We have two in the house.  Passed down through the generations in my wife's family, they currently sit in our living room as decorations, whispering to us of bygone times.

They once played a central role in the cultural life of the Russian emigre intelligentsia.  Alexandra Kropotkin evokes images of this bygone world in her wonderful book on Russian Cooking:

Among Russians who have gone away to dwell in other countries, it is easy enough to arouse mild attacks of homesick longing for Russian life and Russian flavors.  But to launch the expatriate Russian soul on a really unbridled jag of nostalgia, try mentioning our vechernyi t'chai, our evening tea.

There is the magic phrase that reawakens all out dearest memories of home!

When the samovar goes on the dining-room table, usually about 10 o'clock in the evening, the entire family gathers for the most intimate kind of get-together.  This is the hour of comfortable relaxation, with old and young meeting as equals in talk, drinking innumerable glasses and cups of tea while wandering conversationally into all fields of anecdote and gossip, of thought and speculation.

The babies and younger children are in bed.  The adolescents feel grown up.  The oldsters are sure of an audience.  And guests always drop in.  It is perfectly correct for friends to drop in, uninvited, for evening tea at any time between 10 P.M. and midnight.  The lady of the house is not expected to set out anything special for company.  There is no fuss or formality.  The scene is cozy and homelike.  When you come for evening tea, you take potluck with the family.

The dining-room table is covered with an embroidered tablecloth.  Beside the lady of the house, at her right hand, the steaming samovar stands on a little table of its own.  Or if there is no side table, the samovar will be standing directly on the dining-room table, with the hostess peeking around it to see and take part in whatever is going on.

A small china teapot fits into a metal fixture on top of the samovar.  The hostess herself has measured tea leaves into the china teapot, has brewed the tea with boiling water from the samovar, and has set the pot of tea on top of the samovar to keep on brewing.

The tea is made as strong as household supplies permit.  A few drops of this strong tea from the small china pot will be poured into each cup or glass, which will then be filled with hot water from the samovar.

Tea glasses in metal or silver holders that have handles, like American ice-cream-soda glasses, are set out for the men.  In Russia the men drink tea from glasses, adn the women drink tea from cups.

...

On our evening tea table are plates of cold cuts and plates of sliced cheese.  We don't serve fish at evening tea unless the season is Lent, or when times are particularly hard.  The bread basket offers slices of black bread and slices of white.  Unsalted butter is on the table in a pretty dish ... Plenty of sweet things will be arrayed in front of us in any case.  There will be homemade preserves, crystallized fruits, fruit confections known as pastilla, and the semi-jellied fruit candies that Russians call marmelade ...

At vechernyi t'chai, it seemed that the tea was consumed endlessly, most Russians taking it with thin slices of lemon.  The hostess always sliced the lemon herself with a special silver knife.  After cutting the lemon she always held the knife for a moment in the steam from the samovar to prevent the knife from tarnishing.

Everyone at the tea table had a plate and a small saucer, usually of cut glass.  The saucer was for preserves, which you either ate with a spoon or put into your tea.  Many Russians like preserves better than sugar as a sweetening for their tea.  After years in America it still irks me not to be able to find saucers of the right size for preserves to go with Russian tea.  We call these saucers blewdichki dlia vareniya.  They are about 3 inches across.  Very few Russians take milk or cream in their evening tea.  They take it that way on for breakfast.

The best breakfast in the world, of course, is a hot bowl of pho, which is a part of my cultural heritage.  My mother makes it for us whenever she visits, and I generally have it for lunch at least two or three times a month.  Nevertheless, the best time of day for ph? is the morning.  It includes a strong beef broth for protein, noodles for carbs, and spices to help you wake up as well as a variety of herbs, bean sprouts and citrus. 

Andrea Nguyen has written an excellent series of articles about pho for the Mercury News which covers the history and the rituals surrounding the flavorful soup.  She even provides a recipe, though it is a bit of a lark since few people will have the patience to actually try it out.  It requires some unusual herbs as well as long hours of boiling bones and meat for the broth.  My mother typically boils two chickens (either Vietnamese or Thai chickens, since she says American chickens have no flavor) as well as a large beef bone for about 8 hours until the meat has practically disintegrated into the broth.

Garnishing pho is like putting together your own hamburger -- you can have it your way. So, before putting any pho into your mouth, add your own finishing touches. Then dive in with a two-handed approach: chopsticks in one hand to pick up the noodles, the soup spoon in the other to scoop up broth and other goodies.

Your pho ritual may include:

Bean sprouts: Add them raw for crunch or blanch them first.

