News You Can Bruise for 2005 October

I started writing some documentation for Rubyful Soup. Only about halfway done, but it's a good start. I've learned a lot about technical writing in the past couple months, as you can tell by comparing the documentation files for the two Soups.

Sometimes I think about going to culinary school, but it would be a big waste of money because I doubt I could ever be happy making food for a living. However I am always on the lookout for ways to be a dilletante on the cheap, so I just bought a cooking school textbook for self-teaching. We'll see how it goes.

Forthcoming NYCB entries: big changes, Ruby stuff, fun with Amazon wish lists and AWS tomfoolery. I am basically just typing stuff because I don't want to go to sleep yet.

Link from waxy, which has seemingly picked up an interest in recommendation engines.

• Oklahoma.

I have a likely gig lined up at Broadband Mechanics after the book is done. But they keep getting business and they need more people now, especially Javascript ECMAScript DHTML AJAX hackers. If you're interested email Phillip.

Unlike trendy repositories like LibraryThing and AllConsuming, Amazon wish lists are free and reasonably fast. I've tried local spreadsheets but wish lists are easier to keep updated, and you can do more stuff with them. Amazon gives each account multiple named wish lists, and it has a (read-only, blah) RESTish API. The features it doesn't have (tagging, mainly) I don't really need, though I would like to be able to comment on a book and retrieve my comment through the API.

Among the wish lists I'm using for nontraditional purposes are the requisite list of books I own, divided into books I've read and books I haven't. I'm starting to maintain a list of all the books I've read, though I started about 23 years too late. I have separate lists for my cookbooks and movies that Sumana and I plan to rent. Et cetera.

Amazon has a horrible interface for showing you your wish list. It's designed to make you buy things from the wish list, preferably things that show up on the first page of results. But its interface for finding something and adding it to a wish list is the easiest I've used. As for looking at the list that's why the Pocket Wisherman was invented (no, really, that's why). The only problem comes when I read a book and need to find it in one list to move it to another.

I have 2 or 3 books that don't have ISBNs and don't show up on Amazon. I don't know how to keep track of those. On the whole it works out pretty well. If you want to keep online lists of books or other cultural artifacts, and don't mind (or relish the thought of) writing the display code yourself, consider using an Amazon wish list. If you also keep a "real" wish list on Amazon, don't give any shipping information for your subsidiary lists. This will make it more difficult for people to use Amazon to buy you things from those lists.

Next time: exploiting price information. (I also cover this in more detail in the Python book.)

If you only want to make an annotated list of all your books then use LibraryThing. It's fast, easy to use, and the data is reliable. You can simulate multiple discrete lists by using tags. It costs $10, which is not much compared to other things you've paid for. You could also use All Consuming, which is free and does non-books, but was really slow when I tried to use it (which was a long time ago). You could also use one of the 200 bookshelf applications sure to show up on Ning. You could buy Delicious Library for your Mac, which uses a webcam as a barcode scanner. You could, in short, use whatever incarnation of this particular project tickles your fancy, because your fancy is not tickled by external APIs.

If you want to build a list of books and then use it as a data structure, then Amazon wish lists are the only game in town operating on a higher level than a Z39.50 binding: see for instance this NYCB from last year, before I got REST religion. Amazon provides some interesting data not available through other APIs, like prices and sales rank, but you can join on ISBN to get that data, so a lot of the things in the series will be applicable to people with Tyrannioware or other Z39.50 systems.

As we know, Japanese robot technology is making great advances. Once a gigantic humanized robot was only an imaginary object, but it will be made in the future. We wonder whether it is in demand or not.

That reminds me, I need to finish the postmodern Godzilla fanfic I was going to serialize a million years ago... aw, who am I fooling?

I bring this up now because there's an Italian deli on Valencia I've always wanted to go into, and today we were there when it was open and we did go into it and they had little bags of squid ink for sale. We were on Valencia to have a dinner to celebrate my newfound unemployment. We ate at the fittingly-named Last Supper Club, which was tasty. Sumana liked it more than I did. I would probably have liked it more if we'd had a cheese course instead of dessert: I really had my eye on the gorgonzola fondue.

The first time we ate on Valencia it was at an Italian restaurant called Bistro Annex. I got suckered by the romantic candles on the tables. It was not good eats, though apparently it's a spin-off of Watercress, which we've been to and liked. Bistro Annex had subcontracted their desserts to a dessert company, and the dessert company had printed up a dessert menu that was a lot flashier than the main menu. It was, I realize, disturbingly like Brendan's restaurant that instead of having a kitchen just goes to other restaurants to fulfil your order.

