David R. MacIver

I drink a lot of gin and tonics. Mostly this is a function of the fact that I don’t drink beer, rarely drink wine and, while I like a good cider, am rarely in the mood for it.

That being said, I’ve always really liked the gin and tonic. It’s a nice drink.

When talking with Ryan Alexander over drinks one evening, he reported some experimentation he’d done, trying to find the best gin and tonic combination.

This struck me as a good idea. I must admit, most of the gin and tonics I’ve consumed in my life have been schweppes and bombay sapphire. It’s a perfectly serviceable drink, but surely with better ingredients it could be a better drink?

So I set forth and bought lots of nice gin and some nice tonic water and began to experiment.

As it turned out, what I discovered is that I really like gin without the tonic water. Once you use a decent gin, it has much more possibilities than just drowning out the flavour with quinine and sugar. Don’t get me wrong, I still really like gin and tonics, particularly if you use one of the more spicy gins, but I also really like neat gin, and martinis.

The following are the gins I have tried over the last few weeks:

• Whitley Neill
• Sipsmith
• Tanqueray No. 10
• No 3. London Dry Gin
• Sacred Gin
• Aviation
• Dry Fly Gin

I’d also previously had:

• Hendricks
• Tanqueray export strength
• Bombay sapphire

Of the new ones, the only one I really didn’t like was the Dry Fly. It has weird overtones of whiskey and salt (really. It’s based on a wheat liquor and actually does have added salt). I feel like there might be something it’s good in (I keep meaning to try it in a ruddy mary), but I’ve not found it so far.

The ones I would recommend unreservedly are the Whitley Neill and the Sipsmith. The Whitley Neill is quite mild – don’t use it in a G&T, it will drown, but it’s very nice neat and quite good in a martini. The Sipsmith has a similar flavour to it, but much more of a kick (tastewise – they’re about the same in alcohol content with the Whitley Neill actually fractionally stronger). It seems to be very versatile – it produces good martinis, good gin and tonics and is rather nice neat. If I were drinking the gin neat I’d probably choose the Whitley Neill, but for the other uses the Sipsmith seems nicer to me.

(Side note: As you’re probably noting, this isn’t a proper formal alcohol review. This is more just “This is what I tried, these are what I liked”).

For gin and tonics, the combination I’ve been really liking is the Aviation with Fever Tree tonic water. The Aviation is quite spicy (though less so than the Tanqueray) and so the flavour is easily discernable through the otherwise quite strong tasting Fever Tree.

The Sacred gin is nice, but until today I’d not found anything I really liked it in – it has a bit of an odd flavour neat, and I felt that while it was nice in a G&T it wasn’t really living up to its promise. Today I tried it in a classic martini (about 3 parts gin to 1 part vermouth) with Noilly Prat vermouth, which was excellent. This may be my new favourite Martini (although admittedly I’m not yet a connoisseur of the subject).

All told, this has been a really good learning experience. Gin is much more interesting a drink than I had previously realised, and significantly more versatile.

The only downside is that I now have ten bottles of gin in my flat. Oh well. Bottoms up!

…man that title is a mouthful. I’m not really sure how to better summarise this though.

My friends Dave and Rachel came round for dinner last night. Rachel is vegan, and I haven’t cooked anything vegan in ages, so I was struggling a bit to come up with something. After some googling for inspirational recipes (which this is not an implementation of any of, but they gave me some ideas) and a quick run to whole foods, this is what I came up with.

It needs some refinement in order to turn it into a proper recipe, but it was extremely tasty, so I will totally make this again. A lot of it.

Miso-Sake Quinoa

This is pretty simple to make. You make quinoa as normal, but you add brown rice miso and replace some of the water with sake. The proportions I used were one cup quinoa, one cup water, 3/4 a cup of sake and a very heaping dessert spoon of brown rice miso paste.

This turned out to not be enough liquid. I’m not sure why – it would have been enough if it were water. It might be that the sake evaporates faster, it might be that the salt from the miso slows down the cooking of the quinoa. Either way, I had to keep topping it up with water.

Peanut-Sesame sauce

This contained about equal portions of crunchy peanut butter, boiling water, sesame oil and brown rice vinegar. Mix it all up in a jar and alternately shake vigorously and whisk with a fork until you’ve got a smooth creamy sauce.

The main dish

This requires the sauce and the quinoa as above. Other than that it involved:

• About an inch of stem ginger
• A third of a red cabbage
• 5 medium sized carrots
• Two packages of Taifun almond and sesame smoked tofu
• Vegetable oil for frying
• A bit of salt

The salt is really to help things fry rather than for flavour (this recipe has plenty of salt. Possibly too much, although it doesn’t taste like it’s too salty). Feel free to omit it.