Chiles: Dip and wiggle thin slices of hot chile in the hot broth to release the oil. Leave them in if you dare. For best fragrance and taste, try Southeast Asian chiles such as Thai bird or dragon rather than jalapeños. Serranos are better than jalapeños.

Herbs: Strip fresh herb leaves from their stems, tear up the leaves and drop them into your bowl. Available at Viet markets, pricey ngo gai (culantro, thorny cilantro, saw-leaf herb) imparts heady cilantro notes. The ubiquitous purple-stemmed Asian/Thai basil (hung que) contributes sweet anise-like flavors. Spearmint (hung lui), popular in the north, adds zip. [For details, see Essential Viet herb page on this site.]

Lime: A squeeze of lime gives the broth a tart edge, especially nice if the broth is too sweet or bland.

Sauces: Many people squirt hoisin (tuong) or Sriracha hot sauce directly into the bowl. I don't favor this practice because it obliterates a well-prepared, nuanced broth. But I do reach for the hoisin and Sriracha bottles to make a dipping sauce for the beef meatballs (bo vien).

I typically do put both hoisin and Sriracha in my soup because this is the way my mother has always made it for me.  Additionally, I squirt some of each into a dipping bowl, pick out thin slices of rare beef out of my soup bowl with chopsticks and alternate between dipping the slices in the chile sauce and the sweet hoisin.

Unlike the Russian tea ritual, the Vietnamese pho ritual is no time to talk about politics or religion.  Eating soup is a serious business, and involves the constant motion of chewing on noodles and preparing carefully for the moment when one swallows one's noodles by synchronized hand motions, with the chopstick hand picking out pieces of meat from the bowl and dipping them in the sauce dish, while the soup spoon hand gathers more noodles to chase the slices of beef.

Talking generally resumes after the meal, as all participants look with satisfaction at the empty soup bowls and the pieces of discarded herbs and sprouts strewn across the table.

The Vietnamese are a coffee rather than a tea people, having been colonized by the French rather than the English.  For breakfast I like a strong cup of coffee with my pho, and I like to sweeten it with condensed milk.  A meal like this generally leaves me full well into the dinner hour.

Hellboy is, at its heart, a conceit that allows Mike Mignola, the comic book author,  to riff on various horror and fantasy motifs by inserting a gun-toting, cigar-smoking modern action hero (albeit one with a tail) into genres where he does not belong.  The payoff in the comic books, sometimes successful and sometimes not, is simply in seeing how events unwrap.

There is a naturalness to adapting Hellboy for the big screen, since this is where this type of action hero was originally born.  In Guillermo del Toro's hands, what occurs is a reversal of the transposition Mike Mignola accomplishes in his graphic novels.  We import into the action movie genre elements that do not natively belong to it and see what happens.  As with the comic books, this is sometimes successful and sometimes not.

The original movie played with themes from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu stories.  The monsters were beautifully realized using CGI effects, but the incomprehensible horror that typically drove Lovecraft's stories were displaced.  They simply cannot exist in a world that revolves around an indefatigable hero.

The Hellboy sequel in turn plays, more than anything else, with Tolkien's elves.  The elves in The Golden Army are tall and filled with martial virtue.  They are also masters of magic, and preservers of nature.  Part of the high concept behind Peter Jackson's production of Lord of the Rings was to bring out the nature loving motifs in every elven design, while highlight the industrial aspects of orc culture.  As National Geographic (among others) points out:

Tolkien's concern for nature echoes throughout The Lord of the Rings. Evil beings of Middle-earth dominate nature and abuse it to bolster their own power. For example, Saruman, the corrupt wizard, devastates an ancient forest as he builds his army.

The Elves, in contrast, live in harmony with nature, appreciating its beauty and power, and reflecting a sense of enchantment and wonder in their artful songs.

Orcs, however, always exist in some sense as placeholders for modern men.  In The Golden Army, del Toro asks what would happen if Tolkien's elves ever saw what we have now become.  Del Toro's answer is that they would go to war with us in order to preserve what remained of their world.

Visually, we once again see the Hieronomous Bosch inspired monsters we first glimpsed in Pan's Labyrinth.  They are beautiful and horrible at the same time -- horrible enough to justify Hellboy as a hero as he battles them, but so beautiful at times that it seems a shame.  It is this second aspect of the film, and Del Toro's constant affection for outsiders, that undercuts the film as a participant in the action genre.  Instead, the battles become exhausting over time, and we wish they would go away so we can enjoy the gentle details of Del Toro's exotic world which have always been his specialty.

