Cupcake Ipsum generates much better Lorem Ipsum text that your run-of-the-mill tools, like:
Cupcake ipsum dolor sit amet. Toffee I love cake I love gummi bears cotton candy I love cookie. Wafer dragée lemon drops jelly-o jelly I love lollipop.
Fruitcake lollipop sweet roll muffin caramels. Cake I love macaroon biscuit candy canes dessert pie. Sweet apple pie lollipop jelly beans cheesecake gummies biscuit. Wypas I love croissant macaroon halvah.
Sweet roll tart toffee lemon drops candy canes soufflé bonbon. Ice cream tart cupcake I love icing tootsie roll jelly. Soufflé biscuit topping topping caramels pudding sugar plum cheesecake.
Halvah ice cream macaroon lollipop donut. Dessert gingerbread toffee gummies I love gingerbread applicake. Icing marshmallow cupcake.
Topping jelly beans fruitcake tootsie roll. Faworki soufflé chocolate cake. Dessert sesame snaps biscuit tiramisu cookie I love sesame snaps.

Placehold.it is where placekitten.com got their idea, it is also useful, but not quite as fun

(via Chuck Rose)

[Update 2/29/12]
Adding also PLACESHEEN.COM, yow!

(via Bob Archer)

We were there relatively early, on a Saturday night. The bar was already pretty full, though the dining area was empty. The space is pretty cavernous and as it continued to fill, the noise levels increased accordingly. The atmosphere is semi-train station inspired including an old style rotating board listing the most recent wine purchases. That sign is a feature that they are proud of, but it is mostly annoying. It is loud and they like to feature very expensive bottles that have been purchased. Sort of the equivalent of being allowed to drive your Maserati to your table, too ostentatious for my taste. Similarly, the seating is arranged to make sure the diners can see and be seen. Sitting at a table in the center of the room, I felt much too much on display. It was not comfortable.

The servers and wait staff were excellent: friendly, helpful, and courteous.

The menu is small, not tiny, but you may want to make sure there are options for everyone in your party. I had a couple tough decisions to make since there were multiple things I wanted, but my wife ended up ordering multiple appetizers and sides to make her meal.

I ordered their take on an Old Fashioned for my pre-dinner libation. Not my usual cocktail. This was easily the best version I’ve had. I would definitely order that again.

I ended up doing their pre fixe menu since everything I wanted from the main menu was represented there. Our first course: cauliflower velouté for me and beet salad for my wife were both very good. For my main, I had the Lamb Shank cassoulet which was also very good. My wife had the goat cheese toasts and french fries. The goat cheese toast was ok, if not anything special. The fries were inedible, drowning in salt. We ended up sending back the fries, basically uneaten. Here was one break in their staffing. When the person clearing the table (not the waitress) asked if we were enjoying the fries, as they were the only think uneaten on the table, we replied “no.” That never made it back to our waitress, so we were not offered an alternative.

For desert, my wife opted for the Petit Fours, while I got the Sticky Toffee Pudding. The Petit Fours were horrible. Really bad. We sent them back completely uneaten. The Sticky Toffee Pudding was middling at best, mediocre.

To the wait staff and restaurant’s credit, they didn’t charge us for the things we did not eat, but even so, this was a fairly pricey meal.

All-in-all, RN74 was an uneven experience. The highs were high and the lows were low, but the highs were not transcendent enough to justify their price tag or outweigh the lows. Will we return? Unlikely. Maybe for a drink in the bar. There are enough good options in the neighborhood in and below the price range of RN74 with better atmosphere. So, we will probably not get around to returning.

If you want to check it out yourself: get a booth, not a table; stay off the sides of the menu; and have desert somewhere else.

The answer is, of course, to stop buying new books until I make up some lost ground in my to read pile and just get over my fetishizing of
the books I’ve already read. Like any pack rat will tell you, that is pretty tough to do.

A more modern answer is to switch to buying e-books. This won’t fix my deepening pile of To-Read things (in fact it might make it worse because I won’t be able to see my physical pile of books to read), but it would address the clutter.