By the way, the Taifun smoked tofu is amazing. If you’ve not tried it, you definitely should. It’s by far my favourite form of tofu I can buy in the shops. I’d recommend it even if you think you don’t like tofu – I’ve fed this to various people who thought that way and they rather enjoyed it. (Disclaimer: Not affiliated with them in any way. I just eat their food).

Then the instructions are simple:

1. roughly julienne the cabbage and carrots
2. chop up the ginger
3. Fry it all until the carrots are starting to turn soft
4. Chop the tofu into roughly cm cubes
5. Add it to the mix and fry until the tofu is reasonably cooked (it can be eaten raw, so this doesn’t need to be very long
6. Add the peanut sauce, stir until thoroughly coated
7. Add the quinoa, mix thoroughly and let it cook for a few more minutes
8. Eat

Conclusions

As Dave put it, “It tastes very fancy”. There are a fair few different flavours in here (ginger, peanut, sesame, miso, sake), which given that I created this recipe more or less ex nihilo could have gone horribly horribly wrong (some flavour combinations which seem like a good idea turn out to really not be). Fortunately it didn’t, and the different flavours turn out to complement each other very well!

The miso-sake quinoa was definitely a win. I’ll make that in other contexts (and hopefully figure out the right proportions to get it to cook properly). If I were serving it on its own rather than as part of a larger dish I would probably reduce the amount of sake (and maybe the amount of miso) slightly, but in this the proportions were just about right.

The peanut sauce is something I’ve made before a few times, but it’s a really nice easy way to make things very tasty. If I weren’t using the miso quinoa I would probably have added soy sauce to it, but this recipe really didn’t need more soy.

Other than that, I’m not sure what I’d do differently other than minor tweaks and figuring out good proportions for things. Maybe experiment with different vegetables, though carrot and cabbage was a surprisingly good base for this.

All in all, this was extremely tasty and I’ll definitely be making it again.

Good news everyone! We’re hiring!

…wait, who’s we?

I’ve not talked about it nearly as much as I always intend to (I have at least three related blog posts about it queued up in my mental drafts folder), but I’m currently working at Aframe (please ‘scuse the not terribly informative website). We’re doing cool things for the video production world – helping you store your footage, find it again (unless you work in this world you’d be surprised how much this isn’t a solved problem) and make use of it throughout the entire production workflow. It’s exciting stuff, and we’re starting to gain some real traction.

We’ve been talking about hiring for a while. We’re a small team at the moment, and we’re really working at capacity (slightly over it really) – we’ve got a good product, but we’ve hit the stage where we now have to both a) Expand on its feature set and make it better rounded and b) Maintain what we’ve got. Improve reliability, fix bugs, and generally make it work better for our existing paying customers (yes, we have those. A refreshing change from some startups), and to do both well we need to increase our capacity.

Unfortunately we keep facing the problem of actually writing job specs. It’s hard, and the people best equipped to write the job specs are those of us already working at capacity.

So, this is me saying to hell with it. We’re not hiring job specs, we’re hiring people. The most important characteristics are not whether you fit into a box, they’re the following:

• You’re interested in what we’re doing.
• We get along with you.
• You’re a competent developer.

Although we need a range of skills, if you don’t have those three we’re not interested and if you do have those three we’re probably able to find something useful for you to do!

That being said, here are some things we’d be particularly interested in (none of them are requirements. You certainly don’t have to fit all of them).

• Video. We’re a video startup. We could always use more video dev experience. Pretty obvious really. Whether you’ve made contributions to open source video software or have got experience wrangling things through the various commercial behemoths in the industry, we’re interested.
• Front-end and design skills. At the moment we’ve got Mike Stenhouse carrying most of the front-end work. We’ve got Rey Dhuny and Stef Lewandowski, but Rey is mostly busy with the main site and other projects here and Stef is mostly busy with everything all at once. So right now Mike’s got more than the lion’s share of the work, and there’s only one of him. We’ve talked about cloning, but we’re not sure that the world is ready for two Mike Stenhouses and we’d love you to give us a second option.
• Dev-ops. We’re a big believer in this. There is not a separate species called “sysadmin”. The people building and maintaining your infrastructure should be part of your dev team, albeit with a somewhat different skill set. Right now we’ve got Jon Cowie covering half of this. He’s built us a great infrastructure, but he’s very much more ops than dev (we are slowly converting him, though he denies this). We could quite use someone to pick up more of the dev half of that. We need people good at diagnosing problems, fixing issues, building reliable systems, etc.
• Automation. A lot of what we do at Aframe is only semi-automated. We expect this to continue – much of it requires decision making, or requires tasks which are trivial for humans and open research programs for computers. One of our greatest strengths is that we’re entirely prepared to make a person do it when it’s hard for a computer to. But our humans are a scarce resource, and we don’t want to make their lives more difficult than they should be. If you’ve got experience taking manual processes and replacing them with a small shell script that would be great.

