Mylos

London-style taxis (also known as “Hackney carriages) are becoming a common sight in San Francisco, which is apparently one of the first cities in the US to get them. It is amusing, really, when most observers in London expected them to disappear a few years ago. The antiquated look of the London taxi endears it to Londoners, but more importantly, they are very roomy for passengers, and easy to get in and out of, even when you are carrying an umbrella…

One (regular) taxi driver complained to me the London taxis are under-powered and do not go fast enough for him to zip to the other side of the city to pick a ride. Anyone who has seen taxicabs drive in this city knows this is a feature, not a bug, in the interests of public safety. Not that taxi drivers are worse than others – I have never been in another city where drivers violate red lights as casually as in San Francisco, even though I have lived in Paris and Amsterdam.

Taxis, along with docks, are one of the few domains in everyday life where byzantine nineteenth century work arrangements still prevail in defiance of the free market. Most cities arbitrarily limit the number of taxis that can ply the streets, a system that usually benefits taxi companies more than taxi drivers, who often end up in a position similar to sharecroppers. The quotas are seldom updated to reflect demand, due to lobbying by entrenched taxi companies, and cities like Paris or San Francisco often face severe taxi shortages. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy (PDF) related how ministers would fear the wrath of taxi strikers and chicken out of raising numbers.

In San Francisco, proposition K, passed in 1978, limits the number of taxi medallions to 1300. The measure was designed to let genuine taxi drivers, not companies, own the medallions, by requiring a nominal number of driving hours to retain the medallion. The lucky few who hold medallions lease them for $20,000-30,000 a year to taxi companies for when they are not driving themselves. Most actual taxi drivers do not have medallions and lease them for $100 a day or so from taxi companies (sharecroppers on plantations were not required to pay for the privilege of employment).

Of course, the people profiting from this cozy arrangement are never content – the permit holders want to drive less so they can enjoy the rent they are collecting from the coveted medallions. One attempted ploy was to reduce the driving hours requirement for disabled workers. Needless to say, had the measure been passed, overnight many permit holders would have found themselves mysteriously incapacitated. Taxi companies would like to grab medallions for themselves and cut off permit holders from the trough.

The right solution would be to abolish the medallion system altogether, or grant one to all working as opposed to rent-collecting drivers. But of course that is the one solution all vested interests are adamantly opposed to, as it would upset their apple cart. Given the abysmally dysfunctional state of San Francisco municipal politics, the situation is unlikely to improve. No amount of window-dressing with London style cabs is going to change that.

I recently purchased a bar of Amedei Porcelana chocolate. Fog City News sells them for $11 here in San Francisco. When a bar of chocolate is individually numbered in a limited edition, you know it is going to be expensive… There are two reasons why boutique chocolates bars made in small quantities are better than mass-produced ones.

The first one is they don’t adulterate the cocoa butter with vegetable fats (a.k.a. margarine). The European Union yielded to British lobbying efforts and allowed this indefensible practice. Not that chocolate is the only product that legendarily taste-impaired nation tampers with. I lived in London in 1982, and remember my horror at finding out that vanilla “ice cream” included such fine ingredients as fish oil…

The second one is that big manufacturers like Nestle, Kraft Jacobs Suchard, Cadbury or Lindt produce such large volumes they can only retain cocoa varietals that are also grown in large quantities in industrial scale plantations, just as McDonald’s uses standardized potatoes grown to order. Furthermore, several varieties are usually blended for homogeneity, at the expense of character (echoes of the debate between proponents of blended vs. single malt Scotch whiskey). Smaller companies or smaller production runs do not have these constraints and can purchase high-quality cocoa beans that are grown in small quantities.

Venezuelan Criollo cocoa is widely considered the finest variety. It is not as strong (some may say harsh) as Forestero varieties, but has much more refined and complex flavor. It also has poor yields, making it unsuitable for the mass market. Porcelana is the most genetically pure variety of Criollo, and like the others, has mild but incredibly subtle aromas, without the aggressive acidity of some.

I find self-proclaimed connoisseur reviews that speak breathlessly of “fantastic tangy flavor, that evolves through wine and blue cheese to almost too sharp citrus” faintly ridiculous at best, and more than a little unappealing in how they are obviously patterned on wine snobs. That said, Porcelana is definitely a superlative chocolate. I don’t think I will be feasting regularly on it, due to the price, but it is certainly worth trying on special occasions.

I saw the Keyspan USB Server at MacWorld SF a few months ago, but it has only recently started to ship (I received mine yesterday). This device allows you to connect a Mac or PC to up to 4 USB 1.1 peripherals remotely over Ethernet, much as a print server allows you to access remote printers. It also allows sharing of USB devices between multiple computers.

I use it to reduce clutter in my apartment by moving away bulky items like my HP 7660 printer and my Epson 3170 scanner away from the iMac in my living room, which has progressively become my main computer, even though it is probably the slowest machine I have.