I love the concept of e-books. There are a lot of books that I buy that I won’t buy as e-books, like art monographs, but mostly I read non-fiction. For the majority of the books I read, the physical object really isn’t doing anything special for conveying the ideas. Most of the stuff I read would come across just fine on an electronic reader. To this end, I did get one a couple years ago. However, when I started to look into buying e-books, I was pretty disappointed.

I have a rule about DRM. I won’t buy any digital item with DRM. I’ve been burned several times over the years with vendors sunsetting their DRM schemes leaving their customers with a lot of bits they paid for but cannot access. DRM-free versions of e-books absolutely exist, but with such a high premium that they are often much more expensive than their physical counterparts. Even the DRM’d e-books are often as or more expensive than their physical versions, especially if they have already been out for a few years. So with the exception of a few O’Reilly titles, I basically haven’t purchased any e-books and have mostly just used my e-reader to read academic papers or other PDFs.

Last year, I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to help me address the piles of papers cluttering my desk, file cabinet and boxes in the garage. This was the answer to my pack-rat ways. It allowed me to have digital, searchable, copies of every piece of paper I ever wanted without having to actually keep the physical piece of paper. As I said, it also meant that I have a searchable archive, thanks to DRM. I’ve slowly been working my way through all my clutter, one file folder and one box at a time and it feels liberating. I’m finally clearing out magazines I’ve saved for 10 years to read one article and ridiculous crap like that. My recycle bin is always full.

Today, I finished reading Daniel Pink’s Drive. I read most of it a while ago, but it was sitting on my nightstand for a year or so while I read other books until I got around finishing it. I won’t review it here, other than to say that it was a pretty good book, but if you watch this video and understand the concept, you really have no need to buy it. This was a book that I thought was pretty good, but it didn’t say anything to me that I didn’t already know. What I should have immediately done was put it in a box to donate to a library, or given it to a friend, or a clueless boss, or something. Instead, I went to find a place for it on one of my overwhelmed shelves.

Then I spied my scanner.

I realized that this physical book didn’t have anything special about it. It came from a computer file, was printed on cheap paper and was actually the worst manifestation of the ideas from a standpoint of me being able to reference it again. If there was something I remembered from this book that I wanted to look up: I’d need to remember that it came from this book instead of from another one, then I’d need to remember where I put the book (home, work, a box in the garage), and then I’d need to actually find the section of the book that I was looking for. These days, I probably wouldn’t get past step one. I’d google for my answer and then never go to step two.

I decided to see how hard it would be to turn my physical book into an e-book for future reference. It was actually really easy. The whole process took less than twenty minutes.

First I got the tools…

Tools of (Creative) Destruction

Here we go

faster progress than I expected

almost done

<

Ready for scanning

The scansnap does its job

scanning...

into the recycling bin

in Acrobat

Live in iBooks

reading in iBooks

The nice thing is that I could also read it on pretty much any e-reader, computer, or mobile device with a screen. That is the genius of open standards and DRM-free files. Even if some day the PDF format dies, I know that I’ll be able to take my book to whatever the next format or reading device is. Just like a real book.

The Adobe Connect uses Flash and sometimes if you do an update to Flash on your system, Connect gets into a bad state. The way you’ll see this is that when the Add-in tries to launch it will get stuck with a small window that says “Loading Adobe Connect…” that never finishes.

The way to fix this problem is to uninstall Adobe Connect. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn’t make it easy for you to do that. there is no uninstaller and no information on the Adobe web site. Here is where the add-in is installed

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/www.macromedia.com/bin/connectaddin

Delete that directory and you have now uninstalled the add-in. Your connect sessions will now be hosted in your web browser until the next time you need add-in functionality, at which time you’ll be prompted to re-install it.

Hopefully this solves your problem and you found it faster than I did.

(tip of the hat to Aral Balkin who had to do this a few years ago too)

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be speaking with Paul Steinberg of Intel and Tom Murphy of Contra Costa college about the criticality of understanding parallel programming techniques for industry.

In my previous role on the Adobe Image Foundation, it was an obvious requirement for our hiring candidates. We were building tools for a insanely parallel problem, image and video processing. Now that I’m working on a new product, it would maybe seem that it would not be as important. In fact, our threading models are even more complicated than in my previous group. My expectations around threading knowledge for incoming candidates are just as high.

