Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Here are my picks for the best chocolate places in the city (note: updated 2013-04-20):

• Chocolate merchants: Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered has made leaps and strides in the last 5 years, and beat previous favorite Fog City News
• Honorable mention: Fog City News, an impressive lineup tended by the knowledgeable owner, Adam Smith. Also the chocolate section at Rainbow Co-op.
• Chocolate bouchées: Cocoa Bella. This shop is a chocolate integrator: it collects chocolates from small chocolatiers across the world and brings them under a single roof. They also make hot chocolate.
• Honorable mention: Michael Recchiuti makes scrumptious confections, and his burnt caramel chocolate covered hazelnuts are to die for, as are many of his bars. Try also his Chocolate Lab in the Dogpatch for a cafe experience.
• Chocolate maker: Guittard. This fourth-generation family of chocolatiers, originally from France, have been supplying professionals like Recchiuti for a century and half. The best dessert I ever had in America was a Guittard chocolate and cherry cake at Eno in Atlanta, of all places. They now have a retail line of very high quality.
• Dishonorable mentions:
  • Scharffen-Berger: part of the evil Hershey empire, who are lobbying to have FDA standards watered down (so mockolate made with margarine can be passed off as real chocolate)
  • Tcho: overrated, and very simplistic, although their “Tchunky Tchotella” bar is amusing
  • Dandelion: sleazy hipster outfit that turns good raw ingredients into crude dreck
  • L’Amourette: another overrated local brand. The packaging for their “70% Dark Chocolate Gold” screams “Venezuela” and “Sur Del Lago”, but only mentions in small type they use the inferior Trinitario cacao instead of the noble Criollo the provenance (and price) would imply.
• Hot chocolate: Christopher Elbow on Gough & Hayes has an intense hazelnut-flavored hot chocolate.
• Honorable mention: Charles Chocolates (disclaimer: I am an investor)
• Chocolate pastries: Cafe Madeleine, a.k.a. Jil’s Patisserie, formerly of Burlingame, now made in their New Montgomery Street shop (with two additional locations on California and O’Farrell).
• Honorable mentions: Miette in the Ferry Building. Tartine’s chocolate hazelnut tart. B Patisserie’s chocolate Kouign Amann.

See also my Google map of the best sweet treats in San Francisco

Starr Ridge red onion, pistachio and asiago crackers are insanely great. I am officially hooked.

For a very long time, the only reason I still used a Windows PC at home (apart from games, of course) was my reliance on IMatch. IMatch is a very powerful image cataloguing database program (a software category also known as Digital Asset Management), The thing that sets IMatch apart from most of its competition is its incredibly powerful category system, which essentially puts the full power of set theory at your fingertips.

Most other asset management programs either pay perfunctory attention to keywords, or require huge amounts of labor to set up, which is part of the cost of doing business for a stock photo agency, but not for an individual. The online photo sharing site Flickr popularized an equivalent system, tagging, which has the advantage of spanning multiple users (you will never be able to get many users to agree on a common classification schema for anything, tags are a reasonable compromise).

Unfortunately, IMatch is not available on the Mac. Canto Cumulus is cross-platform and has recently introduced something similar to IMatch’s categories, but it is expensive, and has an obscenely slow image import process (it took more than 30 hours to process 5000 or so photos from my collection on my dual-2GHz PowerMac G5 with 5.5GB of RAM!). Even Aperture is not that slow… I managed to kludge a transfer from IMatch to Cumulus using IMatch’s export functions and jury-rigging category import in Cumulus by reverse-engineering one of their data formats.

Cumulus is very clunky compared to IMatch (it does have the edge in some functions like client-server network capabilities for workgroups), and I had resigned myself to using it, until I stumbled upon Shoebox (thanks to Rui Carmo’s Tao of Mac). Shoebox (no relation to Kodak’s discontinued photo database bearing the same name) offers close to all the power of IMatch, with a much smoother and more usable interface to boot (IMatch is not particularly difficult if you limit yourself to its core functionality, but it does have a sometimes overwhelming array of menus and options).

Andrew Zamler-Carhart, the programmer behind Shoebox, is very responsive to customer feedback, just like Mario Westphal, the author of IMatch — he actually implemented a Cumulus importer just for me, so moving to it was a snap (and much faster than the initial import into Cumulus). That in itself is a good sign that there will always be a place in the software world for the individual programmer, even in the world of “shrinkwrap software”, especially since the distribution efficiencies of the Internet have lowered the barrier to entry.

Shoebox is a Mac app through and through, with an attention to detail that shows. It makes excellent use of space, as on larger monitors like mine (click on the screen shot to see it at full resolution) or dual-monitor setups, and image categorization is both streamlined and productive. As an example, Shoebox fully supports using the keyboard to quickly classify images by typing the first few letters of a category name, with auto-completion, without requiring you to shift focus to a specific text box (this non-modal keyboard synergy is quite rare in the Macintosh world). It also has the ability to export categories to Spotlight keywords so your images can be searched by Spotlight. I won’t describe the user interface, since Kavasoft has an excellent guided tour.

