Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I am pleased to announce the release of Temboz 0.8.

The main change in this release is its ability to work with either SQLite 2.x or SQLite 3.x. SQLite 3.x is now the recommended version, see the Temboz Wiki for upgrade instructions. SQlite 3.x improves performance, database file sizes and concurrency, but it also introduced a condition where Temboz could deadlock, hence the long incubation time for this release.

Another enhancement is the ability to sort feeds by Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). The default view for the all feeds page will list high-quality feeds with unread articles first. If you are catching up with many articles, it pays to concentrate on the richest lodes of information first, and possibly prune those that no longer provide an adequate level of interesting information..

I have a number of feature requests I received from users or thought up myself. You are welcome to suggest others on the ticket page for Temboz CVStrac.

One of the benefits of having written my own feed aggregator, Temboz, is that I get to implement the functionality I want to make my life more productive. The most essential one is filtering out articles in subjects I am not interested. One of the first companies to make the cut of those I shun entirely was SCO. I consider them so despicable I don’t even want to hear about them, unlike the hyperventilating Slashdot crowd. Since then, a number of other companies have joined them, most recently Sony. And in the spirit of “a pox on both houses”, I now tune out anything related to either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

That said, this form of shunning could fairly be described as passive-aggressive, not constructive. The fact I will no longer entertain the idea of buying a Playstation 3, and probably many others like me, will probably have some effect on Sony’s sales, but their marketing people analyzing sales figures will almost certainly have no clue their contemptible attitude to DRM is costing them. Much of modern economics is grounded in information theory, specially how markets break down in the presence of asymmetric information. If you want your product choices to have real impact, you need to go further.

Corporations are not monolithic entities, all carefully tailored appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. That’s why the New York Attorney-General, Eliot Spitzer is so effective against crooked Wall Street firms (like his predecessor Rudy Giuliani before him), corrupt record labels and the like. Even if a fine is small compared to a firm’s profits, it has to come out of somebody’s budget, and few careers survive that kind of blow. One fired employee, even a high-ranking one, is not much either compared to the typical large corporation’s staffing, but it will have a disproportionate effect on the remaining employees’ behavior. This has been very visible at IBM and now Microsoft after their anti-trust cases, even if in the latter case it seems to be more of a subconscious hesitancy to get anything done.

The average consumer does not have the punitive powers of a Spitzer at his disposal, but there is another way. Unless a corporation is terminally dysfunctional, it will have clear lines of accountability, all the way to the CEO reporting to the Board. The power we have is to dispel the cloud of obfuscation that some may use to to keep their upper management in the dark about the consequences of their actions.

Writing a letter to the CEO can be surprisingly effective. You have to keep in mind the average public company CEO works upwards of 70 hours per week. That lack of free time, combined with their affluence means they are usually out of touch with reality, and need to be reminded of it. This has to be a letter, preferably on good stationery, typewritten but hand-signed. Emails simply do not carry much weight in the worlds of politics or business, because they are so easily written and thus not evidence of commitment. Usually you want to skip flunkies and go straight to the top, but if the CEO is on record supporting the policies you object to, you will have to copy your letter to the president or the chairman of the Board.

Many companies have started monitoring blogs and forums for possible PR headaches (or subcontract this reputation monitoring work to specialized firms). Blogging about your experiences is another good way to get their attention.

There are limits to what an individual can accomplish. If a corporation is dead-set in its ways, collective action is required. In many ways, the American consumer movement has atrophied since the days of Ralph Nader’s crusade against Detroit, whereas the opposite trend holds true in Europe. There are many fine organizations like the EFF that are fighting for your rights, and sometimes even public officials, local or national.

Here are my picks for the best chocolate places in the city (note: updated 2013-04-20):

• Chocolate merchants: Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered has made leaps and strides in the last 5 years, and beat previous favorite Fog City News
• Honorable mention: Fog City News, an impressive lineup tended by the knowledgeable owner, Adam Smith. Also the chocolate section at Rainbow Co-op.
• Chocolate bouchées: Cocoa Bella. This shop is a chocolate integrator: it collects chocolates from small chocolatiers across the world and brings them under a single roof. They also make hot chocolate.
• Honorable mention: Michael Recchiuti makes scrumptious confections, and his burnt caramel chocolate covered hazelnuts are to die for, as are many of his bars. Try also his Chocolate Lab in the Dogpatch for a cafe experience.
• Chocolate maker: Guittard. This fourth-generation family of chocolatiers, originally from France, have been supplying professionals like Recchiuti for a century and half. The best dessert I ever had in America was a Guittard chocolate and cherry cake at Eno in Atlanta, of all places. They now have a retail line of very high quality.
• Dishonorable mentions:
  • Scharffen-Berger: part of the evil Hershey empire, who are lobbying to have FDA standards watered down (so mockolate made with margarine can be passed off as real chocolate)
  • Tcho: overrated, and very simplistic, although their “Tchunky Tchotella” bar is amusing
  • Dandelion: sleazy hipster outfit that turns good raw ingredients into crude dreck
  • L’Amourette: another overrated local brand. The packaging for their “70% Dark Chocolate Gold” screams “Venezuela” and “Sur Del Lago”, but only mentions in small type they use the inferior Trinitario cacao instead of the noble Criollo the provenance (and price) would imply.
• Hot chocolate: Christopher Elbow on Gough & Hayes has an intense hazelnut-flavored hot chocolate.
• Honorable mention: Charles Chocolates (disclaimer: I am an investor)
• Chocolate pastries: Cafe Madeleine, a.k.a. Jil’s Patisserie, formerly of Burlingame, now made in their New Montgomery Street shop (with two additional locations on California and O’Farrell).
• Honorable mentions: Miette in the Ferry Building. Tartine’s chocolate hazelnut tart. B Patisserie’s chocolate Kouign Amann.