Even the most modest mobile hardware is going (or has gone) parallel. In addition, the expectations from a user perspective around interactivity with their applications is never higher. A laggy touch interface is death to an application (or a platform). Going to get coffee while your image renders on a desktop is a thing of the past. User’s expectations of the software we write is higher than ever and it is nearly impossible to get this interactivity without taking advantage of multi-threading on today’s multi-core processors.

The tools continue to improve, but the threading models continue to evolve. A fundamental understanding of multi-threading is critical for anyone moving into Software Engineering or looking to stay current in their field.

I always enjoy talking with Paul and Tom, and expect that we’ll have a lively conversation.

Tune in live on May 17, 10:00 AM PDT

Here is Paul’s post on the subject.

Pixel Bender is a domain-specific image processing language created by the Adobe Image Foundation, and includes a runtime designed to work well across heterogeneous hardware, scaling efficiently for multiple cores. This runtime currently ships in a number of Adobe’s flagship products. Bob Archer, Technical Lead, and Kevin Goldsmith, Engineering Manager, will talk about the design of the language, compilers, and runtime. They will also discuss how the Adobe system can incorporate complimentary technologies like OpenCL and can scale to accommodate new hardware paradigms like the AMD Fusion processors.

Hope to see you there!

At the same time, I’ve been following the public computing clouds like Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and Rack Space’s Public Cloud. These have been interesting for providing compute on the other end of the spectrum, occasional compute tasks, or higher average workloads with the occasional spike capability (like web apps). The public clouds are made up of thousands of servers and certainly rival or best the super computers in numbers of cores and raw compute power, but they exist for a different purpose.

This article in The Register really got me excited. Especially when I read this:

Stowe tells El Reg that during December last year, Cycle Computing set up increasingly large clusters on behalf of customers to start testing the limits. First, it did a 2,000-core cluster in early December, and then a 4,096-core cluster in late December. The 10,000-core cluster that Cycle Computing set up and ran for eight hours on behalf of Genentech would have ranked at 114 on the Top 500 computing list from last November (the most current ranking), so it was not exactly a toy even if the cluster was ephemeral.

The cost of running this world-class super computer?

Genentech loaded up its code and ran the job for eight hours at a total cost of $8,480, including EC2 compute and S3 storage capacity charges from Amazon and the fee for using the Cycle Computing tools as a service.

Real world HPC is now coming into price points where it is accessible to even small companies or research groups. This seems like a ripe opportunity for companies who can apply HPC-techniques to solve real problems for others, and for tools vendors who can make using these ephemeral clouds easier for companies who want to take advantage of them without having to build up high-end expertise in-house.

I suggested that good white-box testers test the functionality and the failure cases (the intent of the function) and developers test the code that they’ve written (the function as coded). This then lead me to a new revelation around test-first development methodologies (or possibly reminded me of something I had forgotten).

I have been a proponent of writing tests first, since I first started doing Extreme Programming and read Kent Beck’s original book, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change while working at Bootleg Networks (thanks Carmine for making me do that, by the way). Although admittedly, like many developers, I haven’t always been that rigorous at following that rule.

What I like about writing the tests before the function is that it clarifies my thinking about what the function should do, it alerts me to the corner cases, it gives me reasons to consider if the function is doing too much, and it gives me a way to instantly know if the function works once it is written. Writing the tests first also makes sure that the tests are written at all. Once the function is coded, it sometimes gets tempting to move on to the next bit of coding work with the intention of filling in the tests later.

What I hadn’t considered about writing the tests before the code is that it puts me into a quality mindset without having any bias to the code as I’d written it. I’m divorced from my own blind-spots around my coding. This actually leads me to writing better tests because I have no assumptions about how the code should work or fail. I’m testing the functionality, not the code.

Maybe I’d thought about this before, but I hadn’t really considered that benefit recently until that moment. Now, when I start to get lazy about writing my unit tests before my implementation, I’ll have a better reason to keep up my discipline.