reviews

I recently purchased a bar of Amedei Porcelana chocolate. Fog City News sells them for $11 here in San Francisco. When a bar of chocolate is individually numbered in a limited edition, you know it is going to be expensive… There are two reasons why boutique chocolates bars made in small quantities are better than mass-produced ones.

The first one is they don’t adulterate the cocoa butter with vegetable fats (a.k.a. margarine). The European Union yielded to British lobbying efforts and allowed this indefensible practice. Not that chocolate is the only product that legendarily taste-impaired nation tampers with. I lived in London in 1982, and remember my horror at finding out that vanilla “ice cream” included such fine ingredients as fish oil…

The second one is that big manufacturers like Nestle, Kraft Jacobs Suchard, Cadbury or Lindt produce such large volumes they can only retain cocoa varietals that are also grown in large quantities in industrial scale plantations, just as McDonald’s uses standardized potatoes grown to order. Furthermore, several varieties are usually blended for homogeneity, at the expense of character (echoes of the debate between proponents of blended vs. single malt Scotch whiskey). Smaller companies or smaller production runs do not have these constraints and can purchase high-quality cocoa beans that are grown in small quantities.

Venezuelan Criollo cocoa is widely considered the finest variety. It is not as strong (some may say harsh) as Forestero varieties, but has much more refined and complex flavor. It also has poor yields, making it unsuitable for the mass market. Porcelana is the most genetically pure variety of Criollo, and like the others, has mild but incredibly subtle aromas, without the aggressive acidity of some.

I find self-proclaimed connoisseur reviews that speak breathlessly of “fantastic tangy flavor, that evolves through wine and blue cheese to almost too sharp citrus” faintly ridiculous at best, and more than a little unappealing in how they are obviously patterned on wine snobs. That said, Porcelana is definitely a superlative chocolate. I don’t think I will be feasting regularly on it, due to the price, but it is certainly worth trying on special occasions.

I saw the Keyspan USB Server at MacWorld SF a few months ago, but it has only recently started to ship (I received mine yesterday). This device allows you to connect a Mac or PC to up to 4 USB 1.1 peripherals remotely over Ethernet, much as a print server allows you to access remote printers. It also allows sharing of USB devices between multiple computers.

I use it to reduce clutter in my apartment by moving away bulky items like my HP 7660 printer and my Epson 3170 scanner away from the iMac in my living room, which has progressively become my main computer, even though it is probably the slowest machine I have.

You install the driver software (Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X, no drivers for Linux so far), and it creates a simulated USB hub device that takes care of bridging the USB requests over Ethernet. There is a management program that allows you to configure the settings on the USB Server such as the IP address (zeroconf, a.k.a RendezVous is supported, a nice touch), password and access mode. The user interface is functional, if not perfectly polished. To use a USB peripheral hooked to the USB server, you fire up the admin client, select one of the USB devices and take a “lease” on it. I have links to some screen shots of the GUI below:

• Device selection (OS X)
• USB Server administration (OS X)
• Apple system profiler showing the USB hub pseudo-device
• Device selection (Windows 2000) showing the scanner reserved by another computer

The process is as smooth as it can possibly be, given that USB devices are not designed to be shared between multiple hosts, and thus some form of locking had to be provided. I tried my scanner over the Ethernet, and have not noticed any perceptible degradation in performance. The software copes with sleep mode correctly. The only nit I would have to pick is that the power adapter “wall wart” DC connector slips off the device too easily (not enough friction to hold it in place), disconnecting it.

Many families are becoming multi-computer households. The Keyspan USB Server is a surprisingly effective way to share peripherals or to move bulky and seldom used peripherals out of the way. At a street price of around $100, it is not inexpensive, but I found it a very worthwhile accessory for my home network.

Henry Wilhelm is a well-known authority on preserving photographs. He pretty much wrote the book on the subject, and it is now downloadable for free in PDF format from his website.

In a nutshell:

• No widespread color process is really archival, unlike black & white
• Fuji good, Kodak bad

Wilhelm has contributed greatly to making photographs last by raising the public’s awareness of conservation issues, at a time when manufacturers like Kodak were engaging in deliberately deceptive marketing implying that color prints would “last forever”, when they knew the prints would not exceed 10 to 15 years (Fuji has put far more effort in making their materials last).