See also my Google map of the best sweet treats in San Francisco

Starr Ridge red onion, pistachio and asiago crackers are insanely great. I am officially hooked.

For a very long time, the only reason I still used a Windows PC at home (apart from games, of course) was my reliance on IMatch. IMatch is a very powerful image cataloguing database program (a software category also known as Digital Asset Management), The thing that sets IMatch apart from most of its competition is its incredibly powerful category system, which essentially puts the full power of set theory at your fingertips.

Most other asset management programs either pay perfunctory attention to keywords, or require huge amounts of labor to set up, which is part of the cost of doing business for a stock photo agency, but not for an individual. The online photo sharing site Flickr popularized an equivalent system, tagging, which has the advantage of spanning multiple users (you will never be able to get many users to agree on a common classification schema for anything, tags are a reasonable compromise).

Unfortunately, IMatch is not available on the Mac. Canto Cumulus is cross-platform and has recently introduced something similar to IMatch’s categories, but it is expensive, and has an obscenely slow image import process (it took more than 30 hours to process 5000 or so photos from my collection on my dual-2GHz PowerMac G5 with 5.5GB of RAM!). Even Aperture is not that slow… I managed to kludge a transfer from IMatch to Cumulus using IMatch’s export functions and jury-rigging category import in Cumulus by reverse-engineering one of their data formats.

Cumulus is very clunky compared to IMatch (it does have the edge in some functions like client-server network capabilities for workgroups), and I had resigned myself to using it, until I stumbled upon Shoebox (thanks to Rui Carmo’s Tao of Mac). Shoebox (no relation to Kodak’s discontinued photo database bearing the same name) offers close to all the power of IMatch, with a much smoother and more usable interface to boot (IMatch is not particularly difficult if you limit yourself to its core functionality, but it does have a sometimes overwhelming array of menus and options).

Andrew Zamler-Carhart, the programmer behind Shoebox, is very responsive to customer feedback, just like Mario Westphal, the author of IMatch — he actually implemented a Cumulus importer just for me, so moving to it was a snap (and much faster than the initial import into Cumulus). That in itself is a good sign that there will always be a place in the software world for the individual programmer, even in the world of “shrinkwrap software”, especially since the distribution efficiencies of the Internet have lowered the barrier to entry.

Shoebox is a Mac app through and through, with an attention to detail that shows. It makes excellent use of space, as on larger monitors like mine (click on the screen shot to see it at full resolution) or dual-monitor setups, and image categorization is both streamlined and productive. As an example, Shoebox fully supports using the keyboard to quickly classify images by typing the first few letters of a category name, with auto-completion, without requiring you to shift focus to a specific text box (this non-modal keyboard synergy is quite rare in the Macintosh world). It also has the ability to export categories to Spotlight keywords so your images can be searched by Spotlight. I won’t describe the user interface, since Kavasoft has an excellent guided tour.

No application is perfect, and there are a few minor issues or missing features. Shoebox does not know how to deal with XMP, limiting possible synergies with Adobe Photoshop and the many other applications that support XMP like the upcoming Lightroom. It would also benefit from improved RAW support – my Canon Digital Rebel XT CR2 thumbnails are not auto-rotated, for instance, but the blame for that probably lies with Apple. The application icon somehow invariably reminds me of In-n-Out burgers. The earlier versions of Shoebox had some stability problems when I first experimented with them, but the last two have been quite solid.

I haven’t started my own list of the top ten “must have” Macintosh applications, but Shoebox certainly makes the cut. If you are a Mac user and photographer, you owe it to yourself to try it and see how it can make your digital photo library emerge from chaos. I used to say IMatch was the best image database bar none, but nowadays I must add the qualification “for Windows”, and Shoebox is the new king across all platforms.