Cookies

The web is full of "the best chocolate chip cookie recipe"s, but here is one from a NY Times article that would truly be a grievous loss to civilization if it were to pass out of knowledge. According to the accompanying article, this recipe was created with the input of a number of master bakers from New York City. I believe it. This recipe makes what could be the absolute best homemade chocolate chip cookies I've ever had. The recipe is online, but I'm replicating it here. Note if you don't read the article: refrigerating for 24-36 hours before cooking is a very important step. Also, I used regular semi-sweet chocolate chips, and they turned out fine. Maybe they'd be even better with the fancy chocolate?

Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours’ chilling

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons

(8 1/2 ounces) cake flour

1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt

2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract

1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content (see note)

Sea salt.

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.

Note: Disks are sold at Jacques Torres Chocolate; Valrhona fèves, oval-shaped chocolate pieces, are at Whole Foods.

Good Design in 42 Seconds

Caution: not for the novice programmer! Ready? Go.

Find a method that's more complex than average. Use "extract method" refactoring to decompose a complex method into smaller pieces: private methods with self-documenting (doesn't-need-comments) names and correspondingly well-defined roles, like createNewThis, storeThat, and processIntoTheOther. Then convert each of the private methods into an interface/implementation pair. Apply this across a project, and you find yourself with pyramids of objects. The very lowest-level business and integration operations are encapsulated by small building blocks at the bottom. Mid-level objects are no larger than the lower, but assemble the lower-level objects into useful sequences for doing work. Higher level objects continue extending this pattern of maintaining small size but assembling functionality from lower-level chunks. Then unit testing any single object is as simple as mocking the few objects it depends on and testing that it invokes its dependencies in the right order and passes them the right parameters under whatever conditions it's in charge of knowing about. Changing behavior is equally easy because simply writing a new implementation of an object that's <100 lines is nothing. The old implementation stays around for reference, including its supporting tests, or it and its tests can be removed. No more changing the code and then having to trace through old tests to see what needs to be fixed there. Polymorphic open/closed.

Ubuntu Video Problems or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Installing ATI Drivers

I've finally gotten around to fixing my broken Ubuntu desktop. It required a reinstallation of ATI video drivers for my Radeon X1900 card. The Situation: I had installed a fresh copy of 8.04 just after it came out, and I updated via the update manager as updates became available. A couple months ago, I installed some updates which upgraded me to kernel version 2.6.24-19-generic. I don't know what else changed, but after this I couldn't get to the desktop. I removed gdm from the init scripts so I could work at the command line. Every time I tried to run startx, though, it would first go to the grey/black and white check background with the "X" mouse cursor, then to a plain white screen with the normal Gnome mouse cursor. The mouse was responsive, but there was only the white screen. Hitting Alt+Tab would show the outline of what appeared to be a dialog box with the outline of the "task switch" panel in front of it. Hitting enter would make the dialog go away so that this didn't happen anymore and I was just stuck with the plain white screen. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace would make the desktop appear for an instant before dropping me back to the command line. The Resolution: Googling led me in a few different directions, and I tried things like trying to reset my xorg.conf via dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. This generated a basic xorg.conf, but it also failed with this error about a battery: FATAL: Error inserting battery (/lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/battery.ko): No such device ??? This is a desktop! Obviously there's no battery! I never figured out what was up with that. Anyway, the new, very small xorg.conf didn't make anything different happen. I also tried updating a couple times along the way with: apt-get update apt-get upgrade Still no dice. Previous experience had taught me that, regardless of which OS you're using, if you have weird problems like this, there's a better-than-even chance that it's got something to do with the video drivers, so I thought I'd try updating those. The Unofficial Wiki for the ATI Linux Driver was very handy in this regard. I found it linked on the ATI driver page when I went there to download the driver. Of course, downloading and installing the driver yourself is considered the Hard Way, but I've done it once before, and it was the automatic way that got me in this predicament. The wiki has instructions for multiple version of multiple distros, including a page for Ubuntu 8.04. I followed the instructions along to the "Install .debs" step before I hit my first problem. The problem was that I had conflicting packages installed because while I was waiting for the driver to download, I had installed Envy with the intent of trying to have it straighten out my drivers for me. I never tried it though, opting instead to handle the installation myself. It turns out, though, that in installing it, several packages had been added that got in the way of the packages that the driver wanted to install. Removing the Envy packages let the driver packages install fine, but at the very end, I got this error message: [fglrx:firegl_init_module] *ERROR* firegl_stub_register failed Further Googling led me to a forum thread that mentioned that trying to install the fglrx module (the ATI drivers) with modprobe fglrx is what causes this error. I tried running that command, and sure enough, I got the same message. The thread also mentioned that modules "radeon" and "drm" seem to get in the way of fglrx, and removing them allows modprobe fglrx to work. lsmod showed that I also had the two modules in question installed, so I crossed my fingers (I had no idea what would happen) and removed them with rmmod radeon and rmmod drm, then ran the entire installation process again, just to be safe. This time it went fine. I started on my way down the checklist again, and when I got to sudo aticonfig --initial -f, I realized that this is something I should have tried in the first place, since this generates an xorg.conf file with all the right ATI stuff in it. Oh well. After finishing the checklist, my desktop is back, and this is the first blog post I've made from Ubuntu. Woohoo! P.S. The title of this post is a reference to one of the greatest movies ever: Dr. Strangelove.