Hayao Miyazaki's films can be identified as another influence on the visuals and mood of this film.  One of the monsters from Hellboy II seems to be pulled right out of Princess Mononoke.  The bestiary we encounter in the Goblin Market, likewise, recalls the parade of grotesques from Spirited Away.  More than anything else, however, what is borrowed from Miyazaki is the device of placing a child in the middle of the battle between good and evil.  We are forced to see the world through the eyes of a child who finds both good and evil to be ambiguous, which is the emotional location of all fairy tales.  In Del Toro's film, Anna Walton performs this role as Princess Nuala, the sister to the elf protagonist of the story who, with her big yellow eyes and zombie-like complexion, is strangely affecting and sympathetic.

All in all, the film is not successful -- not because it does not know what it wants to be, whether action movie or heroic fantasy, but because there is nothing for it to be.  These genres do not combine easily, and what we are left with instead is a plotline and a set of overlapping genres that provide Del Toro with a canvas upon which he paints detailed images that could not make an appearance in any other way.  Those details were, for me, well worth the price of admission.

The big question is what Del Toro will do when he gets his hands on a real fantasy property.  He is slated to direct the highly anticipated Hobbit movie, with Peter Jackson producing.  There is, of course, what the movie ought to be -- a continuation of the epic fantasy genre, done with the same accomplishment that Jackson achieved with The Lord of the Rings.  If The Golden Army is any indication, however, this is unlikely to be what we will get.  Del Toro's recent interviews point to the same conclusion:

I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits -- I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.

This is fine with me.  I've always been a fan of the Rankin/ Bass cartoon (with music by Glen Yarborough), and don't see any reason to try to improve upon it.  Seeing Del Toro take another stab at twisting the genre to his own ends is well worth waiting for.

According to tradition, the tritone was called the Devil's Chord or the Diabolis in Musica, a sound so dissonant and so puissant it was believed to be capable of raising the Lord of Hell himself.  For this reason, in it's irrationality, the Roman Catholic Church banned the Devil's Triad, on pain of excommunication.  Today, of course, bands such as Metallica and Black Sabbath  use the tritone on a regular basis with no adverse effects.

The irrational is a powerful force that may be harnessed, dear reader, by those willing play on the fringes of reality.  Three magical phrases, irrational yet powerful and well known to the practitioners of the dark arts, can be invoked by anyone who desires to kill a technical project they dislike.  Today, dear reader, I will teach you these three phrases.

But first, a word about motivations.  According to Nietzsche, the driving force behind modern man's desire for power is, tout court, resentment.  We all resent the guy who comes in the middle of a software project and starts making suggestions about how to improve it.  As the new guy, in turn, we resent the old and crusty way things are done, as if the way things are done is the only way.  Resentment, in other words, is the mother of invention when it comes to technology, and we each, in our own way, embrace it as we strive toward a new tomorrow.  In a perfect world, we may all act as the angels, but in the real world, we may occasionally be forced to make deals ex inferis.  Which is not to recommend what I am about to teach you.  I ask you, moreover, to use these techniques judiciously.  One should not call upon the powers of the underworld lightly.  But should you find yourself in a situation where rational discourse is no longer possible, and rhetorical brute force is required, then these phrases may be of use to you.

1. It's too complex.  It's not maintainable.

This is a wonderful phrase.  It is universally applicable since any useful piece of code will end up being complex, and one can never overemphasize the incompetence of one's peers when discussing maintainability.  And with luminaries like Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood backing you, how can you go wrong?  If you want to kill any technology -- WCF, WPF, .NET Remoting, 3-tier architecture -- just invoke this magic phrase and it will wither away.

2. It's not scalable.

Amazingly enough, this diabolical mantra can be called upon without any evidence.  No one will ever turn around and ask you to justify your claim -- be it with a load tester or anything.  Simply say these magic words and your enemies will cower before you.  Anything cool -- like reflection, say -- will cause a certain amount of performance degradation.  This is normal of course.  In software there are always tradeoffs, and exchanging performance for other advantages such as robustness and decoupling are the norm.  Unless, of course, you make trade offs impossible.  The magic phrase "It's not scalable" instantly makes any trade off seem impossible.  It's very well, after all, to lose 5 milliseconds on a transaction, but what happens when you have a gazillion transactions?!!!  That's 5 milli-gazillion units of time that you have cost the company, and time is money!  That's 5 milli-gazillion dollars you've cost the company!   By golly, this solution is not scalable!