No application is perfect, and there are a few minor issues or missing features. Shoebox does not know how to deal with XMP, limiting possible synergies with Adobe Photoshop and the many other applications that support XMP like the upcoming Lightroom. It would also benefit from improved RAW support – my Canon Digital Rebel XT CR2 thumbnails are not auto-rotated, for instance, but the blame for that probably lies with Apple. The application icon somehow invariably reminds me of In-n-Out burgers. The earlier versions of Shoebox had some stability problems when I first experimented with them, but the last two have been quite solid.

I haven’t started my own list of the top ten “must have” Macintosh applications, but Shoebox certainly makes the cut. If you are a Mac user and photographer, you owe it to yourself to try it and see how it can make your digital photo library emerge from chaos. I used to say IMatch was the best image database bar none, but nowadays I must add the qualification “for Windows”, and Shoebox is the new king across all platforms.

Adobe Acrobat 7 is a necessary evil for some operations such as OCR, rotating or deleting pages (although as an editor PDFPen is cheaper and more useable). Acrobat has grown into a sumo of an application, with incredibly sluggish load times. If you peek under the hood, you will notice it actually has a full copy of MySQL embedded in it. I am not fond of MySQL, but it is not that bad of a database as to account for all the bloat in Acrobat, who knows what else lurks in that package?

At any rate, Acrobat is to be used as a last resort, and most definitely not the viewer of choice. Apple’s own Preview.app is far snappier and more pleasant to use (no annoying Yahoo toolbars or spurious JavaScript warnings when you have the good sense to disable a potential security hole). Acrobat insists on taking over ownership of a file once you save it, however. You could manually change the HFS creator code for each file by hand, but this is where Spotlight’s efficiently indexed metadata database shows synergy with OS X’s underlying UNIX scripting magic. The following one-liner will clear the creator code for all PDF files on your system so they open with Preview instead of Photoshop. It can easily be added to a crontab or launchd script.

mdfind ‘kMDItemCreator==“Adobe Acrobat*”’|tr “\012” “\0”|xargs -0 -n 1 /Developer/Tools/SetFile -c ‘’

If you simply want to strip the creator application from all PDF documents altogether, this script will do the trick:

mdfind ‘kMDItemKind=“Adobe PDF document” and kMDItemCreator!=""’|tr “\012” “\0”|xargs -0 -n 1 /Developer/Tools/SetFile -c ‘’

mdfind queries the Spotlight metadata for all files with a creator that starts with “Adobe Acrobat”. xargs reads arguments from standard input and passes them as command-line arguments to the SetFile utility (part of the OS X Developer Tools). tr replaces line feeds with ASCII 0 NUL characters used as argument separators when xargs is invoked with the -0 option, so embedded spaces in filenames are passed unscathed. I have tested this with Unicode file names, and they are handled correctly as well.

Thanks to Spotlight, the whole process takes only a couple of seconds on my machine, something that would not be possible if it had to scan through 300GB’s worth of files. It also goes to show that Spotlight’s apparent sluggishness when you use it from the GUI stems entirely from the overhead of the GUI struggling to progressively display search results as they are returned by the metadata index, not from the underlying database engine. There is no justification for Google searches of the entire Internet being faster than a local desktop search.

Of course, the technique can be generalized to other ownership changes for contested file formats like HTML, JPEG or TIFF.

I am partial to milk chocolate with high cocoa content. It combines the best of both worlds: the rich flavor of dark chocolate, and the smoothness of milk chocolate. The better grades will be made of cocoa coming from a single region, ideally Venezuelan criollo. The natural candidate would be El Rey, a Venezuelan maker, but I don’t like the milky aftertaste of their Caoba 41% cocoa bar. My favorite, Michel Cluizel, makes superlative bars with 50% cocoa content, but the cocoa is from Java or Madagascar. They even used to have a 60% bar blended with almond cream, unfortunately it seems to have been discontinued.

A new specialty chocolate store, Bittersweet Cafe, opened recently on Fillmore Street in san Francisco. They have a good selection, almost as good as Fog City News, with some brands I haven’t seen before. One of those was this bar made from Venezuelan Chuao criollo beans, with a mix of chopped almonds, hazelnuts, and interestingly, pistachios. It is made by Chuao Chocolatier, a small artisanal company based in San Diego (but we won’t hold their unfortunate choice of location against them).

The bar has a rich, deep flavor, and is not over-sweetened as is unfortunately too often the case with milk chocolates. The cocoa content is not indicated, but I would estimate it at around 40%. The nuts are crunchy and fresh, with no hint of rancidity. This is no small feat, hazelnuts and pistachios spoil easily and are tricky to work with. Fran’s, based in Seattle, won’t even ship some of their Oregon hazelnut confections outside Washington State out of fear they will lose their freshness by the time they arrive. At $6.50 ($6 if you buy direct in packs of 4), this is by no means cheap, but at least they give you an unusual 110 gram portion, none of that wimpy 75 gram size companies like Scharffen-Berger (now a part of the despicable Hershey group) are turning to in order to increase profits.

Merry Christmas to all, hopefully one rich in cacao…

Update (2012-12-13):

They changed the packaging and name. It is now called the “Milk chocolate nut nirvana”.

Update (2013-04-20):

Sadly Bittersweet Cafe’s Fillmore location is no more.