That said, his simulated aging testing methodology has been criticized as too optimistic, and in one embarrassing instance, Epson Stylus Photo 2000 inkjet photo papers he highly rated for their durability turned out to be very short-lived because they were very sensitive to very common ozone pollution. For an alternative, more conservative, take on inkjet print longevity, Stephen Livick’s website offers a valuable counterpoint.

My take on the subject: I almost exclusively use black & white film because it has a distinct character and is archival without special equipment or active attention. Color film relies on dyes (that fade over time) rather than silver, and fades quickly or suffers from weird color shifts even when kept in the dark. The exception is Kodachrome, which keeps a very long time in the dark despite being also dye-based, but Kodak is not enthusiastic in supporting it and its future availability is uncertain. Given that, it makes more sense to use digital, which has more than caught up in quality, and at least has the potential for lasting images if managed properly (a big if: imagine you were to disappear tomorrow, would your heirs know how to retrieve your digital photos from your computer?).

And of course, I boycott Kodak, a company ruled by bean-counting MBAs whose only concern seems to be how to cut corners in silver content at the expense of product quality, much like Detroit automakers behaved before American consumers wised up to the shoddy quality of their products. Then again, Kodak’s current management is stacked with former HP executives who are turning the company into a HP-wannabe, thus predictably accelerating its slide into irrelevance.

Edward Tufte

Graphics Press, ISBN: 0-9613921-5-0 Publisher

Edward Tufte is probably the single most influential authority on communicating complex information graphically. He pretty much wrote the book(s) on the subject in his classic series The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

In this short booklet (24 pages), he devastatingly takes to task the shoddy quality of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and makes the case this information poverty is intrinsic to the tool itself, due to its limitations such as low resolution (cannot use complex data), poor typography, strong bias towards hierarchical outlines and fluff over substance. In Tufte’s own words:

The PP slide format has probably the worst signal/noise ratio of any known method of communication on paper or computer screen.

This echoes one of the reasons why Sun Microsystems banned PowerPoint slides, their abysmal information per kilobyte ratio. More worryingly,

In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers at a cost of intellectual damage to 80%.

The booklet is short and sweet. Tufte’s wicked sense of humor comes out in comparisons to Stalinist propaganda or in a set of slides by Peter Norvig showing how PowerPoint could have denatured the Gettysburg Address.

In my experience, PowerPoint slides are mostly used to vehiculate marketing garbage presentations. As such, there isn’t much content to damage in the first place, and the act of showing a PowerPoint presentation is in itself an excellent cue to the audience that they can do their crossword puzzles, tick off their grocery lists on their Palm Pilots or whatever other discreet way is at hand to salvage otherwise completely wasted time.

Tufte’s suggestions for improving the quality of presentations (give high-content handouts, eschew PowerPoint for anything but projecting low-resolution images, and above all, do not read out slides) are mostly useful for scientific or engineering presentations, which is probably a tiny proportion of PowerPoint’s market.

Karen Armstrong

Anchor Books (Random House), ISBN: 0385721404  Publisher, Buy online

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a “triple vision”). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Even now, the subject is still fraught with passion and having an entirely unbiased view is difficult, but she does a good job of it in my opinion. Certainly, her assessment is quite critical of the Crusaders, but the only actors to which she is wholly sympathetic are the humanistic Byzantines, who were poorly repaid for their forbearance towards the Crusaders by the sack of Constantinople.

Her central thesis is that the Crusades were the crucible where the modern European identity was forged, and that unfortunately in the process it was alloyed with anti-semitism and a visceral hostility towards Islam. Her second thesis, somewhat less convincing, is that in the current Israeli-Arab conflict, both parties are consciously replaying the Crusades.

The convoluted politics of the Middle East, over seven millennia in the making, have a habit of tripping up overly simplistic analyses. The Lebanese master story-teller Amin Maalouf, in his excellent (but clearly not unbiased) The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, notes that shortly after the first crusade, an army of Christian and Muslim allies fought another such army in Syria.

The Crusades were clearly seen at first as a colonial or purely military venture by Arabs of all faiths, it is only later with the sultans Nasr-ud-din and Salah-ud-din (Saladin) that the war took on a religious significance. While Karen Armstrong does a good job of showing how the conflict progressively acquired the traits of a holy war, she is not as good at identifying the purely secular realpolitik that was pursued then as it is today.

All in all, for all its flaws, specially in the political analysis of the current situation, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.