Bohmian.org - Matthew Wronka

Bistro du Midi

2020-03-11 22:00:59.926

Bistro du Midi is a highly regarded restaurant in Boston. It's part of the Himmel Hospitality Group, which also owns Post 390; it's chef, Robert Sisca used to work at One if by Land, Two if by Sea and Le Bernardin; and the GM Federico Salvador has worked at L’Espalier, Del Posto, and A Voce previously.

Yet we have had a couple of very different, but both poor, visits. Our first visit simply had poor service from start to finish. Our server tried to dissuade us from ordering the tasting menu, and then we saw him once more on the night, about halfway through. Food runners brought our food; when we had a question about the amuse-bouche (which is off-menu), we couldn't flag anyone down until someone came by to clear. She cleared our food, our next course came, and finally someone came by and confirmed that the kitchen had a note that we had a tree nut allergy, so there was nothing to worry about for our meal. With that, we enjoyed the rest of the meal. When dessert came, we were a little confused, when my dish had an extra part compared to my wife's; it turns out they placed the nut and nut-free in front of the wrong person.

More recently, we tried a seafood and caviar themed tasting menu. Arriving at 5:01, we were the third couple waiting at the door to go upstairs for our 5pm reservations. A couple people came in, and walked into the bar section downstairs, as we checked-in. A few minutes later, someone came from upstairs to bring the first couple in line upstairs, and the gentleman behind the desk turned to the second couple, and began checking them in again, requiring the couple to remind him that they'd already done that. Service was not starting well.

It did get better though. Our server Kevin was awesome, energetic, knowledgeable, and accommodating. Unfortunately, our issue this time was with the food as my wife started feeling sick as she started the third course. We decided to leave early, and the restaurant adjusted the bill for our unfinished courses; I was beginning to not feel too well either, but it wasn't until we started home that I began feeling worse, and it had passed after 18 hours.

My theory had been that the broth for the amuse-bouche hadn't been properly heated, while my wife postulates that it was the first course which had been scallops. (The second course was calamari which seemed well cooked, and then we were already feeling unwell by the salmon in the third course.) Regardless of the specific dish, we've decided to write-off Bistro du Midi.

TAK Room

2019-08-13 20:19:29.445

Thomas Aloysius Keller's mid-town restaurant in the Hudson Yards area of western Manhattan. It presents a throw-back to fifty years ago, with continental dinners where preparation is completed at the table, and is somewhere between his Bouchon Bistro and The French Laundry in terms of casualness.

Embassy Suites Baltimore Hotel at BWI Airport Mayrland

2017-06-13 15:59:58.864

A rather disappointing Embassy Suites hotel, although convenient if you'll be nearby the airport for most of your stay (it's also not particularly close to the airport, but located nearby several other options).

The room itself appeared to have been only superficially cleaned; items like the desk, couch, and cabinets had not appeared to have been cleaned under for quite some time. They did not provide the requested My Way benefit (fruit; usually our arrival snack for our toddler), although they did provide junk food. Despite being Hilton Gold, they also required that we sign a waiver that essentially said we would not throw a party at the hotel which seemed quite odd.

ST3000DM001

2015-06-09 22:36:57.378

ST3000DM001 or 7200.14 and formerly the Seagate Barracuda and later simply its Desktop HDD, is prone to failure. When I bought five in July 2012, two of them were dead by 2013, after which I stopped using the other three. In June, 2015, I re-ordered three more (silly me) placing them all in a NAS with a third of the originals failing within the first 24 hours.

The first batch were all made in China, not long after the floods damaged the Thailand supply chain. I'm hoping that the replacements, all from Thailand, are more reliable.

Poetterization

2015-02-02 19:19:05.831

Small is not done.
Make each thing done by one Program.
APIS are unimportant, since the Program does everything.
Others will port the Program for you, so you need not worry about writing for portability.
Text is for humans; the Program reads binary.
Use economic leverage to your advantage.
Build your own shell for scripts.
Avoid user interfaces.

Unix Philosophy

2015-02-02 19:12:02.467

Doug McIlroy (Bell Labs, 1978):
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.

From Mike Gancarz in 1994:

Small is beautiful.
Make each program do one thing well.
Build a prototype as soon as possible.
Choose portability over efficiency.
Store data in flat text files.
Use software leverage to your advantage.
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
Avoid captive user interfaces.
Make every program a filter.

Poetterize

2015-02-02 19:08:06.524

The process by which a federated system is assumed by a fascist monolithic one. These new systems conflict with the established culture, such as the Unix Philosophy in the case of systemd.

