Latest Web Bloggers Give Cooking: WSJ

PORTALS By LEE GOMES

Generic food blogs are the scrambled eggs of culinary blogging. They require little in the way of skill and next to nothing in terms of equipment -- just a digital camera and a broadband connection.

A particular kind of food blog, however, has become the genre's Canard a la Presse Tour d'Argent. These are "cook-through" blogs, in which someone picks a cookbook and then doesn't stop cooking and blogging until the dishes for every recipe have been washed and put away.

The necessary ingredient: You need to be a little crazy.

Carole Blymire, a Washington, D.C., public-relations consultant, for example, has been writing "French Laundry at Home" since last year. With no real cooking experience beyond Thanksgiving dinner, she is tackling the 130 or so recipes in Thomas Keller's "French Laundry Cookbook," which may be the most technically challenging American cookbook ever written.

No matter, says Ms. Blymire, "I just opened it up and said to myself, 'Let's see what happens.' "

The site has become a huge hit in the food blogosphere, winning awards and attracting 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day. It also has become the template for many other such cook-along blogs, with pictures of the dish at various stages of development and a rating of the final result. Personal asides are often folded in as well. (These are, after all, blogs.) Ms. Blymire uses a Miss Smartypants persona and often brags of her two loves: New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and bacon.

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Tall tales: Economist

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

The rollercoaster, rags-to-riches story of a remarkable animation studio

PIXAR'S characters—whether the heroic toys of “Toy Story”, the father and son fish of “Finding Nemo”, the insects in “A Bug's Life” or the rat-chef of “Ratatouille”—are full of yearning; for a child to play with, a lost family member, or to become something that seems far out of reach. The small company that imagined them is just the same. Right from the beginning, Pixar, officially a computer-hardware business, secretly dreamed of a more creative life making feature films.

Ed Catmull's ambition at school had been to become an animator at Disney, but he gave up because he couldn't draw. Computer animation, he realised, having graduated in computer science and physics, could be a way to overcome this. So Mr Catmull brought together a small group of people to form a computer-graphics group, which later became Pixar. Their early attempts were uninspiring, however. Two years in the making, the 1977 film, “Tubby the Tuba”, looked bad and the story did not work. Mr Catmull and his colleagues quickly realised that fancy technology was not enough, and that story-telling was just as vital to computer animation as to the hand-drawn sort. Under John Lasseter, a young animator rejected by Disney, Pixar started to develop a new kind of cartoon, which eschewed fairy-tale plots and entertained adults as well as children...

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Here we go again?: Economist

May 22nd 2008

From The Economist print edition

A new boom in cable-laying—but this time it is rational

EVEN as data centres pop up all over the globe to support “cloud computing”, another construction boom is taking place below the waves. After years without much investment in undersea fibre-optic cables, dozens of new cables will be constructed over the next three years, at a total cost of about $7.1 billion, according to TeleGeography, a market-research firm (see chart). And this is likely to be an underestimate, since other projects are being planned.

You may be thinking: will they never learn? This new investment boom comes only a few years after a spectacular telecoms crash. In the late 1990s internet gurus convinced financial markets that worldwide data-traffic would double every 100 days; this led them to bet billions building global fibre-optic networks. In 2001 alone, network operators such as Global Crossing spent nearly $13.5 billion laying undersea cables. But when the deluge of traffic failed to materialise, the boom swiftly turned to bust...

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Microsoft demos 'touch Windows': BBC

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, in Silicon Valley

Microsoft's next operating system (OS) will come with multi-touch features as an alternative to the mouse.

It is hoped the successor will have a better reception than the much-maligned Vista OS, released last year.

Scheduled for release in 2009 the new fingertip interface lets users enlarge and shrink photos, trace routes on maps, paint pictures or play the piano.

"The way you interact with the system will change dramatically," said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

Speaking at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, the Microsoft Chairman said Windows 7 would incorporate new forms of communication and interaction.

"Today almost all the interaction is keyboard-mouse. Over years to come, the role of speech, vision, ink - all of those things - will be huge."

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Down on the server farm: Economist

May 22nd 2008 | SEATTLE

From The Economist print edition

The real-world implications of the rise of internet computing

EVEN when the sky is blue over Quincy, clouds hang in the air. The small town in the centre of the state of Washington is home to half a dozen huge warehouses that power the global “computing clouds” run by internet companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. The size of several football pitches, these data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.

Yet even more intriguing than the buildings' size is their location. Quincy is literally in the middle of nowhere, three hours' drive from the nearest big city, Seattle. But it turns out to be a perfect location for data centres. As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put into where to put the infrastructure it needs...

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Buy our stuff, save the planet: Economist

May 22nd 2008

From The Economist print edition

The internet could become as ungreen as aviation. A self-serving solution beckons

IN COMPUTING, buzzwords are in most cases just that. But the latest, “cloud computing”, stands for a real trend: computing is increasingly being supplied as a service over the internet (depicted as a “cloud” in many charts). Still, there is something wrong with the term.

It implies that by moving into the ether, computing is becoming weightless, with no connection to the resource-constrained real world. In fact the opposite is true. The corollary of more computing in the sky is more and bigger data centres on earth. These are warehouses packed with humming electronic gear, and in particular thousands of servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. The biggest facilities are the size of half a dozen football pitches and house as many as 80,000 servers (see article). They are huge energy hogs...

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Doctor on call: Economist

Mobile-phone microscopes
May 15th 2008 | BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
From The Economist print edition

Simple accessories could turn mobile phones into useful medical devices

ROBI MAAMARI stares intently at the screen of his mobile phone. The student is not squinting to tap out yet another daft text message, but looking carefully for the faint blue dots that are the tell-tale diagnostic signature of malaria.

Mr Maamari is a member of a research team led by Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, which has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many of today's mobile phones into a microscope. Called a CellScope, it can show individual white and red blood cells, which means that with the correct stain it can be used to identify the parasite that causes malaria. Moreover, by transmitting an image directly over the mobile network, the CellScope could greatly help with the remote diagnosis and monitoring of many illnesses.

The project, which began as a challenge by Dr Fletcher to his undergraduate students to turn their mobile phones into microscopes, gained momentum when they came up with some practical designs. Although the first prototype covered a tabletop, the latest uses commercially available lenses fitted inside a tube that snaps directly onto the phone. One end has a clip for holding a sample slide, and different levels of magnification are possible. The team thinks the attachments, if mass-produced, could be made smaller and tougher, and sell for less than $100.

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