Just got back from a lovely dinner at
Morimoto (grrr, flash),
the restaurant of the famous
Iron Chef Morimoto.
I had the 2nd level Omakase tasting
menu,
which gave my tastebuds a workout through sweet, salty, bitter, and umami
(no sour, AFAICT). There was a Chinese influence to at least a couple of
the courses that I wasn’t expecting given his Japanese/Western-fusion
reputation, but it was absolutely wonderful …
except for the penultimate (prior to the dessert) course, sushi.
The pieces were too small, which I can forgive, but it all tasted very “flat”,
which I’m less forgiving about. I don’t expect that this was due to poor
quality (the texture was wonderful, especially the toro) or preparation, but
instead due to my palate being complete tuckered and unable to appreciate
the delicate flavours of the fish. Perhaps I’m also not fully appreciating the
structure of the meal, but I would have personally put the sushi as the second
course, after the tuna tartar (and reduced it to three larger pieces).
Still, the previous six courses were to die for, and the
restaurant was a
site to
see.
Highly recommended, next time you’re in Philadelphia.
An interesting
presentation
from
Sam
upcoming at
ETech.
It’s titled ‘”Just” use HTTP’, and this is said about it;
Unlike other talks about newly emerging topics, Ruby’s centers around the reemergence of appreciation applications centered around the venerable HTTP protocol[sic]
Sam has
this to say
about it;
I’m planning on depressing a lot of people there. ;-)
Au contraire, my friend. 8-)
Update; as
pointed out by Robert
I think I totally misinterpreted the presentation. I can see now that it’s
about the practical problems with HTTP/XML development. You can probably guess
what I thought the main point of the talk would be. 8-)
James Tauber writes;
I think it would be fun being able to trace one's GMail Invite Lineage.
I got mine from Mark Baker.
Now if Mark reads this and says in his blog where he got his from and that person says on their blog (assuming they've got one) where they got theirs from...
So a call to all bloggers with GMail accounts: spread the meme!
I got mine from my old friend
Nelson Minar,
Google employee. I expect I know where he got his. 8-) Actually,
let’s save a whole lotta time and just ask him for a dump of the
invites database. 8-)
I met Paul in Honolulu at
WWW2002
where he and his partner Chris Sukornyk were working on developing what
turned out to be
Semaview.
Unfortunately things didn’t work out there, and Semaview recently ceased
operations. But coincidentally, I happened to catch a pointer on the
SWIG chump
yesterday
to an
article
written by Paul some time ago. It’s about Semantic Web Services,
which immediately brought to mind an exchange we had a couple of years ago
where I told him I thought it was great that he was planning to expose the
functionality of their software, but suggested it be done over the Web
rather than with Web services, which they did end up going with. Well
lo-and-behold, but Paul has just
resurfaced
and
written
about his experience with Web services, and how he has now seen
the value in the REST architectural style. He concludes;
Lesson learned. Keep it simple stupid.
Amen.
I’m going to be hitting some XML users group meetings in the North East
US over the next couple of weeks, for my client
Justsystem.
If you’d like to meet with me to chat about XML,
compound documents,
or anything else Web-related for that matter, that’d be excellent.
My current schedule is;
I’ll keep my schedule up-to-date in this entry; there’s more to come.
Via Edd,
a link to an
interview with Stewart Butterfield.
It’s a great interview all-round, but here’s a couple of points on
topic for my weblog;
People who would be reluctant to provide metadata most of the time do so on Flickr because there’s a payoff for them. A) other people see their work–work is probably the wrong word because I don’t think most people see it as work in a serious artistic sense– but people see what they’re up to, see what they’re creating. And B) because they derive some pleasure from building value in the global collection.
I think this point is often missed by those who hold the
“no cheap metadata”
position. Turning “metadata” keywords into dereferencable URIs – as
Flickr
(among others) does –
provides the means by which these “payoffs” that Stewart refers to, can be
realized, cheaply. For me, it also helps drive home the point that one
person’s metadata is another’s data, as this feedback loop is exactly the
same one that exists when you publish any data behind a dereferencable URI.
Taking it further, one might, for example, provide metadata for the Flickr
metadata, which
this is, if
you squint a bit (not literally 8-).
And to complete the loop and emphasize the point, one could easily republish
many of these new images as new
squared circles. Fractal!
As pointed out by Edd, Stewart also had this to say about Web services/REST;
I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don’t know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others–I don’t even know how many there are–are built on the REST API. It’s just so easy to develop that way; I think it’s foolish to do anything else.
“The Semantic Web accelerates the participation of machines in networked systems by providing them with a shared vocabulary, grammar, phrasebook and knowledge base.” – with all due respect to Graham, I think that approach will confuse folks more than info
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Web site updated. CFP to follow Real Soon Now.
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Bingo. See my comment there.
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