"People are working very hard to /depoetterize/ Linux as fast as Red Hat
can /poetterize/ it. Your statement above is a slap in the face to the
people making eudev, vdev, and lots of other stuff."--Steve Litt in <20150202182705.1fb4fe4d@mydesq2.domain.cx>

Lazy programmers

2014-02-09 23:44:25.127

Lazy programmers will spend time up-front to be lazy in the long-run. It takes work to be lazy.

Buzzfeed

2013-12-30 13:35:57.842

A lot of what's wrong with the [[World Wide Web|Web], distilled into one plagiaristic site.

Epson Perfection V700

2013-12-20 09:09:07.456

The Epson Perfection V700 image scanner provides high-resolution (6400dpi) scans with 16-bit per channel resolution. It works quite well with SANE (at least with xsane, other programs seemed to have some issues, and the viewer window in xsane itself is perpetually black). Scanning is surprisingly quiet compared to previous experience and quality quite good. It comes with additional holders for 35mm film, medium format, and slides.

The Grandmaster (2013 film)

2013-12-20 09:00:04.77

The grandmaster (martial arts) is a 2013 film from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) and starring Tony Leung (梁朝偉) as the primary character, historical Ip Man (葉問). The film covers around ages 40-60 of Ip Man, from his fleeing from Foshan to Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War to the founding and development of his academy and fast forwarding to his death.

The film portrays itself as recounting the historical events in Ip Man's life before he created his Hong Kong school which would eventual train a number of famous martial artists, including Bruce Lee. This feels like a mere contrivance—and one which you may reasonably ignore—for scripting a beautiful wuxia film that looks very Wong Kar-wai.

The beautiful fight scenes are worth seeing the movie, which otherwise feels hollow. Much of the script feels rushed from one era to another, or from one fight scene to another. There is less internal dialog and development than in other Wong Kar-wai films. While still present, and perhaps for the best given that any more might have felt fake in the historical context, this leaves a flat feeling to the film.

West of Watertown

2013-04-20 22:05:36.096

It's been a hectic week in eastern Massachusetts, with a police chase happening going right through what used to be part of my daily commute chasing terrorists who lived a block away from where my wife used to work, and ending in a gun fight and manhunt about a mile from the apartment I rented before moving to Cambridge.

The reactions and actions of the politicians and residents has been reassuring—there's been a definite sense that we're all in this together and apparent coöperation. There has been several stories speaking about how the local (city and state) police played a large role in these events which was certain important.

When I arrived at work early Friday, I was unaware of what had happened the previous night and what was still going on in the surrounding area. While my route to work no longer goes through Watertown, the police had established checkpoints at major roads and intersections in the cities adjoining Watertown, which included the town containing my office.

Discovering that the town—and my office by extension—was closed, I left for home a couple hours later, admiring the minimal traffic along the way. The street on which my office sits had about a half-dozen patrol cars in various locations over the course of a mile, itself located fo
ur miles from the cordoned-off area of the morning's firefight and the ensuing dragnet.

With all of that going on, and a metropolitan area of millions of people closed down—possibly costing multiple hundreds of dollars in GDP for the city according to Bloomberg's back-of-the-envelope estimate—the scene just another mile away belied the tension felt in the city. The sun poked in-and-out from behind the clouds, children played basketball and adults played golf.

Tim Allen

2012-10-14 01:11:37.776

1990s era comedian, portraying an ignorant, self-centered, and sometimes misogynistic father figure--a thin Al Bundy.

Economist.com

2012-05-06 14:31:29.655

The Economist is a long-running weekly periodical based in London, England but with various localized editions.

Starting no later than May 2012, eMail addresses which subscribers had provided them began receiving eMail scams without an explanation from the company.

Acolytes (film)

2012-03-31 23:19:48.405

Acolytes seemed like it had promise, but the ending was so ridiculous and nonsensical that any promise prior was suddenly lost. At least the title of the movie is explained shortly before that happens.

Americans don't like coffee

2012-01-31 18:29:27.364

Americans in general don't like coffee. Other than an actual coffee house and fine restaurants, it is nearly impossible to find good coffee in the United States. Usually what one finds is not particularly good coffee which suits most Americans' taste for something in which they can pour cream without feeling like they're drinking something incredibly unhealthy. Americans are quite good at rationalizing their food choices.

Not particularly good coffee

2012-01-31 18:26:26.465

Many restaurants and diners, particularly in the United States, serve not particularly good coffee. The qualities of their coffee which prevent it from being reasonably considered good often involves being watered down and almost universally involves an absolute lack of flavour. My leading theory for why this is that Americans don't like coffee.

