In Commentary on
4 May 2010 tagged Treme, TV with 1 comment
First, some links that are worth noting from last week.
There’s an article about Donald Harrison, Jr., the musician who recorded the version of “My Indian Red” that played over the credits of episode 3, at Nola.com. Here’s what he says about Clarke Peters playing Big Chief Lambreaux:
I think what the series has picked up on is the seriousness that people who do that have. They maintain the culture and the spirituality of it, and the transcendence from everyday life. Those are some of the things I think Clarke really brings out. And the regal nature of being a big chief.
Back of Town is a Tremé blog.
Finally, a couple of books by Ned Sublette that David Simon cited as influences for Tremé: The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square and The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans.
In addition to several former members of the cast of The Wire featured on last nights’ show, writer George Pelecanos slipped in a reference to Hamsterdam early in episode 4.
The Apple Barrel is a local bar in New Orleans.
The term langiappe finally reared its ugly head last night. It’s an authentic bit of New Orleans culture, but trotting it out as they did is liable to irritate the natives, as it’s sort of overly precious. Early on someone said something about people eating red beans and rice (and “not even on a Monday”) that rankled in a similar fashion.
LA Swift is a bus service operated by the state of Louisiana that takes people back and forth from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Fares are only $5. The service was established after Hurricane Katrina.
Entergy is best known as an electric utility, but they provide natural gas service in New Orleans.
Singer-songwriter Steve Earle and his son Justin Townes Earle made cameos last night.
Deuce McAllister (whose jersey was featured last night) played for the New Orleans Saints from 2001 to 2008. He was cut before the Saints’ championship season last year, but the team brought him back briefly during the playoffs to let him lead the team onto the field.
In Commentary on
30 April 2010 tagged food with 1 comment
Anthony Bourdain responds to a question about whether foodies are too precious:
Yeah. It could be silly, it could be annoying and I like to make fun of bloggers. But when we’re researching a show some place, chances are, it’s bloggers we’re reaching out to first. It’s not the restaurant review in the newspaper that’s going to determine [a place's] future. The Internet is a big bathroom wall with people writing on it all the time. At the end of the day, some consensus will be reached. You know, 3,000 words on a hot dog, why not? What better thing to write 3,000 things on? How many tens of thousands of words has been written about Kate Gosselin for f—’s sakes. Or the Kardashians. So I don’t see anything out there…what better than a hot dog or a chef?
I think a world where millions of people can publish 3,000 words on any subject they’re passionate about is a wonderful world. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
In Commentary on
28 April 2010 tagged food with 2 comments
I loved this sentence in a blog post about Meishan pigs:
If one reflects for a moment on the needs of Chinese subsistence farmers, it makes sense that the Meishan is the pig that it is; it is a pig best-suited for a Malthusian world.
In Commentary on
28 April 2010 tagged The Media with 10 comments
I’ve been following the ongoing saga of Gizmodo’s publishing photos of the lost iPhone prototype. The latest is that the San Mateo police served a search warrant on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, broke into his house, and confiscated his computers. There are two arguments about this, the first is whether Gizmodo is protected by shield laws for journalists, being a blog and all. That’s not a very interesting argument — of course it is. If you want to argue about that, argue with someone else.
The second argument is that Gizmodo is suspected of engaging in criminal activity to obtain the iPhone prototype, thereby rendering the shield laws inapplicable. Eugene Volokh makes that point. The EFF disagrees. That’s the discussion that interests me.
The consequences of reporters using illegal methods to break news reminds me of a dispute between Chiquita (the banana company) and the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1998. On May 3, 1998, the Enquirer published 18 pages of investigative pieces on Chiquita’s business practices. Two months later, the Enquirer renounced the stories on its front page and agreed to pay Chiquita a settlement of more than $10 million. The reporter who wrote the story was fired immediately and the editor responsible was reassigned.
There’s little argument that the stories were accurate, but the reporter had obtained some of the details by accessing Chiquita’s voice mail system without permission. You can read a detailed account of what happened in the American Journalism Review and the paper’s apology is still available on the Cincinnati Enquirer Web site.
