Gruntled Coder

Gruntled Coder says it’s time for sit-ins

keithjgrant — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:01:36 +0000

I think it’s time Occupy Wall Street started learning a few things from the civil rights movement. Our system is screwed up. We’ve become an oligarchy where large coorporations have more political power than voters, and there are no checks and balances. The protests so far have done well with raising awareness and starting a much-needed discussion, but for real change to occur, some more specific things need to start happening.

The civil rights movement was effectual largely because it interrupted the status quo. The Occupy protests and marches are great at raising awareness, but to affect real change, they need to do the same. They need to peaceably interfere with the daily lives of the bankers and politicians that are at the heart of the problem. This made sense with the initial protest on Wall Street itself: get a crowd of people on Wall Street, interfering with the stock market trading. I’m not exactly sure how well they’ve been able to do this, but it at least makes more sense than the protests in other cities around the U.S. and the world. While seeing tens of thousands of people marching in Oakland is cool, it still provides little more than a sound bite.

The movement needs some sort of sit-in. The crowds need to surround capitol buildings. Make it difficult for governors and representatives and senators to get into their office or go out to lunch. Have hundreds of people schedule mortgage appointments at the big banks, spend as long as possible discussing a loan and wasting the loan officer’s time with questions at Bank of America or Chase, and then neglect to sign any paperwork.

A discussion has started. Now it needs to affect the lives of the people who are the cause of the problem and are the only ones who can really change the system.

Gruntled Coder tells you how to make a darn good cup of coffee

keithjgrant — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:07:28 +0000

“Coffee makes the code go ’round.” At least, I think that’s how the saying goes.

Programmers (and other humans) need coffee in order to have a productive day. It’s scientifically proven, or something. So here are all the tricks and tips I know regarding coffee (and the french press). I’ll save my more pretentious thoughts til the end, but honestly, the pretentious stuff makes the biggest difference, so if you’re short on attention, you should just skip to that.

The basics:

Grind fresh. Make sure your beans are fresh–roasted within the last few weeks is best, a month at the most. Grind your beans just before brewing. Don’t save unused grounds for the next day.
Grind right. Medium grind for drip-brew, course grind for french press (and fine grind for espresso). A burr grinder is really the only way to do this, but I’ll be the first to admit those things are expensive and I don’t own one (yet).
Use a french press (when you can). There’s a reason a french press is used every time a study wants to show that coffee is bad for you; we all know that,”bad for you” usually means “tastes good”. And please, for love of all that is holy, do not use a percolator.
Reconsider your cream/milk habits. Different bean varieties hold up to milk differently. Milk can enhance coffee with a more robust or “muddy” flavor (such as Sumatra). However, the flavor of more floral coffees (such as most African beans) gets lost when you add milk, even in small quantities. All coffees are not equal! When in doubt, give your coffee a sip before deciding whether or not to add cream.

French Press tips:

Plunge slowly. I always saw this on the little slip of instructions that comes with a french press and thought, “yeah, yeah, but I want my coffee now”. The problem is, pushing the filter down quickly will force more coffee around the sides of the filter, rather than through it, taking the finer grounds (“the fines”) with it. You don’t want that.
Brew time. Plunge after four minutes. Five is right out. You will not make a coffee stronger by brewing longer, you will only make it more bitter.
Use a scale. If you have a small kitchen scale on hand, use it to get a much more consistent coffee-to-water ratio. Just weight the beans before you run them through the grinder. After you get your grind and your brew time consistent, this is where you experiment. I have what I think of as a standard-size french press (I think it’s an 8-cup). For that, I use 35 grams of beans and fill my water to the bottom of the metal band.
Water temperature. Your water should be about 200 degrees, not boiling. What I did was used a thermometer once, and took a good look at how the water was behaving at 200 degrees: little bubbles were forming and disappearing rapidly on the bottom of the kettle. Once I had a good idea of how that looked, I now go by sight.
Bonus trick: Skimming the fines. I learned this one from an article on freakonomics. As you reach the end of your four-minute brew time, use a spoon to skim off all the foam and the fines floating on the top of the water. This will hugely reduce the grit remaining in the french press. It will also make a significant difference in the flavor profile of your coffee: it will give it a much cleaner mouthfeel. This may sacrifice a bit of the coffee’s depth, though, so experiment.

Now for the pretentious stuff. Getting good beans. Hunting these down will take the most work on your part (unless you live in Portland, then its everywhere). It will also make a bigger improvement to your coffee than anything listed above.

