netzooid

It all began when they put a jar of live shrimps in front of me (see a short video here).

Me: “Am I supposed to eat that alive?”
Waiter: “Yes, just dip them in the brown butter.”
Me: “Whole?”
Waiter: “Well, sometimes I bite the tails off first so they don’t cut my cheek.”

Shock and awe campaign? It was the beginning of one of the best meals I’ve had and it definitely shocked and awed.

Noma, is located in Copenhagen which I’ve been vying to go to for around 2 years now. It finally came together as I was going to Norway to do some hiking. (I made my reservation before all the hubub about being #1 in the world for the record).

The ingredients were fresh. They were unmanipulated. The wine pairings were superb. The meal was exciting, but never over the top. One of my favorite meals of all time!

Then menu:

• An assortment of amuse bouches.
• Dried scallops and watrecress, biodynamic cerelas and beat nut / 2008 Bourgogne Aligote, Fanny Sabre, Bourgogne
• Oyster and the ocean / 2008 Chablis, Pattes Loup, Bourgogne
• Pike perch and ramson leaves, cabbage stems and pickled ramson seeds / 2007 Viré-Clessé ‘Thurissey’, Domaine Sant Barbe (Jean-Marie Chaland), Bourgogne
• Pickled vegetables and bone marrow, herbs and bouillon / NV ‘7′ Moins d’alcool, Autant de Plaisir!, Domaine Fontanay (Simon Hawkins), Roanne
• Ox cheek and endive, pickled pear and verbena / 2007 Cornas ‘Brise Cailloux’ (Magnum), Matthieu Barret, Rhone
• Celery and celeriac / 2008 Riesling Auslese, Georg Breuer, Rheingau
• “Gammel dansk” (in ice cream form), milk, and wood sorrel / NV Vin de France ‘Ze Bulle Zero Pointe’, Chateau la Tour Gris (Gourdon), Saumur

There is a lot to talk about here. I will try to break it down by theme instead of dish by dish, which you can see above. I’ve inserted a few pics, but I want you all to know that I ate a portion of the dish usually before snapping a picture. You can Google around for more of them. Also, I’m certainly skipping over a lot of the meal, so it’s worth checking out the other reviews anyway!

Local to Scandinavia

The overriding theme of the meal to me was the local food of Denmark and Scandinavia. They are very passionate about using Scandinavian ingredients. There were a plethora of greens throughout the meal which they grow/pick themselves. It started right away with a lovely amuse bouche with rose hip “leather” (I think that’s what they called it at least). And wood sorrel is a new favorite of mine now. It made an appearance in the first dish where there was a sauce made from pureed wood sorrel over diferent cereals. It also made an appearance in the desert course… (see below).

There was also the amuse bouche which was in a plant pot. Inside of it was edible “dirt” (I can’t remember what exactly it was) with freshasparagus bits and radishes from their garden. There was also a green cream that tied everything together (literally). Crunch and delicious!

Of course everyone is local these days, so why the hubub about it? Well, I think that part of the reason the whole meal was so interesting is because they are ingredients and methods that we don’t often get exposed to. It was very much Scandinavian in style. Although most Scandinavians can’t cook that well. So I think part of the greatness of it is that they are taking an area which is not traditionally known for it’s amazing food, then using it’s ingredients and methods to make something amazing.

Simplicity

All the dishes had a great simplicity to them. You don’t need to manipulate ingredients to be creative. The pickled vegetables was a very simple dish, but beautiful, delicious, and interesting! It featured lots of local plants which were scattered over the dish. The sauce had a simple, but satisfying bouillon sauce.

Wine

I’ll be honest, I’ve  been kind of down about wine pairings lately. Most recently I think it was L2O (which I love still). My friend convinced me afterward we would have been better off ordering a great bottle of wine which we knew was good. I am not looking for anything particularly inventive or challenging, just something that is beautiful and enhances the food.