Some other by the ways:

• We’re mostly Ruby. We’re in principle open to other languages, particularly for high performance stuff, but it’s unlikely we’ll move away from Ruby as the main stack any time soon. While knowing Ruby isn’t strictly necessary (particularly for people more focused purely on the video), if you don’t know it you’ll need to pick it up pretty quickly.
• We do Agile. We’d like it if you do too.
• We like interesting people, and people who are interested. If you don’t have a passion for what you do, this is probably the wrong place for you.

Oh, and the people I mentioned above are not the whole dev team. We also have Marcus Baker, who we hired for the “Beard” job spec you might remember (which seems to have vanished off the internet. Sad. I might repost it for archive at some point), and a mysterious being known only as “Michael” who has successfully erased all evidence of himself from the internet. Really.

Anyway, I hope that sounds interesting to you. Feel free to ask me any questions (in comments, on Twitter, by email, whatever) and if you want to apply, drop us an email at jobs@aframe.com!

Up front disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation with these people except as a user. I just like their service.

So I used to have this project called Gourmand. It scraped my interests from various places across the internet and shoved them into delicious. Favourited tweets, google reader shared items, stumbleupon thumbs ups and reddit votes. I’d vaguely intended to get hacker news in there but never got around to doing it.

It bit rotted – various features stopped working as services moved on, and I decided that I didn’t really have much interest in maintaining it. So I just turned it off.

I’ve since moved from delicious to pinboard, which is a rather nice (paid) replacement for it. It’s not as good for discovery, but it’s much better as a bookmarking service. It has a bunch of nice search and integration features, and in particular my tweets and google reader items are now going into my bookmarks again.

This of course caused me to want more, and in particular want my reddit upvotes to go into it. I briefly talked to the author of pinboard on twitter about importing arbitrary feeds. He didn’t want to implement the feature for various reasons but suggested using yahoo pipes to turn the reddit upvote feed into a google reader shared like feed and use that.

I really hate yahoo pipes, so decided to use the API to do it instead. I then promptly proceeded to do bugger all with this intention and there it ended for the time being.

The other day my friend Joanna Geary had some invites going to ifttt (If This Then That), a web automation service. I thought “Hey, that looks neat” so happily took one off her.

I signed in, looked bewildered for a few seconds, clicked some buttons, and about a minute later had my reddit upvotes going into pinboard using the RSS feed channel. Shortly after that I had my metafilter favourites coming in too.

It works well. It handles a somewhat limited range of tasks, but it seems to handle those smoothly and with just enough flexibility to let you do what you want. I’m quite impressed, and definitely recommend checking it out.

I had a conversation on twitter with Michael Bridgen the other day. It went:

@squaremobius: Time to get my C++ hat on! That C++ hat that I have.
@DRMacIver: @squaremobius is it made of barbed wire and high explosives?
@squaremobius: @DRMacIver No, the C++ hat is made of slightly damp folded newspaper. And high explosives.

Well I was thinking about hats on friday (as one does), and started thinking about what the hats for other languages are like.

And then I thought “You know what we haven’t had in a while? An irritating but catchy meme in which we shallowly compare programming languages based on superficial characteristics. Those are awesome“.

The rest was inevitable.

And so, without further ado, I bring you hats for programming languages.

The C Hat

The C hat is a knight’s helmet. People looking at you think you are a brave warrior who slays dragons. They do however also suspect you might just be a crazy LARPer.

The Java Hat

The Java hat is a bowler hat. It is very prim and proper and worn by responsible businessman. You’re not sure if they know it says “Kick Me” on the back, but you don’t want to ask in case they don’t.

The Scala Hat

The Scala Hat is the Java Hat with an HUD and a propeller beanie attached.

The Haskell Hat

The Haskell hat is a beautiful construction of crystal and silver. It is a wonderful thing to behold. It’s the devil to keep the thing properly balanced on your head.

The Python Hat

The Python Hat is broad brimmed, stylish and proper. There is a correct way to wear it, and any other way will get you judged. The correct way is facing dead straight forward, no angle at all, and with a significant indent in the front.

The Ruby Hat

The Ruby Hat was made by this wonderful little milliner you’ve probably never heard of. Despite that, it looks remarkably like they took the Python Hat and added sequins. It is worn at an angle.

The Perl Hat