Implementing Optionally Infinite Iterations

Sometimes you need to write a method that takes an argument indicating how many times a certain thing should be done with the option of doing it an unlimited number of times. A straightforward writing might look like this:

    /** Pass in -1 to work forever. */
    public void doStuff(int iterations) {
        int count = 0;
        while (count < iterations || iterations == -1) {
            foo();
            count++;
        }
    }

If that just bugs you because one of the conditions will always be unnecessary to check--it bugs me--then what about this?

    /** Pass in -1 to work forever. */
    public void doStuff(int iterations) {
        final long maxCount = iterations == -1 ? Long.MAX_VALUE : iterations;
        int count = 0;
        while (count++ < maxCount) {
            foo();
        }
    }

Since an int can never be as much as Long.MAX_VALUE, you've got your infinite iterations, and there's only the one condition to check. All it requires is that you know how big the primitive types are in java and understand how two's complement numbers work.

Object.getClass() and generics

I ran into trouble with Java's generics (who hasn't?). I couldn't figure out why this wouldn't compile:

class Foo {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
       List<Class<Foo>> list = null;
       list.add(new Foo().getClass());
   }
}

Here's the error (remember, it's a compile-time error): The method add(Class<Foo>) in the type List<Class<Foo>> is not applicable for the arguments (Class<capture#2-of ? extends Foo>) This is what I figured out: First, as far as I know, that "capture#2-of" is just an internal name that the compiler assigns to the generic type and doesn't really have any great meaning, so basically the compiler seems to be complaining that Class<? extends Foo> isn't assignable to Class<Foo>, which is true, of course:

Class<? extends Foo> c1 = null;
Class<Foo> c2 = null;
c2 = c1; // <-- error

Same thing as:

List<? extends Object> l1 = null;
List<Object> l2 = null;
l2 = l1; // <-- error

This is illegal because consider if l1 is actually a List<String>, then:

l2.add(new Date());

would be a legal method call, and you've just added a Date to a List<String>. So we know that Class<? extends Foo> isn't assignable to Class<Foo>, but the question remains: why does the compiler think we're trying to do that? Well, for the next step, what does java.lang.Object.getClass() return? Per the API docs, it's a Class<?>, but that's not the whole story. We can see from our example that it's actually "Class<capture#2-of ? extends Foo>". Now what I couldn't figure out was why the type of Class was "? extends Foo". Shouldn't getClass() called on a Foo object return something of type "Class<Foo>"? But I was forgetting about polymorphism and how it plays with these compile-time parameterized types. In this code:

Foo foo = ...;
Class<...> c = foo.getClass();

the compile-time type of c can't be Class<Foo> because Foo is only the declared type of the variable. At runtime, the foo variable could actually hold an instance of any subclass of Foo, meaning the type returned by getClass() must be at least as wide as Class<? Extends Foo>, which explains this last bit of the puzzle. This is why the result of new Foo().getClass() can't be guaranteed to fit in a variable of type Class<Foo>. For more good stuff on generics, Sun's generics tutorial is very easy to understand.

On a Quest for Social Lending

(Jump right to the list.)