Noma reminded me why wine pairings can be amazing. It started with the Oyster and the Pattes Loup Chablis. The minerality and the salinity of the dish and the wine were perfect together. Then the full, rich, beautiful Viré-Clessé ‘Thurissey’ with the perch.  And what is with everyone and Georg Breuer lately? I managed to have his wines at Noma, Credo (Trondheim, Norway), and my friend’s parent’s farm in Molde, Norway. Enjoyed him every time.

Desert

There deserts were inventive. Perhaps the most challenging dish in the whole meal was the celery and celeriac dish. It was a desert. Made from celery. The food geek in in me was provoked. It was light, refreshing, and mildly sweet. It was interesting, however, it’s something I don’t ever feel the need to eat more than once.

There was also an ice cream made from Gammel Dansk, a Danish liquor. It has wedges of dried milk and wood sorrel on it. Vegetables? On ice cream? I was skeptical, but I loved it!

It was great to finish up the meal with deserts which were light and not overly sweet. It showed great finesse and respect for the arc of the meal.

Staff and experience

One thing that struck me about eating at Noma was the staff. Sometimes, when I go to a top tier restaurant, it can feel quite stuffy and the staff a little robotic. At NOMA this is not so. They are passionate, friendly, and relaxed. I spoke to numerous staff members for a quite a bit and the chef for maybe 30 minutes. It was nice that they weren’t in any way caught up in themselves. It shows you can be passionate about food, but not annoying about it. I think they’re probably helped somewhat by being off the beaten path. In NY or whatnot I can see how one can quickly grow jaded with a certain type of customer. Perhaps there are less of them that are able to make it to Denmark.

There was a funny spot somewhere midway through the meal where one of the staff came up to me and said, “so you have a blog?” Surprised, I asked how they knew. Seems the Google every single person who comes to their restaurant (I asked if that results in any different treatment, and like the good restaurant they are, they said “no.”) I don’t consider myself a food blogger and I told them as much. I just write these things so I can explain how great the meal was to all my friends!

Conclusion

Noma is a great achievement in the world of food. Questions: when can I go back? Who wants to come this time?

The other day I heard someone in a particular niche of the software industry say, “whenever we run into our competitors we always win.” I about choked on my food I was eating at the time. I like the company and they make a good product, but what made this claim particularly astounding was that I’ve heard it from two of their competitors as well.

I’ve heard a similar thing from someone in sales in our company as well. While I believe Mule ESB, Tcat, etc are great products, I surely don’t believe that we just have a marketing problem. If only people would get in front of our product then we’d always make a sale! Yeah, right.

Back to the first example though, how in the world can this be true for all three companies? Well, it comes from what is called a selection bias. Surely you’ve heard of it? Selection bias is when you have a bias in your conclusion based on who you are sampling from. For instance, let’s say you were trying to determine President Obama’s approval rating. If you said, hmmm, I’ll just take samples from urban centers – there are a lot of people around and it’s really convenient – that would be a selection bias. You’d be missing out on large swaths of republican, red state people who are much less likely to approve of Obama.

Similarly I believe that the 3 companies are coming to a wrong conclusion based on who their sampling from. This is almost too obvious to state, but when a lead comes in to a company they have already gone through many different gates:

• Hearing about your product
• Learning what your product is
• Evaluating your product
• Contacting sales
• Buying your product

I’m guessing that these 3 companies actually are only basing their data on those who made it to the last two points. Folks may have given up though on any one of the first three. They may not be hearing about your product. Your product could be described wrong for their use case. Your product may not work out of the box correctly. In any of these cases, you’ll never ever hear about it and you’ll be selling yourself short in the market.

Further reading

There’s actually a rather interesting field of research on this as it relates to cosmology. Nick Bostrom in particular has written a great book on it called Anthropic Bias (first 5 chapters are free). He asks questions about how we can reason with our limited perspective – we can’t see the grand scheme of things in the universe afterall, we can only see from our planet earth. So how can we make judgments about the probability of life? Or the probability of our species surviving after we know how to produce nuclear bombs? I find it a rather interesting topic. He also has a bunch of other great articles like Global Catastrophic Risks and Where Are They? Why I hope that the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

My friend Paul Brown and I just finished our presentation here at OSCON. It was a fun exploration of some of the non relational database technologies, a presentation of a key/value store based twitter clone that we built on Voldemort and some discussion of monitoring/deployment.