First, a bit of history. There’s a movement called Third Wave Coffee. Honestly, I’ve never heard this term used by anyone, but I’ve certainly seen its principle in action. The theory is this: The first wave of coffee was in the 19th century, when coffee became a common item in every household: Folgers. The second wave started in the 60′s but really hit big in the 90′s, when coffee became regionally labeled and espresso drinks became big: Starbucks. The third wave is about focusing now on not just the country of origin, but the farm of origin. Instead of blending a lot of beans to make every batch uniform, you celebrate what makes each harvest unique, much like wine. No big name company makes third-wave coffee, because by definition, they can’t. You’ll likely have to find somewhere locally that embraces some or all of these ideals:
Single-origin. Forget blends. Get coffee that is one type, from one place. Ideally, look for coffee that’s labeled not only with a country of origin, but a farm name.
Small-batch roasted. Roasting in small batches means the roaster is able to give much more attention to the bean, and make adjustments based on differences between batches.
Forget the dark roast. The longer coffee beans roast, the more they all start to taste the same. Big companies like Starbucks over-roast so they can produce a more consistent product nationwide, year-after-year. But by doing so, they sacrifice all the unique flavors that make each batch unique. The flavor profile of coffee can be just as complex as that of good wine. The same farm will never produce the same coffee twice. Weather patterns and soil conditions will be different. A light- to medium-roasted coffee will even change its flavor profile from day to day in the first week after roasting. Embrace the uniqueness of each cup of coffee.

Gruntled Coder says desktop operating systems should learn from tablets

keithjgrant — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:41:54 +0000

Touchscreens have done a world of good for simplicity in UX design. Large buttons, little or no window chrome, and putting a mask over the complex directory structure where system files lie. Granted, I would argue that the latter point is overdone–I wish Android gave a way to organize my photos–but in general I think it’s a good thing, so long as you can still get your hands dirty when you need to. Ubuntu Unity is a small step in the right direction, but I think there is a lot more we can do.

Strangely enough, Microsoft may have actually figured this one out. (Ouch! It burns when I say that!) Check out this sneak peak at Windows 8. They may or may not be taking this too far, but I think so far it’s the best attempt I’ve seen.

Gruntled Coder keeps with tradition

keithjgrant — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:57:54 +0000

This afternoon, I’m hitting the road. And that means one important thing: Cinnamon Bears. (Traditionally pronounced “Cimmon bears”.)

It’s a very sad thing, but they seem to be getting harder to find at those middle-of-nowhere gas stations. It must have something to do with oil prices, I’m sure.

Grunted Coder laughs at RIM’s demise

keithjgrant — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:03:56 +0000

I generally consider myself an early adopter. I welcome innovation–and competition–in tech products. But one tech company has repeatedly failed to offer a product I felt the least bit interested in: Blackberry.

I remember seeing their first attempt at a smartphone (though it would be years before I heard that term). It was fat, almost puck-shaped, and had about thousand buttons. It looked more like a graphing calculator than a phone. I realized getting email on your phone was a great idea, but this ugly thing was most definitely not the answer. I saw business men using them, and thought they were doing it purely out of necessity; BlackBerry was the only option.

The day Apple announced the iPhone was the first day I was actually interested in a smart phone. That most definitely was the answer. I’ve since switched to Android, because I support competition in the market and I prefer the customizability that comes with it. But what boggled my mind is that BlackBerry continued to sell.

So when I read today that RIM recalled 1,000 PlayBooks due to operating system glitch–I have to be honest–I laughed out loud. As I said, I welcome competition in the smart phone market, but let’s face it, BlackBerry is not competition. One thousand units isn’t a big recall, but it’s just one more thing indicative of RIMs demise. And I like seeing dumb products go by the wayside.

Gruntled Coder says digital media needs to dump the middle man

keithjgrant — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:13:09 +0000

It doesn’t matter if you look at e-books, mp3s, or television ^[1], digital media is all overpriced for the 21st century. It costs pennies to reproduce any of this and get it beamed straight into your living room, yet we still pay steep premiums on all of it to keep the gears churning at behemoth distributors whose primary purpose was physical production and shipping to brick-and-mortar. It takes a lot of cash to keep that infrastructure working.

The problem is, those distributors hold all the power, even though their key role is all but obsolete. With the rise of the internet and digital media, new outlets should emerge, but it’s going to take time. It’s just so much easier to find good content by going to a well-established, trusted distributor/publisher/network/label, and the average customer is still stuck in that mindset, even though its much more costly. And that, of course, keeps driving the content producers to the big distributors, which just makes a vicious cycle of the whole thing.

^[1] Huge props to Hulu for giving television a good jump start over other media industries. They, at least, are reasonably priced. Though I have other thoughts regarding television and the internet…

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