3. It will push us beyond our deadline.

"The solution you have provided is all well and good, and I mean neither to question your integrity nor your intelligence, but given the fact that it is not maintainable and not scalable, I fear that trying to implement it will push us beyond our deadline."  I've never worked on a project that wasn't "time sensitive" and rarely on one that wasn't needed "yesterday".  There's no better way to kill an idea, even when it comes out of  the mouth of someone who refuses to say definitively when a project will in fact be completed, than to say that it will push us past our deadline.  I've seen this used when determining which architecture to use.  I've even seen it used in determining which textbox control to use.  If you ever find yourself in a position where you have an idea that is competing with someone else's idea, you can quickly sweep your adversary's idea aside by invoking this occult phrase: It will push us beyond our deadline.

Why are these magic phrases never tested?  Why are they impervious to standards of verifiability traditionally expected in other fields?  The reason is simple.  Software development is always seen, from the outside, as a kind of magic, and any successful project has at its heart some secret sauce, some magic code, that makes it all possible.

This is the magic unicorn principle.  At the heart of any successful application stands a magic unicorn.  You feed it data, no matter how disorganized or moldy, and it comes out the other end a rainbow.  Data in.  Rainbows out.  It's beautiful in its simplicity.

In my next post, I will demonstrate how to build a DIRO magic assembly.  Stay tuned ...

The problem with conjuring tricks is that they lose practically all their glamour once you find out how they are done.  It's very cool to see David Blaine walk down the street, do a few passes over his hand, and resurrect a fly which proceeds to flee.  It's rather disappointing to do a google search and discover that in order to prepare for this trick, the first requirement is that you freeze a fly.

My trick is to make an autocomplete extender from the Ajax Control Toolkit call a WCF service instead of an asmx service.  For this recipe, I assume that you are already familiar with the autocomplete extender, and that you are using Visual Studio 2008.  I warn you in advance -- my trick disappoints.  It is so trivially easy that, once the technique spreads, it is very unlikely to impress your colleagues at work, much less get you a date with a supermodel.

Start by creating a new web project called AutocompleteWCF.  Add a reference to the AjaxControlToolkit.dll.  Open up the default aspx page that is generated with your project, and add the following code to:

          <
          form
          id
          ="form1"
          runat
          ="server"
          >
          <
          asp:ScriptManager
          ID
          ="ScriptManager1"
          runat
          ="server"
          >
          </
          asp:ScriptManager
          >
          <
          div
          >
          <
          asp:TextBox
          runat
          ="server"
          ID
          ="myTextBox"
          Width
          ="300"
          autocomplete
          ="off"
          />
          <
          ajaxToolkit:AutoCompleteExtender
          runat
          ="server"
          BehaviorID
          ="AutoCompleteEx"
          ID
          ="autoComplete1"
          TargetControlID
          ="myTextBox"
          ServicePath
          ="Autocomplete.svc"
          ServiceMethod
          ="GetCompletionList"
          MinimumPrefixLength
          ="0"
          CompletionInterval
          ="1000"
          EnableCaching
          ="true"
          >
          </
          ajaxToolkit:AutoCompleteExtender
          >
          </
          div
          >
          </
          form
          >
        

This is the standard demo code that is shipped with the Ajax Control Toolkit Sample Website.  I've simplified it a bit by removing the animations.  The only significant change I've made is to change the ServicePath from Autocomplete.asmx to Autocomplete.svc, the latter being the extension for a WCF service.

The next step is to create our service and add a GetCompletionList operation to it.  The easiest way to do this is to go to Add | New Item and just select the Ajax-enabled WCF Service item template, but this would be so easy that it is hardly worth doing.

Instead, create a new WCF Service using the WCF Service Item Template and call it Autocomplete.svc.  Visual Studio will automatically generate a service interface for you.  Delete the interface.  We don't need it.  (To be more specific, I don't know how to get this to work with an interface, so I'm just going to ignore that it is possible.)

Again, I am going to rip off the ACT sample app and just borrow the code from their webservice and place it in our WCF service.  The WCF service class (Autocomplete.svc.cs) will look like this:

A few things worth noting:

1. Autocomplete does not implement the IAutocomplete Interface.  Even though this is generated automatically, with the WCF Service item template, you should remove it.

2. The service contract has a blank Namespace explicitly declared. 

3. The ASPNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute must be added to our class.

This takes care of the code that calls the WCF service, as well as the service itself.  We now have rig up the web.config file.  If you've been working with WCF for any length of time, then you know that this is where the problems usually occur.  Fortunately, the configuration is fairly simple.  You need to set up an endpoint behavior for your service that enables web scripting (much the way asmx web services must be decorated with the ScriptService attribute in order to be called from client-script).  You also will need to turn AspNetCompatibilityEanbled on for the hosting environment.

And that is all you need to do make the AutoComplete Extender work with a WCF service instead of an asmx web service.  I told you it would be unimpressive.