I started experimenting with some of the non relational databases a while back in an effort to learn a bit more. There are some very interesting problems involved in dealing with such systems. Somehow I managed to get Paul to get in on it as well and do this talk with me. He too must be a sick individual to play with this in his spare time.

We built out a functional twitter clone called BigBird based on voldemort (minus lots of things like direct messages, searching), and it’s now all open source and available on github. Our presentation is up as well (slideshare, pdf) and should give a good idea of how we architected things.

I hope that everyone finds our code useful and informative. If nothing else, it could server as a good basis for evaluating/testing Voldemort. We may improve it over time. The idea is that we will add different backends which interest us. HBase, for example, now seems much more worthy of attention than when I looked at it early this year. Cassandra seems interesting too now that it has a release out and I don’t have to deal with their crazy build process. Paul has also started on a Dynomite & Osmos implementation.  Although no word on when/if any of this will be finished.

Alinea is the crème de la crème of molecular gastronomy. It’s a restaurant based in Chicago, which by some counts is the #1 restaurant in the US. Grant Achatz, the chef, is a food whiz whom likes to deconstruct your food. Think of it as post modern food taken to the extreme. With the tour menu at 24 courses (many bite sized), it is the height of food art, experimentation, and excess.

I’ve been wanting to go here for a year or two, and finally made it down there last night with my good friend Andrea. The summary of the night is: it was amazing, fun, overwhelming and disappointing at the same time. I would definitely recommend it if you’re a foodie, but I’m not sure that I would recommend the longer tour (24 courses) as opposed to the tasting (13 courses). If you’re not a foodie, well, buy yourself a really really good steak and bottle wine instead.

My highlights/lows/wine notes are below. 

Highlights

• One of my favorite things that Alinea did was integrating aromas which were not part of the dish with the food. There were ~4 times that they did this, and each one was a great success:
  • Oyster, yuzu, and seasame on a stick of lemongrass
  • Sweet Potato with bourbon and brown sugar, deep fried on a burning cinnamon stick. That was delicious. Seems there is this thing called sweet potato pie which I’ve never had which it imitates to some degree. I need to remedy this in the future…
  • Cobia presented on a spoon, in a covered bown, which had burning cedar and tabacoo leaf in it. When they brought it to you, they opened up the bowl giving the smoky aromas while you at your single bite of deconstructed fish.
  • For one of the desert courses, they had spice cake with caramelized ice cream (or something like that). What was interesting about it was that they presented on top of a pillow full of air. The weight of the dish slowly pushed out the air, giving an aroma of “brown spices” while you ate your dish. I really liked this one!
• Every dish was absolutely visually stunning. I’m working on getting pictures up, but they’re on my friend’s camera.
• Wagyu Beef. This is the Japanese beef where they massage the cows daily. It just melted in your mouth. (This also goes to show a lot of things are better off not deconstructed!)
• Hot potato/cold potato. You ate this one in such a way where you pulled out a pin and the hot potato dropped in cold potato soup, swallowed it all, and enjoyed the hot and cold inside your mouth.
• The service was probably the most impeccable service that I had anywhere. I never had to ask for anything, except for where the bathroom was.
• The wine overall was excellent. My notes are below.

Lows

There was one nearly overwhelming low theme of the whole night for me: the lack of range of texture of the dishes. Let me explain. Part of the fun of the dishes is to turn something into something else. The lamb dish had a lemon, but you would never know that it’s a lemon, because it was turned into a gelatinous ball. But, nearly everything was turned into a gelatinous or creamy something, which texturally was overwhelming. As we started reaching the halfway point of the night, I started thinking, “not more cream! Give me something solid!”  I think that might around the point of the butter themed dish. It actually had a ball of butter that you were supposed to break open and eat with a bunch of other already rich cream, a few bits of corn and some crab.

