Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

The world’s best chocolate comes from the criollo variety of Venezuela, renowned for its complex and subtle flavor. Unfortunately, this variety, the original and purest variant of cacao, is fragile and has poor yields, making it expensive to produce. That’s why bars like Amedei Porcelana sell for more than $10 per tablet.

Fortunately, there are inexpensive alternatives. For those who live near that great South California institution, Trader Joe’s, run, don’t walk, to stock up on Chocovic Ocumare, which retails for a mere $1.79 a bar. Chocovic is based in Barcelona, and has a line of single-origin Southern American chocolates named in honor of their places of origin (Ocumare is a coastal cacao-growing district of Aragua state in Venezuela). Few people immediately associate Spain with chocolate, but the Spaniards are the ones who first imported the cocoa bean to Europe, and Spain obviously maintains a close relationship with Latin American nations which produce the best cacao (unlike the more industrial but lower grade stuff that comes from Ghana/Ivory Coast and South-East Asia).

As with all criollos, the Ocumare is relatively mild but has a very rich taste that lingers in the mouth. It may seem like sacrilege to use it for cooking, but when made into a ganache and poured as a frosting over a cake, it is simply phenomenal. Just make sure the cake in question is exceptional enough to deserve this truly regal treatment…

Once you have used a digital SLR (DSLR) with a nice, clean, large, low-noise sensor, the poor image quality of most compact digicams becomes hard to tolerate. This is in contrast with film, where a $70 Olympus Stylus Epic can compete in image quality with thousand-dollar cameras.

Then it hit me: don’t consider a pocket digicam as a camera, think of it as a pocket photocopier/scanner instead, like HP’s ill-fated CapShare. I use my pocket digicam mostly to record specials in stores, flyers, magazine articles, diagrams on a whiteboard and the like. Japanese otaku teenagers are way ahead of me, as many bookstores in Tokyo now ban cameraphones because the kids would just snap photos of manga comic books and not pay.

A 5 megapixel digicam, pretty mainstream nowadays, with a 4:3 aspect ratio can “scan” a standard US Letter or A4 page at an approximate resolution of 240 spi. This is significantly better than a fax, which scans at 150 spi. Many pocket digicams have lenses that are serviceable in macro mode. The limiting factor is probably setting up the camera, as you can’t find portable copy stand like the vintage Leica BOOWU (also shown top left in this outfit photo).

Since I moved six years ago, I keep my CDs in binders (four of them, plus one for DVDs and two for CD-ROMs) and the jewel cases in storage. I just finished ripping the first folder’s worth, about 250 CDs and SACDs in iTunes. The bulk of the time spent is actually in cleaning up inconsistent CDDB metadata and locating scans of the cover art. As I mentioned earlier, I am ripping to Apple’s lossless encoding, which is a lossless zip-style compression of the 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo PCM CD audio stream. There is no loss of quality and my iTunes library should now be a bit-for-bit exact copy of my CD collection (or at least the third or so I have already ripped).

Because there is no loss of quality, I won’t have to go through the effort again, whereas if I had ripped to a lossy format like MP3 or AAC, I would need to do so again to play on my HiFi setup or if the level of compression was too high. Hard drives are cheap, and storing 250GB of music is no longer the daunting prospect it was a few years ago. Lossy formats like MP3 take detail away, rather than introducing noise, and thus it is not immediately obvious just how much damage was done, but side-by-side listening makes it clear. I always find it very amusing to read people nit-picking about subtle details of audiophile gear, and then basing their subjective judgment on testing with MP3s or (even worse) video game soundtracks played over a PC sound card.

Due to electromagnetic interference, a PC chassis is the last place you want to put quality analog audio circuitry. The way to go is to hook up a PC or Mac’s Toslink optical or SPDIF coaxial digital audio output to an external digital to analog converter (“DAC”, such as the one built into every home theater surround receiver). This situation is reminiscent of high-end CD players, where the laser pickup mechanism (“transport”) is in a different box from the DAC to improve quality. I do most of my listening from my Mac connected to my Yamaha home theater connected by Toslink, or from Sennheiser HD-650 headphones connected to a Headroom DAC and headphone amp (via USB).

There are alternatives to a direct connection, such as a Squeezebox, Apple AirPort Express, or one of the lesser devices that allow you to stream music from your computer to your amplifier via a wired or wireless local area network. WiFi may be fashionable, but I don’t recommend using it for streaming audio or video because the jitter introduced by interferences degrades sound quality.

Streaming sound over the house is of course the first step in building a home network. Market studies show most people use a home network only to share Internet access or a printer between several computers, and they haven’t yet reached even this first stage. One of the most obvious uses for home networking is remote monitoring using a webcam, but this hasn’t been marketed effectively. Remote control of TiVo is another non-contrived application, much appreciated by their users.

Given the overwhelming amount of gadgetry that clutters my tiny San Francisco-size apartment, it is natural I have a home network, entirely wired, although I do have WiFi for visitors. In an idle moment, I mapped it (PDF) as a practical exercise in using OmniGraffle instead of Visio. One conclusion I drew from a cursory analysis of it is that all the networking gear combined did not amount as much in value as my headphones alone. Home networking as a category is not going to dominate consumer electronics anytime soon…

I have released version 0.5 of Temboz. This version makes considerable improvements in its tracking of feed changes. Feeds where the GUID is distinct from the link are now handled correctly. Some feeds have a tendency to modify articles and reissue them with a different GUID or link, causing them to appear as duplicates. This is often the case with Reuters and Sun blogs (Sun is now handled as a special case in the feed normalization code). If the optional title-based duplicate detection flag is set on a feed (go into the feed details page from the all feeds view), articles with duplicate titles will not be recorded twice in the database. This is not on by default, as it could cause false positives on some feeds that have recurring titles.

The other big feature in this release is that Temboz now automatically backs up its database nightly, and keeps a configurable number of daily backups (7 by default).

These changes require a data model upgrade. A script is provided to perform the upgrade, as well as another one to reconcile items already recorded where the GUID differs from the link. Upgrade instructions are provided in the UPGRADE file. All users are advised to upgrade.

Somebody at Oracle clearly spent a lot of time creating a quad-precision floating package that exploits the 38 digits of the built-in Number type. Pointless, yet impressive.

SQL> select to_char(exp(1)) from dual;

TO_CHAR(EXP(1))
----------------------------------------
2.71828182845904523536028747135266249776

SQL> select to_char(4*atan(1)) from dual;

TO_CHAR(4*ATAN(1))
----------------------------------------
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288422