Basically we should have gone to the Salvadorean restaurant next door. We still haven't been to that restaurant, but it probably would have been pretty good.

Anyway, I have just recently started to really observe restaurant kitchens. The neatest thing at Last Supper Cafe was how they cook the pasta. They have deep-fryer machines full of water which they occasionally top off from a pot set under a barely dripping tap. To cook a bunch of spaghetti they drop it into the basket of the deep fryer. When it's done they pull out the basket and reuse the boiling water. It's probably some specialized $600 pasta-boiling machine but it basically looks like a deep fryer full of water instead of oil.

In the web services portion of Beginning Python I demonstrate a web service client that goes through an Amazon wish list looking for bargains. A bargain is defined as an item available used through Amazon for some small fraction of its new price.

There are lots of bargains because many people think they can make money selling used books online for a penny and making it up in volume. Actually they think they can make it up by skimming money off the $3.50 shipping surcharge that Amazon charges the buyer. But they might as well be trying to make it up in volume, because $3.50 is not that much when you think of the labor involved in determining the book's condition, doing the data entry, then when someone buys the book finding it, packaging it, and shipping it out. That kind of low wage is usually associated with foolhardy professions like writing the books in the first place.

But people persist in listing books online at sub-yard-sale prices, and even when you tack on $3.50 for shipping you can find lots of good deals on books you wanted to buy anyway. The formula I would use today (slightly different from the one in the book) would be to add the UsedPrice for an item to the shipping cost (assumed $3.50), then consider the item a "bargain" if the total cost is 25% or less of Amazon's OurPrice.

Ideally you would have a script that generated an RSS feed containing all the current bargains on your wish list. I haven't written this useful program yet because my pressing concern right now is slowing down the rate at which I acquire books from my wish list.

Recently I was given an Amazon gift certificate. You can't use gift certificates on used items because you're not really buying from Amazon. The rational way to use them is on things that aren't available used, or that cost just as much used as new. In other words, anti-bargains. Tweak the threshold algorithm and by bargain finder script became an anti-bargain finder.

The anti-bargain finder relies on the assumption that used availability on Amazon is proportional to used availability in the real world. If there were some book that crowded used bookstores in the real world but wasn't being sold used on Amazon at all, it would be falsely flagged as an anti-bargain. This is unlikely to happen because so many of the used listings on Amazon come from real-world used bookstores in the first place.

I think I had another hack idea in this category but I can't remember it at the moment. These are pretty simple ideas but they can save you money.

Jake Berendes sent me an awesome stuffed mola mola today. By coincidence I sent him a less awesome thing today.

Also today O'Reilly sent me a "new author" package with some books about writing and a T-shirt. Basically I think they are trying to make me feel like I'm a college freshman and they are my supportive parents. Every month they'll send me a box of cookies or something.

My ideal audience for these ads are the people who come into my site on really weird search requests that I can't help them with. Often times someone will do a search for, say, a game called Rat Poker with colorful rats that you color coordinate. For the median person who comes into my site on that search request, Crummy is a smorgasbord of disappointment. My scintillating discussion of mola molas and scripting languages are ashes in their mouth. Assuming I'd ever talked about games in which you color-coordinate rats (the plague has never been so stylish!) it would have been a computer hippy Linux game reviewed in a Game Roundup, or some crusty old DOS game in the Da Warren archives.

But there's a slightly larger chance that some programmer has recently written a Flash game that's all about picking the right rat to go with your jacket, and is advertising it through AdSense. The search request person should have just clicked on the AdSense ad for Barbie Rat Shop in the first place. But if the same ad shows up on my page and they click on it, I get money.

I have tried to make these ads unobtrusive by picking the most boring color scheme on offer, in keeping with the philosophy of design simplicity that drives all of our efforts here at crummy.com. Let me know if they bother you nonetheless. They sort of bother me, mainly because I've already had to tell Google not to use my site to push ads for the PublishAmerica vanity press, but also because there's sleazy impossible-to-block-all-of-it "give us your personal information and receive a tasty herring!" stuff. What kind of way is that to make a living? Whatever happened to making money the old fashioned way, by putting ads on your website and writing about random crap?

• 1.5c rice
• 1 T peanut oil
• turmeric
• *curry leaves (I don't remember whether they go here or in the skillet, but if they're like bay leaves they should go in here.)
• salt
• water

Put in rice cooker.