A couple other lows:

• There were also a couple dodgy wine pairings. Most notably the Crozes Hermitage.
• It’s excessive. It was simply too much food to consume. Maybe that is the point?

Wine

Here are a few of my thoughts about a few of their wines.

• NV Henriot “Souverain”, Champagne: This was an easy drinking 50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir Champagne. It was a bit thin, but the second course really brought out some nice flavors of honey and citrus for me in it. It would not have been my choice to start off the night, but hey, I don’t own a swanky restaurant. 
• 2007 Michael Chapoutier, Crozes Hermitages, France. A beautiful, lean, floral wine, with great minerality. I will probably be tracking this down, but we both thought it was a horrible pairing with what we were eating
• 2002 La Sirena, Syrah, Napa Valley. Oh this was an amazing, amazing wine. This is a dark, concentrated, but still incredibly elegant Syrah. The woman who made this wine used to be a wine maker at Screaming Eagle from what I understand. Their bottles sell for like $2000-3000. Oi. Luckily, this bottle sells for $60 (in the newer vingates), so I could theoretically get some.
• 2007 Brick House Gamay Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon. A lighter wine with good fruit but also good earth from what I recall. It had an odd color and cloudy character – maybe it didn’t have sulfur dioxide added to it? That’s the only other time I’ve seen a similar color.
• 2001 Hans Nittnaus “Premium” Trockenbeerenauslese, Burgenland, Austria – I thought this was a very delicious desert wine. Lots of apricot flavor and not overly sweet.
• 2004 Olivares Dulce Monastrell, Jumilla, Spain. I had no idea they made wine like this from Monastrell. They leave the grapes on extra like so they dry up a little, then they make a very high alcohol, almost port-like, wine from it. I would like to try this one again, as I was a little fuzzy and overly full at this point, but it was delicious at the time.

(Skipping week in review for a long entry today…)

I’m continually amazed at how hard of a problem deployment actually is. If you’re going to be deploying any reasonably sized application you have an endless list of things to worry about:

• Taking the cluster up and down so there is no downtown
• Managing the configuration of individual nodes
• Operating system setup
• Installation of required libraries/3rd party tools
• Managing dev, QA, staging and production deployments
• Schema migration/database updates
• How to do rollbacks

We’ve done a bit of work with Galaxy to support deployment which addresses a small subset of these problems. Our NetBoot feature allows you to store your Mule application in a repository and have it downloaded on the fly from any number of nodes. You just trigger a restart on the node to get the application update via JMX.

There are a few other interesting tools out there.

Capistrano: Allows you to create Ruby scripts which automate all the aspects of your deployment. It looks endlessly flexible.

SmartFrog: A system for describing and managing software components. Its goals seem much more ambitious than Capistrano. Check out Steve Loughran’s presentation on deploying Hadoop on a cluster (a non trivial task) with SmartFrog for a good overview. It even comes with a management console! Although it looks complex at first glance, I bet that once you get the hang of it, it can simplify things quite a bit. 

Puppet: A declarative language for “automating system administration tasks.” This seems much more oriented at automating sys admin tasks, than actually deploying your application. 

(I would love to hear about anyone’s experiences with any of these tools or any of the commercial vendors as well.)

Given the complexity of deployment, it certainly makes PaaS offerings appealing. No worrying about operating systems, databases, 3rd party libs, configuring individual nodes… Ideally it could be such that you just upload your application and push it out. Which is what it seems many large companies are doing – Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to name a few. 

I hope that we start to see more core infrastructure managed by the infamous cloud people. Just write your app, upload, and tell it where to deploy. Then we can focus on building applications, which is what we really want to do anyway.

On a related note, are there any managed Hadoop instances out there? This could be a very useful part of a hosted application infrastructure. It’ll be interesting to see if Amazon supports something like this as a core service someday.