This "global economic crisis" isn't all bad. If you've got some cash piled up, like Warren Buffet--even if it's not quite the $44 billion he started this year with--you're in a great position to be hunting for opportunities while others are just trying to make ends meet as their credit lines shrink. One such opportunity, in my opinion, is something that recently came to my attention: the relatively new movement called "social lending".

The shortest way to explain it is that people borrow money from other people instead of from banks. Why social lending? Consider how banks make money. First, they buy your money by giving you interest on money you deposit with them in the form of savings and checking accounts, MMA's, CD's, or whatever. Then they turn around and sell your money to someone else at a higher rate: by giving a home loan for 6%, a car loan for 7%, a credit card for 13%, etc. (These are just rough guesses at today's rates.) This is what banks do. It's their purpose for existence and how they stay in business. It's called arbitrage. The question on the lips of social lenders is, "Why should the banks have a monopoly on this?" Social lenders want to get in on this action.

Social lending is also known as P2P (peer-to-peer or person-to-person) lending. As described in the wikipedia article linked above, it can refer to a "marketplace" type of lending, where lenders browse for borrowers they would like to lend to, or a "friend/family" type, where you are lending to or borrowing from a friend or family member and would like a service to help make the loan "official" with appropriate legal paperwork. In this post, I'm referring to the "marketplace" type of lending, in which you, as a lender, actively search for someone to lend money to as an investment. The model I'm primarily interested in is one where borrowers list their loans and lenders "bid" on them with a dollar amount they're willing to give and the interest rate they want for it. In essence, it becomes an interest rate "auction", with lenders bidding down the rate until the "auction period" expires.

Social lending allows anybody with a little bit of cash--as little as $50 in some cases (maybe less?)--to lend that cash out, thereby putting the money to work and getting a higher return than they'd get from a typical bank account. Before you get too excited, social lending sites have taken something of a beating in the past couple of weeks. A quick Google search turned up a WSJ blog and a Washington Post article about how these sites have been affected by recent events: tighter regulation by the SEC and higher-than-normal default rates are putting a dent in their business. Briefly, the sites have been forced to suspend all new business until certain SEC filings are complete--a process that can take months. Unfortunately, this is happening just at the moment when their businesses should be growing by leaps and bounds, as more and more loan-seekers are denied by banks and turn elsewhere to get the funding they need.

A word of caution wouldn't be out of order here: when you loan money like a bank, you're taking on risk like a bank. Don't lend indiscriminately or you'll find yourself in the same position as Wachovia:

"October 23, 2008--Wachovia Corp. reported a $23.9-billion third-quarter loss Wednesday, the largest loss at any bank since the financial crisis began..."

Wachovia, of course, won't be Wachovia for much longer. Lehman Brothers is another good example of how not to lend. I can't find any one, good article, but looking over a news search for "Lehman Brothers" for the past month brings up words like "carnage", "fire sale", "disaster", "subpoenaed", "death", and other unpleasant things. When you lend, choose your borrower wisely, and, as with any financial endeavor, diversify! Split your money across many borrowers to limit your exposure to defaults.

One other thing to check for... To loan money, you have to first have the money somewhere. Make sure that whatever service you go with keeps your money in an FDIC-protected account. If it doesn't, well... I won't tell you what to do with your money, but make sure you know exactly what you're getting into, and weigh the risks appropriately.

If all this doomsaying hasn't scared you off, if you're still interested in the potential investment opportunities offered by social lending, as I am, then you can start by looking through this list of social lending sites I've found. Not all of these are "marketplace" lending sites, but I'm listing them anyway so that it's a complete reference. Further, some of these sites serve particular countries exclusively, so make sure you check that particular detail. I've tried to keep at the top of the list all the sites where a US citizen could go and sign up for an account right now to start lending.

The List

Fynanz - http://www.fynanz.com/ - Social lending that specializes in student loans. This one was going to be further down in the middle of the list (arbitrarily), but I moved it to the top because it seems like a really good prospect to me. Take a look around their site. One thing that makes them stand out is that they recentaly gave referral and lending bonuses. It looks like that's over, but it seems promising for the future. They also have a guarantee system that protects some or all of your investment, which I haven't seen elsewhere. Finally, there's the fact that you're investing in someone's education.

