sufi coffee shop

On a recent trip to Palo Alto, I had missed nearly a full day and a half without an actual meal. There were too many hassles enroute and then lots of exciting work to discuss, once I got on the ground.

By the time I had a chance to call home and then get a little food, not much around my hotel was open (or looked any good). I wandered, frustrated and hungry. Amazingly, here in the heart of Silicon Valley, I stumbled upon a jewel called Sufi coffee shop. After I ordered an enormous amount of food, the proprietor, Parviz Rasti, looked at me carefully and asked, "Have you not eaten in days?" "Actually," I replied, "not in about 1.5 days!"

Okay, this place has wonderful food - huge portions, great quality, reasonably low price. Even more wonderful is the ambience and the spirit of the place.

I'm hungry now, I'm heading back to Silicon Valley soon, and I'm looking forward to visiting Sufi.

aws rocks the free world

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is perhaps one of the most fundamental and far-reaching changes in the computer industry ... since perhaps when, recently, SecondLife hit the cover of BusinessWeek magazine. In fact, this news will be the cover story of BusinessWeek next week.

I knew about a friend working on this project a couple of years ago, and helped a little (on the sly) with documenation. So when it came time to provide offsite backup services for HeadCase, we thought it might be good to check out AWS. Price-performance comparisons showed 90% reduction in cost over going to an ISP or other backup service, plus the Amazon approach ("S3") had better reliability and other uses, such as tiered storage.

Overall their "cloud" of grid/utility computing services allows a small technology startup to begin playing with REALLY big scale services - it fits almost perfectly for those of us who share a perspective of REST + SOA. With "S3" as a storage grid, "EC2" as a compute grid (Linux images, Java API), "SQS" as a transaction message queue (somewhat reminiscent of IBM's MQ), and MTurk for the "human computation" and crowdsourcing, this business strategy precipitates a fundamental shift in how to plan for IT infrastructure, how to manage QA resources, etc.

As an engineering manager, I would expect to pay a lot to get access to that kind service - especially giving Amazon's remarkable quality of service. Instead, I pay pennies on the dollar compared with a hosted service - and moreover I don't have to staff up my operations, since Amazon handles that as "outsourcing". And thereby our firm inherits that quality of service, since the Amazon AWS services handle the public-facing aspects of our SOA.

The bottom line here: the fundamental issue with cost of scaling Internet infrastructure is not the processors (thank you very much, Dell or HP) but instead - as IBM knows oh so well - the utilities involved, such as power. Amazon is building out data centers in the Pacific Northwest, located near cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power generation. This has a significant Green effect, optimizing the electrical power generation and usage by collocation, then exporting the "refined" use as data center services.

This almost as major change in the industry as when DNS was invented, or HTTP/1.0 became accepted, or Skype launched. Wall Street is tending to comment that Amazon is not following a core strategy, without clearly understanding that Amazon has just put several big players on notice for substantive business model disruptions: notably IBM, Microsoft, Google, EMC, HP, BMC, (and for what it's possibly still worth) Sun. As the article in BusinessWeek does mention, this is clearly a good strategy for launching a tech startup with vastly reduced capital and substantially enhanced quality and scalability. In other words, in the eyes of VCs, that implies better opportunities to leverage capital.

Here is an example pattern of usage:

1. Design your data model to be stored in the Amazon S3 storage grid. For example, we have requirements for running a Java JSR 170 content management system, which fits well with S3 capabilitities.
   
2. Prepare images for your application servers (Java, PHP, whatever) to run on Amazon EC2.
   
3. Point the client side of your applications, such as Ajax requests, at the Amazon SQS message queue.
   
4. Allocate your server images in the EC2 cloud to pull requests off your SQS queue.
   
5. Your middle tier processes requests within EC2, persisting data out to your S3 storage.
   

You can also run "back office" tasks such as reporting or data mining based on the same pattern - without disrupting customer services.

I've read about people beginning to use this kind of pattern to setup their QA environment for regession testing or load testing - again without disrupting other operations or requiring costly server + network replication.

It would seem to fit quiet well in, say, with Java Server Faces used for an Ajax UI... based on a tech stack that used Seam, clustered JBoss servers, Hibernate for the persistence layer, and clustered MySQL underneath that.

in praise of seitan

Recently my wife asked me how to cook eggplant. First, we had received some nice egg-shaped eggplant with our Greenling delivery last week. Secondly, there's a popular eggplant dish in Persian cuisine which I like to fix for the family, and Erin was perhaps hinting :)

The Persian word for eggplant is "bademjan". I remember a similar word used to describe a popular eggplant salad in Russia - which was delicious, but perhaps not quite as savory as the Persian variety.

However, this time we changed up the recipes a bit. We had a craving for "setian" - also called wheat roast or fu. So here goes one for our recipe book, an adaptation of a Persian lamb stew called "khoresh" with our substitutes for the meat - in prase of Seitan:

Slice eggplant - optionally peel them if the peels are too think and tough.

Soak eggplant in brine overnight, to leach out the bitterness - not required for Japanese style eggplant.

Drain eggplant, removing the bitter brine.

In a large iron skillet, heat a centimeter of grapeseed oil, adding freshly grated nutmeg, black pepper, and Hungarian paprika.

Once that begins to snap, add eggplant slices.

Cover and cook, stirring occaisionally so that all the eggplant becomes cooked evenly.

When the eggplant flesh becomes soft and somewhat brown/purple, add equal amounts of seitan (roasted kind).

Stir together, adding enough tomato paste to coat all the "meat".

I like to garnish with a chiffonade of cilatro and garlic chives, which just happen to be locally in season.

I also like to serve this over rice. A nice basmati should work well enough... Persian dishes tend to use a technique called "chelou bah tadig" where the rice is slightly under cooked, then placed into a tall pot which has hot oil and saffron in the bottom. Make "holes" with a wooden spoon all the way from top to bottom of the rice, and wrap the pot's lid with a towel.

The result is a golden crisp at the bottom, where the the rice above becomes a little fluffy and gains an almost "nutlike" or "popcorn" flavor. Place the tomato + seitan + bademjan mix atop that and you'll enjoy a tasty entree.

In fact, I have been tempted to name this dish The Great Seitan.