Interesting stats for those who think WebApps R All. Not sure what to make of it, though. How is C still being used? C++ seems to be the “must-have-performance” language on the server side, Java is the “IT-blessed” app standard (although most of my tech friends have gone Python or Ruby by now for the business and presentation layers).
What are you seeing? Let me know.
Rushed meal, all of us coming home from various places. No time for anything fancy (like visit to fish market, etc.). Crumster just took frozen scallops, sauteed with garlic and parsley, and served on whole wheat penne. Not because whole wheat penne is so terrific; unlike many whole-grain-ish products it tastes like a bad adaptation. But it fit the Mediterranean-diet construct that is powering (hopefully) my next phase of weight loss.
There it is on the plate, just before eating. Very tasty, even though nothing special. Served with tossed salad.
I’ve been reading through a raft of year-end predictions from the digital advertising-oisie (thanks so much AdExchanger.com for putting it all together).
I’m not an advertising “native” as you might say, but just a humble investor in advertising technologies, platforms, agencies, and next-big-things. So the vocabulary takes some getting used to.
But something just struck me: most of the predictions are all about using “data” to gain insight into the “intent” of members of an “audience”.
I’ve got a novel idea: why not just ask them?
What made search advertising such a rock-star was that you don’t have to guess what the searcher is interested in: they’re telling you. Not perfectly. Not always. But it’s a big step in the right direction.
All kinds of targeting approaches jump through hoops to try to guess a prospect’s intent. These schemes are ingenious: if you combine context, history, behavior, offline data, and social network, you know a whale of a lot about the prospect. But it’s still incredibly hard to know what’s on their mind.
I’m looking for advertising breakthroughs which, like search, piggyback off an obvious indication of intent. That’s where we should be investing next.
Have you run across anything along these lines? Let me know…
Conversations with customers, analysts, and vendors in the storage industry throughout 2010 convinced me that “backup” as we have known it is going the way of CRT tube “burn-in” orarchiving to optical media. Backup is going away, and will soon be dead.
Consider Storage Newsletter.com. Or Backup is Broken, by Wikibon. Or even Steven Foskett, who acknowledges what a chunk of the traditional backup use case is being taken over by “new technologies” even as he tries to carve out a continuing place for backup.
Behind all the provocative language, we are looking toward a future when a “window” of time taken up with data management to the exclusion of all else in the storage system will be a thing of the past. Whatever forms data protection take in the future – and technologies like replication, snapshots, CDP, etc. are only the beginning – they will be increasingly transparent, seamless, and continuous. And backup systems, shorn of the obligation to manage the lack of transparency, will increasingly become metadata catalogs with a variety of uses including backup/restore but also including the likes of discovery, content-addressability, or even semantic inference. The backup system and the file system, in a word, will converge.
So, Mara’s back from Africa for the next few weeks, and this has induced a flurry of CrummyCooking. Up from once a week more-or-less to two or three times a week.
This last week I got some cod at Black Salt (not the same without the very impressive MJ there, I must say), and got more than I needed. Debbie baked the cod, but we had quite a bit left over.
Something inspired me to make it into cod croquettes, which are (in this case) sauteed patties of fish together with onions, spices, and “binder” (in this case, mashed potato).
Here are the croquettes coming out of the fridge, ready to be sauteed.
Here is Mara with the salad.
We also had Brussels Sprouts browned in butter-and-oil, but they were a bit underdone.
Croquettes were very fragile even after cooking, but tasted great.
Debbie’s been hankering to have this dish at home since she had it at Nobu in New York, and doubly so since the Careful Cook Mary made it a year ago at her house.
I’ve begun to buy my fish where Josh and Mary do – Black Salt Fish Market in the Palisades – the really good guy MJ who is the manager of the market told me the other day that fresh black cod was in. I was in!
There are a bunch of Nobu-esque recipes for this dish on the web (which is why I call it “a la Nobu” here); I used this one from foodandwine.com since it seemed to have the chef’s imprimatur on it.
What I didn’t realize before I brought the cod home is that it has to be marinated at least overnight to get the taste. The recipe says it should even be marinated more, although Josh told me that would just make it taste salty. So we let it sit overnight and had it last night.
Here’s the cod on the plate just before consumption. It was really delicious. It’s a great silky unctuous fish to begin with – basically the sable of my childhood, which, along with smoked salmon, smoked whitefish, and smoked sturgeon, were the set pieces of a visit to my grandma’s house – and the marinade hits my sweet-and-salty spot perfectly.
