Brian Short

    Newman Wins

    I love me some figs.

    This is a pretty recent phenomena, though. I used to be scared of figs in the raw. The chewy skin and the flesh-like texture repulsed me. I'd eat liverwurst before I'd eat a plain fig, which, maybe isn't really that remarkable since I've loved liverwurst and it's more attractively described cousin braunschweiger for most of my life.

    But, right, figs.

    For years I only enjoyed figs in their newton form, and only because I didn't consciously make the connection that maybe Fig Newtons had some figs in them. Making yet another connection to liverwurst: it also took me several years before I suspected that liverwurst contained liver.

    Even the word is strange. "Figs."

    It sounds like something that you wouldn't really want to eat. The sound of the word makes me think of mushrooms and pine forests.

    So, but I've really learned to love a raw, dried fig over the last couple of years. It's a healthy snack that satisfies a craving for sweetness, but without really leaving you hungry for more. Raw figs, too, have become a treasured, but rarer part of my diet. Usually only eaten at restaurants that have the nerve to serve a raw fig, maybe drizzled in honey, maybe just sliced in quarters, for several dollars. The lack of value doesn't make me any less likely to buy them, though.

    Tonight, though, I've come full circle. I opened up a pack of Fig Newman's (low fat, no less) as an after-dinner treat. They're definitely the best fig I've ever had in newton form, and probably the best fig-based food ever. They're figgier that your regular newtons, and the fig tastes much more like an actual fig.

    posted by bshort March 25, 2007 @ 1:27 AM   1 comments

    The Sound Of Money

    So Canon came out with a new DSLR this week. The 1D Mark III can shoot at 10 frames per second.

    I bet you're not impressed. I wasn't, at first, but then I saw this.

    posted by bshort March 9, 2007 @ 7:01 PM   0 comments

    Microkernels and You

    I've been reading a lot on the internals of the Mac operating system (OS X) and I've come across some fascinating articles I'd like to share:

    The Wikipedia article on the Mach kernel is fascinating stuff, covering the development and history of what was once the most promising operating system kernel. Microkernels were going to change the world at one point, and although a modified version of Mach is used in OSX, the GNU Hurd, and NEXTSTEP, monolithic kernels seem to have some massive performance advantages. If there's a fundamental revolution in memory access, or some sort of improvement that allows much larger caches that in our current chips, this advantage might disappear, but that looks unlikely.

    One of the major innovations of Mach, and one of the qualities that make Mac hackery such a pleasure, is the interprocess communication that allows applications to communicate with each other.

    The Mach chapter from the Dinosaur book is also interesting, and is required reading for any operating system enthusiasts.

    If you're still curious, the Wikipedia entry on microkernels is also good stuff.

    posted by bshort March 6, 2007 @ 11:12 PM   0 comments