LendingClub - http://www.lendingclub.com/ - A high-profile US social lending site. They very recently reopened lending after completing the aforementioned SEC registration process.

Loanio - https://www.loanio.com/ - Another site that is currently open for business to US residents. I'm not sure if they've had to or will have to register with the SEC. This is something to check on before you decide to go with them, since they might have to shut down lending for weeks or months to get the registration done.

Prosper - http://www.prosper.com/ - Probably the most prominent social lending organization serving the United States. As of this writing, they aren't accepting new loans because of the SEC registration process I mentioned above. They began the process on 15 Oct 2008, I belive, and it's unknown when they'll open back up to lenders.

CommunityLend - http://www.communitylend.com/ - A new player on the field: they're not open for business yet. It seems they intend to have a public beta, and you can be notified when it launches by entering an email address on the "I want to Invest" part of their site. Note: This is a Canadian company, and I can't find any information about who is eligible to be a lender. I've emailed them to find out. Another note: Before I even finished this post, the Chief Technology Officer of CommunityLend wrote me back--on a Saturday!--to say that because of financial service regulations, the service will only be available to Canadians. That's unfortunate. Their website looks promising.

Yadyap - http://yadyap.com/ - Another not-quite-launched site, Yadyap will reportedly be the social lending equivalent of payday loans. I don't know much else about it. You can be notified when they launch by entering your email address on their home page.

Zopa - https://us.zopa.com/ - Included here for completeness, Zopa recently stopped doing business in the US. They apparently still have a booming business in the UK and also offer services in Italy and Japan. Maybe they'll come back to the US. Who knows? The seem to have had a different business model than the typical auction of a "marketplace" social lending company.

GlobeFunder - https://www.globefunder.com/ - I'm not sure if this is the same kind of company as Prosper or LendingClub. They're not operational yet, and the site doesn't give a lot of detail about what they're trying to do. It does mention "individual lenders" on their Lenders page, so maybe it will be what I'm looking for.

Fosik Lending - http://www.fosik.com.au/ - An Australian lending site that does both "friends and family" and "marketplace" lending. The "marketplace" portion is currently in beta testing and will reportedly be made a public beta. I'm fairly certain that only Australian citizens are eligible, but it isn't stated on their website. I've sent an email requesting confirmation.

iGrin - https://www.igrin.com.au/ - Another Australian lending site that plainly states it's open only to Australians. It's too bad. It looks like a well-executed website.

"Friends and family" loans only: Virgin Money - http://www.virginmoneyus.com/ - No marketplace here. Their whole thing is about formalizing and managing loans between friends and family members.

LoanBack - http://www.loanback.com/ - About the same as Virgin Money, from what I can tell.

Finally, something a little different: "marketplace" social lending targeted at enterpreneurs in third-world or poverty-stricken areas. "Enterpreneur" here doesn't necessarily mean someone looking for $10,000 to rent some office space and set up shop. It could just as easily be someone looking for $300 to buy some pigs for a farm. That's not intended to be derogatory. I just want you to know what to expect:

Kiva - http://www.kiva.org/ - Just from poking around the websites to write this post, Kiva seems like the leader in this section. They have a polished site and and seem to have a lot of traffic. Kiva appears to be open to lenders from all over the world, US included. They target poor enterpreneurs all over the world, and the result is a strong tendency toward agricultural borrowing.

MyC4 - http://www.myc4.com/ - This site focuses on Africa. Borrowers seem to tend more toward light industry--textiles, light manufacturing, and the like. It's not clear whether US citizens are eligible, but the front page claims that they have investors from 75 countries. All monetary amounts are in euros.

United Prosperity - http://www.unitedprosperity.org/ - This one isn't operational yet, but seems like it will be similar to Kiva.

How to Process a File Line-By-Line in Linux

Being a Linux noob, I had to look around for how to process a text file line by line in a shell script. I have no idea if this is the best way, but here's what I figured out:

cat movies | awk 'system("echo " $1)'

where "foo" is the file. That sends the file to awk, and the stuff in the single quotes tells it to invoke the system command "echo" for each line of the file, passing the line to it.  You can obviously  substitute other commands for "echo", like "wget" to download a bunch of stuff if the file is a list of URLs.