1. Being able to depend on a project without having to download, unzip, locate jars, locate dependencies, and add them all to my classpath
2. Automatically getting the sources attached to my IDE once I depend on it (meaning I don’t have to check it out from SVN…)
3. Automatically getting the javadocs attached to my IDE once I depend on it (meaning I don’t have to check it out from SVN…)
4. Knowing exactly how to setup a project in the IDE once I download it’s sources
5. Standard commands to build and test and deploy
6. Modularization. This isn’t Maven specific per se, but on the whole, people who use ant don’t modularize their build and end up with one ugly amalgamation of source code. 

Seeing that I’m not inclined to write a whole series of entries, I’m going to give a new format a go: summarizing some random thoughts from the week on different topics in one blog entry. Basically I’m lazy and this makes me feel better about writing short snippets because I can combine them and make it one long post. Don’t expect much value add.

Twitter

Seems I’ve given in and become an active twitter user. My ID is dandiep. The conclusion so far is that people seem to enjoy drinking and tweeting about it. I’m drinking a Ale to the Chief right now, I suppose I should go let the world know…

Scalability

I’ve been looking at some of the cool stuff coming out of companies that have big scalability requirements. The first project that I was pointed to recently is Cassandra. I’m guessing I’m way behind the times because I had never heard of it. It’s the P2P storage platform that they use at Facebook. Will someone please add some friggin docs to this thing?

The second comes via Geir. It’s an Amazon Dynamo implementation called Voldemort. It was developed by LinkedIn (primarily/all by Jay Kreps?) and appears to be pretty simple to use. On the flip side it is very simple with just keys and values. Cassandra definitely goes beyond that and allows you to define schemas and indexes of sorts.

Are people using any tools to help them deal with the added code complexity of these non relational databases? Is there an opportunity for a framework to help deal with constraints, eventual consistency, etc on top?

Mule

Did you know Mule has a blog? Of course other people blog about us too. Jerome from Noelios just blogged about our Restlet connector. Restlet is pretty cool and I think the URI template routing insnide Mule can come in pretty handy…

SOA

Is it dead? How can something be dead when I wasn’t sure what it was to begin with?

I would prefer to kill the term. I would group part of what people refer to as SOA as systems design. Thinking about a problem wholistically. This is just part of good software engineering. For instance, the guy who has 6 services which do the same things for different parts of the company. Investing to consolidate these services will pay off. Investment and return. ROI. Why do we need to call this SOA?

Also, you cannot separate this from the technology. How am I going to achieve a shared service which needs to be monstrously scalable? The outcome of this decision probably has big effects on your process.

I’ll be speaking at QCon next week on bringing the enterprise to the web with Mule. Mule has a lot of cool stuff which can help you integrate applications RESTfully. I’ll be looking at some example scenarios and how these problems can be solved using Mule.

Have use cases or scenarios which you’d think would be interesting to discuss? Shoot me an email (dan AT netzooid.com) or leave a comment below!

1. Make it faster. Anyone else notice how slow the apps are to start? It takes like 15-20 seconds for me to get to the point where I can take a picture. This is the case with nearly every application – I spend the majority of my time in front of the iPhone waiting.
2. Build a model with a slide out keyboard.
3. Stop being monopolistic, two faced jerks and allow any application on the iPhone. I want Rhapsody on the iPhone! Subscription music rocks.
4. Create a home screen which shows my upcoming appointments, recent calls, and favorite apps. Kind of like WinMo…
5. Flash for the iPhone. Too many restaurant websites depend on Flash, making the iPhone unusable for a lot of menu browsing.
6. Create a better SMS applicaiton. There is no sorting, filtering, and it takes a lot of scrolling to call a contact. There is also no easy way to go from a contact to the SMS chat history. Annoying.
7. Allow me to turn off spelling correction.
8. Copy & Paste anyone?

Stefan Tilkov just posted his slides from his Lightweight SOA talk. I have nothing to add to them. I just wanted to say: these should be mandatory reading for all our customers and anyone doing integration!