You install the driver software (Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X, no drivers for Linux so far), and it creates a simulated USB hub device that takes care of bridging the USB requests over Ethernet. There is a management program that allows you to configure the settings on the USB Server such as the IP address (zeroconf, a.k.a RendezVous is supported, a nice touch), password and access mode. The user interface is functional, if not perfectly polished. To use a USB peripheral hooked to the USB server, you fire up the admin client, select one of the USB devices and take a “lease” on it. I have links to some screen shots of the GUI below:

• Device selection (OS X)
• USB Server administration (OS X)
• Apple system profiler showing the USB hub pseudo-device
• Device selection (Windows 2000) showing the scanner reserved by another computer

The process is as smooth as it can possibly be, given that USB devices are not designed to be shared between multiple hosts, and thus some form of locking had to be provided. I tried my scanner over the Ethernet, and have not noticed any perceptible degradation in performance. The software copes with sleep mode correctly. The only nit I would have to pick is that the power adapter “wall wart” DC connector slips off the device too easily (not enough friction to hold it in place), disconnecting it.

Many families are becoming multi-computer households. The Keyspan USB Server is a surprisingly effective way to share peripherals or to move bulky and seldom used peripherals out of the way. At a street price of around $100, it is not inexpensive, but I found it a very worthwhile accessory for my home network.

I keep noticing with dismay that many of the gadgets I consider for purchase are deliberately crippled in their US versions. It used to be only European consumers had to suffer from inflated prices and reduced functionality, usually self-inflicted due to bureaucratic EU mandates like the DV-In fiasco (most DV camcorders in Europe have digital IEEE1394/Firewire/iLink video out but not digital video in, as otherwise they would be classified as VCRs and be subject to various protectionist customs duties).

• Sony’s PEG-TH55 PDA has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth worldwide, except in the US where Bluetooth is omitted. This is incredibly annoying and rules the device out for me (unless I import one from the UK or Germany), as I have discovered from practical experience with my PEG-UX50 that WiFi access points are seldom available when you need them, and I often have to fall back to GPRS via Bluetooth. We are already saddled with the industrialized world’s worst mobile telephone operators and clunkiest phones, why add injury to insult?
• Canon’s new Digital Rebel DSLR is available in a kit with a 18-55mm lens. The lens has the smooth and fast USM ultrasonic motor in Japan, but uses the inferior AFD micro-motor in the US. Perhaps they believe US customers are too clueless to notice the difference.
• Many ultra-slim laptops available in Japan are never introduced in the US (this has created a market opportunity for parallel importers like Dynamism. Once again, the gaijin must lack the refined aesthetic sensibility to appreciate models like the Sony Vaio X505 and are probably content to lug their boat anchor laptops in their gas-guzzling SUVs. Nor is this attitude limited to Japanese companies – until recently IBM had an entire line of ultra-compact notebook computers available only in Japan.
• Epson’s Stylus Photo 2200, probably the favorite printer of professional photographers, does not include in the US the gray balancer, special software and calibration sheets used to improve the neutrality of black and white prints. Michael Reichmann puts it best when he calls this “The software that Epson North America thinks its customers are too dumb to use”.

The US is the world’s single largest market for consumer goods. Why is it treated with such disregard?

Update (2004-05-12):

Sony is relenting and will officially release the Vaio X505 in the US, albeit for the princely sum of $3000.

Maxwell’s demon is a classic thought experiment that illustrates the second law of thermodynamics. The conundrum drove Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide. Leo Szilard, a contemporary and friend of Einstein, and one of the first proponents of the atomic bomb, provided the first refutation in 1929 – Maxwell’s demon appears to create energy from scratch, but what it is really doing is transferring entropy to the outside world.

In his analysis, Szilard considered alternative demons that would overcome his objection, and for one of them, now known as the Szilard Engine, his interesting conclusion is that it cannot work because forgetting information from memory in itself incurs thermodynamic costs. To make a real-world analogy – you may pay to get information in the form of your daily newspaper, but disposing of all that paper also incurs real costs in the form of garbage hauling taxes, even if you are not aware of them. In the cosmic order, getting rid of data is as important as acquiring it in the first place.

One of the buzzwords of the day in IT is Information Lifecycle Management, This basically means using a fancy database to track information assets, how they are stored, backed up and disposed of in accordance to retention policies and various legislative mandates like the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Companies like Microsoft discovered to their dismay the consequences of having incriminating information dragged into court under subpoena.

It seems the price of forgetfulness is eternal vigilance…

A side note – one of the things that seems consistently forgotten whenever designing a database is archiving and deleting old historical data – the data just keeps accumulating, usually until the database becomes obsolete and is decommissioned or the original designers have moved on to other jobs. In large scale databases, the efficient archiving of data requires partitioning, and is several orders of magnitude harder if the partitioning was poorly designed in the original data model. For instance, if some classers of historical data have to be held for longer retention period than others, make sure they are stored in different partitions as well, otherwise separating them will require lengthy batches. If you are specifying a database today, for your successors’ sake, plan for the orderly disposal of data once it is no longer relevant.