It was not as elegant-looking as Mary’s. She got all the marinade off before grilling (where I just got most) and got it to look as silky and elegant as it tastes. Anyhow, great dish.
We had broccoli with garlic-infused olive oil and salad on the side.
Got intrigued this week with the idea of poaching a salmon in olive oil, which basically involves longer cooking at a pretty low temperature (as oil goes).
Here’s an Epicurious recipe to give you the idea, although it’s not the one I followed. Mine came from a (shudder) legacy printed cookbook that my cousin Nina gave us a couple of years ago (before the CrummyCook phase began, but after I had begun to express an interest in cooking better).
The book is The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, from which Debbie had made a slow-baked salmon recipe some time ago that we had liked.
The promise of oil-poached salmon is that the fish looks very fresh, perhaps even a bit uncooked, and is not dried out, but is properly-done. Sort of a cooked-sashimi blend.
Verdict? Debbie and I were a bit disappointed. It used up a boatload of oil (although, to be fair, they claimed you could reuse the oil since the cooking temperature is so low) and didn’t turn out much different from the slow-baked recipe.
I’d like to try it again, since the Web is loaded with paeans to the deliciousness of the technique. But probably not for a while.
My zeal for WeightWatchers has been flagging in the last few weeks, and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I have to pick a new diet every 6-12 months. Something about the new diet restores my obsessiveness and zeal to adhere. Serial monogamy with diets, I guess. In any case, it has worked so far.
So the latest thing I’m going to try is the “Mediterrean diet”.
I ordered "The Mediterrean Prescription" from Amazon using my sophisticated algorithm of picking the most popular book that meets my search criteria (“Mediterrean Diet”).
And for this week’s CrummyCook I searched for “Mediterrean Chicken” on WeightWatchers and came up with a recipe for Greek Lemon-Chicken Thighs and Potatoes. Basically marinate chicken thighs (boneless & skinless of course) in a lemon-oregano marinade and bake with small potatoes. I only had chicken breasts, but what the heck.
When Debbie saw the marinating chicken, she said “why not have Avgolemno soup to start"? She’s big on starting with soup after coming back from Canyon Ranch, where soup quells the demon of gluttony in part. So I looked up egg and lemon soup in the Joy of Cooking, and it was pretty simple. Cook rice in chicken stock and slowly stir in an egg and lemon mixture.
Voila! Not too shabby. Needed salt, but tasted pretty good.
Not so much the main dish. It tasted like diet food: light on fats and heavy on lemon and oregano. And I overcooked the chicken breasts (which, of course, turn to sawdust at the drop of a hat). Not terrible, but not my best effort either.
Home alone last night (Debbie is at a Grand Spa which she describes as an elegant 24/7 gym) and wanted to use some feta we got last weekend at the farmers’ market. I’ve also had a yen for some time to have stuffed peppers (which Debbie hates for some reason; she is not keen on peppers except raw in salads).
Epicurious to the rescue with Couscous and Feta Stuffed Peppers, an old SELF Magazine where I jacked up the oil to some extent and used fully-leaded chicken stock (in fact I used some kind of “Chicken Garlic Soup” from Whole Foods which looked enough like stock for the Crumster’s purposes.
I’ve always been big on the idea of getting all the ingredients ready before commencing to cook. I now know (thanks to "Cooking for Geeks") that the French call this mise en scene (as the billboard used to say in Harvard Square when I was young, “Whatever it is it sounds better in French”), so I’ve been practicing proper mise en scene for years without knowing it.
In any case, here’s the mise en scene for the stuffed peppers. Pepper cases on the left, stuffing parts on the right.
They came out well. Very tasty. Although the woman who sold us the feta told us we could wash it in fresh water and make it less salty, I left it pretty salty because I love salt, and it was veggie and salty and crunchy all at once. Great meal.
From WeightWatchers (For Men, for some reason) Online, I did the Tuscan Casserole recipe because I had leftover black bean soup and ricotta. They called for canned cannellini beans, and I tried to talk myself into substituting the black bean soup, finally decided it would taste too gross, and opened a can of kidney beans (closest I had to what they asked).
A not-too-flattering photo of the innards of it (Oh, I put home-made croutons (a CrummyCook regular nowadays as the solution to Terminal Bread Syndrome) on top instead of the torn-up bread pieces they called for. You get the idea, sort of a diet veggie casserole kind of thing. Not bad.