In September 1998, the reporter, Michael Gallagher pleaded guilty to two felony charges related to accessing the voice mail system. In 2007, Chiquita paid a $25 million fine for payments it made to paramilitary groups in Colombia. The company has also been recently accused of mistreating its workers in exactly the same ways as were alleged in the original series.
The articles were an important act of public service journalism, exposing a broad pattern of malfeasance by the most powerful company in Cincinnati, but the fact that the reporter cut corners blew the whole thing up. If illegal access to voice mail by a reporter was enough to cost a newspaper $10 million and discredit a thoroughly researched, important investigative series, what’s going to be the end result of Gizmodo purchasing stolen goods to share pictures of a cool new phone with the world?
On one hand, the stakes are lower. Apple’s brand is not damaged by Gizmodo’s reporting on the prototype, so while it may want to discourage people from stealing their property and discourage journalists from buying it, they don’t have any incentive to knock down the story Gizmodo published. On the other, with millions of dollars and its own prestige on the line, the Cincinnati Enquirer was forced to capitulate completely to Chiquita. In the end, I guess Gizmodo has to hope that Apple isn’t as angry as Chiquita was.
In Commentary on
27 April 2010 tagged immigration, politics with 5 comments
I’m not too happy with the state of Arizona, but I can’t express myself any better than New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse did today, in her op-ed piece Breathing While Undocumented. Arizona has passed a law that any idiot can see is inhumane and unenforceable.
Political activists tend to ignore basic issues of enforcement when they propose laws. During the late stages of the health care debate, Senate Republican introduced an amendment that bans the government paying for erectile dysfunction drugs for registered sex offenders. Not to go too far afield, but the idea was that the Democrats would have to embarrass themselves by voting against the amendment for procedural reasons, thus handing Republicans a minor victory.
But what interested me was that while this amendment might have seemed like a good idea, it had huge enforcement issues. Suddenly it turns doctors or health insurance companies into law enforcement agencies — whose responsibility does it become to ask patients whether they’re a sex offender? Do people have to indicate that they’re a sex offender when they enroll in a health insurance plan?
Now that this bill in Arizona has gone into effect, every policeman has immigration enforcement added to their existing list of duties. Not only does it increase their workloads, but it also makes it less likely that immigrants will work with the police for any reason, undocumented or otherwise. If anything, this bill will make life better for criminals in immigrant communities because those communities will be further alienated from the police.
So on top of the reasons of principle that make this bill an awful idea, but it’s likely to be an utter failure for practical reasons as well.
In Commentary on
26 April 2010 tagged business with 3 comments
Matthew Yglesias asks an interesting question today: why are the big tech companies sitting on so much cash? These are big companies full of smart people, is there no way for them to invest that money to earn a greater return than it is just sitting there? What’s that say about the state of the industry?
It’s not as though companies aren’t shipping new product — Apple has increased its cash reserves by around $13 billion over the past year even as it developed the next generation of the OS X for the iPhone and created the iPad.
Is it a lack of talent? Could these companies be moving forward on more fronts if there were more engineers they could hire to build cool new stuff? Is it that it’s so much easier to build big things with small teams that these companies don’t need to invest big dollars to build products? These days teams of five or ten people are building cool products on a shoestring, and big companies are acquiring them for small amounts relative to their cash reserves.
Any other ideas?
In Commentary on
26 April 2010 tagged software development with 3 comments
A couple of friends have taken a stab at the binary search exercise and posted the results to their blogs. Check out Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s implementation and Erik Kastner’s implementation(s).
In Commentary on
26 April 2010 tagged cloud computing with 5 comments
Tim Bray on local storage:
In fact, I’m increasingly convinced that any data whose permanent canonical home is on a device that lives in your pocket and can fall into a toilet or the hands of a thief means You’re Doing It Wrong.
This is a lesson Apple really needs to get. I don’t think iTunes makes a better permanent home than the device itself does.
In Commentary on
25 April 2010 tagged Treme, TV with 3 comments
A few links from my notes on this week’s episode of Treme.
