I applied the TextMate theme and was blown away at how comfortable it is to work in. I’ve now applied the color scheme to the Terminal, OmniFocus and (using the OS X color palette) I even retouched Scrivener to display the light theme.
Just one more justification for my quest to never open Word or Pages ever again.
This weekend brought some much needed rain on Saturday followed by 80 degrees and sun for Sunday afternoon. What a perfect time to clean off the deck, crack a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and fire up the grill. The only thing missing is music, right?
One of the few gripes about the iPad last year was it’s inability to access my entire music library wirelessly. It made little sense that I should be able to push music from my iPad to the Airport Express but not push music to my iPad. This resulted in a couple emails to Steve about this logical hole in iOS.
The solution came a few weeks ago with version 4.3 of iOS. If you haven’t already done so, activate home sharing in iTunes on whatever machine holds all of your music. Pick up your iPad, fire up the iPod application and look in the top left corner.
Now you can access your whole music collection, including that rare Grateful Dead set from Filmore East, that choice version of Porch Song by Widespread Panic From 2001 or whatever else fits your fancy.
Happy spring, everybody. After this winter, we all need it.