Of course, using a WCF service for Ajax has all the limitations that using an asmx file for Ajax did.  First of all, you can't call a service that is in a different domain than the page which hosts your client-code.  This is a security feature, to prevent malicious code from redirecting your harmless javascript to something nasty on the world wide web.

Second, you can't call just any service from your client-side code.  The service must be explicitly marked as something that can be called from client code.  In asmx web services, we used ScriptService for this.  In WCF services, we similarly use EnableWebScript binding property.

Now I feel like I've wasted your time, so here's a YouTube video of David Blaine to make up for it.  And remember, David Blaine is to Chris Angel what Daisy Duke was to Alexis Carrington.  It's an existential thing, and at some point, you've just got to pick sides and stay put in a way that will determine who you are for the rest of your life.

Are you a David Blaine/Daisy Duke kind of person or are you a Chris Angel/Alexis Carrington sort?  Do some soul searching and please let me know what you learn about yourself.

Science is all about making proposals that can be tested (especially after Karl Popper's formulation of the Falsifiability Criterion), and then undergoing the experience of having that proposal rejected.  This is the essence of any successful process -- not that it eliminates errors altogether, but rather that it is able to make corrections despite these errors so that the target need never shift.

Professor Alain Connes recently gave his opinion of Xin-Jing Li's proof for the Riemann Hypothesis -- a proof which relies in part on Professor Connes' work --  in a blog comment to his own blog (by way of Slashdot):

Self-correcting extends to other professions, as well.  Scott Hanselman recently posted to correct an opinion he discovered here which he felt required some testing.  Through his own tests, he discovered that nesting a using directive inside a  namespace declaration provides no apparent performance benefit over placing it outside the namespace.

This leads him to draw these important lesson:

The sentiment recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson's memorable words:

A similar sentiment is expressed in Hobbes' Leviathan, though with a wicked edge:

We find it again expressed in Descartes' Discours de la méthode. Descartes, it might be remembered, occasionally exchanged letters with Hobbes:

Both Hobbes and Descartes formulate their defense of common sense somewhat ironically.  In a recent post, Steve Yegge takes out the irony (or perhaps takes out the kernel of truth and leaves nothing but the irony) in his argument against Joel Spolsky's widely aknowledged criteria for a desirable employee: "smart, and gets things done."

According to Yegge, the crux of the problem is this:

And yet the self-correcting process continues, on the principle that we are all smart enough, collectively, to solve our problems in the aggregate, even if we can't solve them as individuals.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama recently held a news conference to correct a misunderstanding he had made a few hours earlier about his stance on the Iraq War.  According to CNN:

This is, of course, merely a blip in the history of self-correction.  A more significant one can be found in Bakhtin'sattempt to interpret the works of Rabelais, and to demonstrate (convincingly) that everyone before him misunderstood the father of Gargantua. 

Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais in turn brought to light one of the great discoveries of his career: The Carnival -- though a colleague once found an earlier reference to the concept in one of Ernst Cassirer's works.  Against the notion of a careful and steady self-correcting mechanism in history, Bakhtin introduced the metaphor of the Medieval Carnival:

The Carnival serves to correct inequalities and resentments in society and its subcultures not by setting it upon a surer footing, but rather by affording us an opportunity to air our grievances publicly in a controlled ceremony which allows society and its hierarchical institutions to continue as they are.  It is a release, rather than an adjustment.  A pot party at a rock festival rather than a general strike.

As for the Internet, it is sometimes hard to say what is actually occurring in the back-and-forth that occurs between various blogs.  Have we actually harnessed the wisdom of crowds and created a self-correcting process that responds more rapidly to intellectual propositions, nudging them over a very short time to the correct solution, or have we in fact recreated the Medieval Carnival, a massive gathering of people in one location which breaks down the normal distinctions between wisdom and folly, knowledge and error, competence and foolhardiness? 

Nancy Davolio was a fictitious employee in the Microsoft Access 97 Northwind sample database.  Many office workers became smitten with her furtive smile and stylish hair, and while she continued to exist as an employee in later releases of the Northwind database, her employee photo changed, leading many to suspect that something untoward had happened to the real Nancy.

As most people know, "Nancy Davolio" is an anagram for "A Navy Cod Loin", which provides a hint about her origins and eventual fate.  For a list of further Nancy Davolio anagrams, I recommend the Internet Anagram Generator here, where may find more of the 1394 or so anagrams derived from Nancy's name, for instance:

Cavil Noonday
A Viand Colony
A Divan Colony
A Vainly Condo
Canal Void Yon
Canola Nod Iv