Mardi Gras indians were heavily featured again, so I’m recycling that link from the episode 1 reference. The Wild Magnolias tribe has a Web site with downloadable music, as well as its own Wikipedia article.
Dr. John’s version of My Indian Red was included on his 1992 album Goin’ Back to New Orleans.
Also on the music front, Professor Longhair’s Tipitina was referenced this week.
FEMA trailers of course have their own article in Wikipedia.
A couple of unique Louisiana drinking customs were mentioned in quick succession, go cups and drive through daiquiri shops.
McDonogh 15 is a school for the creative arts in New Orleans.
Embouchure is the shape of the mouth when playing a brass or wind instrument.
Feelings Cafe is a real restaurant, still open.
This week’s other guest musician was Tom McDermott.
Finally, a couple of cast notes. Desiree is played by Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a Katrina survivor who David Simon cast having seen her in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke. She’s also written a book about Katrina. Annie the fiddler is played by Lucia Micarelli, who’s a concert violinist, not an actress. Esquire interviewed her last week.
Update: New Orleans may be America’s smallest big city. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc is a cousin of “Tootie” LeBlanc, one of the Mardi Gras indian chiefs name checked in Dr. John’s song.
In Commentary on
25 April 2010 tagged software development with 1 comment
I wanted to point the programmers in the audience at a series of three posts by Mike Taylor of The Reinvigorated Programmer. In the first, he challenges programmers to sit down and see if they can write an implementation of binary search on the first try, without testing. I tried the exercise without reading the whole post last week and tested intermittently, so I blew it. My implementation didn’t work the first time but that’s because I started testing it before it was finished. Or maybe it’s because I suck. I’ll probably give it a try again later when it’s not so fresh on my mind.
If nothing else, the exercise revealed that I’m too eager to start on things for my own good. I started doing the exercise before I read all the rules, and I started testing my implementation before I was done writing it.
He also posted two followups . In the first, Common bugs and why exercises matter, he apologizes for the structure of the first post, which led me to dive in:
The bad: because I produced the Jon Bentley quote from Programming Pearls before stating the rules of the challenge, a lot of people eagerly ploughed straight in, and so inadvertently broke the rules. My bad.
Here’s his explanation of why it’s a good idea to work on exercises like the one he posted, in response to people who argue that it’s useless to write your own binary search routine when perfectly good implementations already exist:
Why would we think that in programming we don’t need to do exercises that are similarly related to our day-to-day work?
I have a hypothesis about that, but it’s not one that’s going to be popular. The boxer, the concert pianist and the sprinter need to be at the absolute top of their game in order to succeed. If the boxer’s not light on his feet, he’ll get beaten up; if the pianist lacks dexterity, he simply won’t get booked, in such a competitive career; the sprinter deals in margins of hundredths of a second. They practice, exercise, do training drills because they must: if they fall to, say, 97% of their best performance, they lose. Could it be that programming is a little too comfortable? Do employers expect too little? Are we content just to stay some way ahead of the pack rather than striving to excel? That’ll work if you’re happy to write Enterprise Beans For The Enterprise for the rest of your career. Not so much if you’re hoping to go and work for Google.
I’ll be blunt. If I were researching a job applicant and found them arguing that doing programming exercises is a waste of time, I’d reject them immediately. Even if you’re not doing programming exercises to improve your skills, you ought to at least know that there’s value in doing them. I don’t want to work with people who don’t take their craft seriously.
In his second followup, he takes on the assertion that the rule against testing the implementation as you work on it is bad. I like the title: Testing is not a substitute for thinking. Here’s his point:
The point is this: testing is only one of the weapons in our armoury, and it’s one that has recently become so fashionable that a lot of programmers are in danger of forgetting the others. Although testing is valuable, even indispensible, it is also limited in important ways, and we need to have facility with other techniques as well.
The entire series is well worth reading if you’re a professional software developer. It certainly shook me out of my comfort zone and made me realize that I could stand to do more basic programming work, rather than figuring out how to glue things together or what the right syntax is in JavaScript to do something I already know how to do in Java or Ruby.