Aastra Asterisk codec negotiation issues

2012-01-30 15:08:53.886

It seems that with at least certain version of the Asterisk PBX, and the firmware I am running on my Aastra 6757i phones, the Aastra phone will try to negotiate a 16kbps version of G.711 (presumably as specified in G.711.1), and when Asterisks tries to send audio back to the phone, it isn't converted to an audible form.

I haven't investigated upon which end this problem exists (i.e. whether Asterisks is sending bad or no audio, or if the phone is interpreting it incorrectly). What I can see is that setting the codecs to basic (or manually specifying functional codecs) results in correct audio.

Synchronizing the world of commerce

2011-12-12 16:38:55.03

UPS recently changed its livery to include the slogan "Synchronizing the world of commerce." As a software engineer and programmer with a great interest in synchronization this seemed to be an odd slogan. In software, as in systems in general, being able to synchronize distinct components (say two remote offices) is important as certain operations may require ensuring that components have the same value for some vital information. However, synchronization is a performance bottleneck. When you have a a 30 minute meeting with your four person project group to discuss status, that's two hours of work that's not getting done on the project.

Commerce used to be an extremely synchronous and slow process. Back in Phoenicia, the purchaser arrived in the market and the vendor arrived in the market. This was the first synchronization point. At this point the purchaser browsed (either asynchronously, or while being directed by the purchaser synchronously). If the purchaser did not yet have the vendor's attention, he would now wait (synchronization point) for the vendor's attention before beginning to haggle (this part is a synchronized REPL on both sides). Finally, if there is a sale to be made, the purchaser provides currency, waits for confirmation from the vendor, and then receives and leaves with the product in another synchronous step.

This process hadn't changed significantly since ancient Phoenicia. Less than two decades ago, the most advanced order system would allow you to call on a telephone rather than travel in person, but otherwise the process remained the same. Since the turn of the millennium, most commerce now involves more asynchronous steps. A purchaser now goes online (possibly while the vendor's shop is physically closed and empty), browses and selects an item all asynchronously. The purchaser can make a purchase which is handled independent of the status of the vendor. Once the purchaser completes the purchase, the purchaser is free to do unrelated tasks. The vendor now can acknowledge the order at its leisure, package, and ship the product.

This is where UPS synchronizes the world of commerce. Whereas all elements up until this point could be done asynchronously, the only component right now which can prolong the transaction is UPS which is a bottleneck. The parties must wait for UPS to pick-up the package and subsequently for UPS to transfer the package.

In an asynchronous model, a purchaser has one of two options to determine that it has a package waiting. A purchaser could receive an interrupt (notice) that the package is available (like receiving a subpoena, no matter what you're doing some guy will ask if you know what time it is and suddenly you'll be told you have a package). The other option is that the purchaser could poll frequently, like looking in your mailbox or checking the delivery status online.

In a particularly perverse delivery model however, UPS may operate the last leg in a synchronous manner. This final phase is initiated when the UPS driver arrives at your home while you're at work and announces "Hey, you have a package. Be here in two days between 8am and noon or you'll only have one more chance to get it." At this point you begin your busy wait while the UPS driver shows-up at 2:30pm.

Pig latin

2011-11-20 20:02:55.935

The second language 98% of all software supports.

Why can't I shade my web browser

2011-11-16 21:51:17.924

Because you're using Chromium, fool.

Respect your window manager

2011-11-16 21:50:36.173

Why must some programs, like the Chromium web browser, try and handle window management and decoration in its own way? Why can't I shade my web browser?

Chromium

2011-11-16 21:49:16.35

It does everything better than the other options, and thats why it doesn't have to do anything right. Like respect your window manager. Fuck you Google.

Companies who have not explained why they provided my email address to spammers

2011-11-05 09:25:58.281

Many companies have, either through vulnerabilities sin their own system or through contracted companies, allowed their mailing list information to be accessed via third-parties unintentionally. These companies I would not suggest doing business with, or at least being careful with what information you provide them.

Companies who have admitted breaches resulting in mailing list compromises

2011-11-05 09:25:15.433

Many companies have, either through vulnerabilities sin their own system or through contracted companies, allowed their mailing list information to be accessed via third-parties unintentionally. Fortunately, many of the technically-literate companies have realized that being forthcoming about these vulnerabilities is best for their public relations. Unfortunately, many of these companies outsource their eMail operations to a handful of companies that do not seem to understand security.