• mustard seed
• *chana (?) Sumana's mother said this was a spice but it seems to be a lentil. Maybe it was "chana [something]" and I just wrote down "chana".
• 2 T peanut oil

Fry in skillet. When it starts popping, add:

• *3 red or green chilis, chopped (we used a bunch of cayenne powder)
• handful of nuts (peanuts or cashews)
• handful of unsweetened shredded coconut

Fry it up. Deglaze with

• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 t sugar

If you have timed everything correctly the rice in the cooker is now about 5 minutes from being done. Drain the excess water from it, and dump the rice into the skillet. Stir, cover, let sit until it's done.

Cleaning tip: chop the lemon rind into quarters and put one of the quarters into the rice cooker pot. Fill with water and turn on the rice cooker for 5 minutes. The turmeric mess will wipe away.

"Then, how did you suppose your sister was going to read it?"

Schnitzel was smiling to himself

"Schnitzel, you certainly are a magnificent liar"

"I think," said Ainsley, "they have lost their way"

"Was it you," demanded young Andrews, in a puzzled tone, "or your brother who tried to knife me?"

Mr. Thorndike stood irresolute, and then sank back into his chair

"Do I look as easy as that, or are you just naturally foolish?"

She was easily the prettiest and most striking-looking woman in the room

Sumana: Really makes you think, huh?
Leonard: Yes, but not about anything in particular.

• 1.5 cups toor dahl (ie. yellow lentils)
• Turmeric
• 1 package fresh green beans, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 2 small potatoes or 1 big potato, diced (I would add more potato, personally).
• 3-4 tomatoes, diced

• 1/2 of the flesh of a coconut

I scooped it out with a melon baller. Save half of it for the raitha. The other half goes into the blender and gets chopped into coconut flakes. Then to the blender add:

• 5 stalks cilantro
• Sambar powder. here's a recipe. Sumana's mother gave me a bag of it; probably you can buy it at a local Indian store.
• 1/2 stick cinnamon
• A little water

Blend into a paste. Scrape into the dahl and stir. Now the sambar is basically ready and just needs to cook some more. While it cooks make the raitha. To the leftover coconut add:

• 1 cucumber, peeled and grated
• 1 serrano chile, diced
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 1 tomato, diced

Stir to combine. Finish the sambar with about a tablespoon of brown sugar and 2 teaspoons of salt. Finish the raitha with 3/4 teaspoon of salt. Serve with rice.

I like putting the raitha on top of the sambar as a sauce. Sumana thinks this is really weird. But I used to put ranch dressing on top of pizza, and this is an analagous situation. To me, it is Sumana's habit of eating the raitha completely separately that is weird.

Incidentally, when I saw Austin Powers I did not get the Macarena reference at all. I only got it a couple days ago after Sumana painstakingly explained every aspect of the joke. I thought Dr. Evil was walking like a toy robot, making a sound a toy robot might make while walking. I actually like this explanation of his behavior a lot better.

I also wrote a song. It's an "I Will Survive" type anthem to be sung by Godzilla, and it will go on the next album. I had to give Kevin's drum machine back, and still haven't figured out how to record on the computer, so who knows when that album will be forthcoming. My writing breaks are good opportunities to practice, though.

Anyway, today when I wasn't writing I spent a lot of time playing Angband spinoff #300, Troubles of Middle-Earth. As the name indicates it's sort of a Tolkien-themed Angband variant. Yes, Angband itself is supposed to be Tolkien-themed but it's just not enough for some people. This game lets you gallivant all around Middle-Earth and jumbles the three ages all together for your delectability.

There's also a bunch of weird stuff like Deathmolds. I don't think any of those supplemental volumes of Tolkien's obscure myths mention Deathmolds, or any kind of sentient molds for that matter. I think I'd have heard about that. This obsessive eclectiveness (really the defining feature of the roguelike genre) yields some weird features though. As usual with Angband clones, I was having a great time until my carefully constructed character was cloberred by something significantly more powerful than myself.

Best self-reference I've seen in a long time.

You may have noticed that I try to avoid telling you about my dreams unless some aspect of the dream would be interesting if I'd thought of it while awake. There's no need to thank me for this, though large cash donations are always appreciated. Anyway, last night I dreamed I was reading a Terry Pratchett book and weird punctuation started creeping into the middle of the words. There'd be a string of periods or an exclamation mark where it didn't belong. More and more of these strange characters started showing up in the text, and then you turned the page and there was a two-page spread that looked like a screenshot from a roguelike game. In retrospect all the weird characters made sense within the roguelike game, and the screenshot accurately represented the state of the plot of that scene in the book.

It would be pretty neat if someone could actually do this for a nontrivial story, but it seems like a task similar to the map of Rome in Gigamesh that you see if you only look at the commas.