avinash.vora ★

I’m obviously enamored by awesome stuff like blade-making, and this is a brilliant and insightful look into the lives of a bunch of fellows that make what is pretty much the greatest kitchen knife in the world. Don’t buy it?

Japanese kitchen knives cost more than a camera, they can’t be washed in a machine, are subject to rusting and boy, they are so sharp that if you slip you’ll lose a finger or two before you can say banzai. There is no doubt that these are the best knives in the world. Nothing comes close to them in terms of sharpness. With one of these knives, you could slice fish so thin you could read a whole chapter of La Physiologie du Goût through the slices.

How expensive? Try €400. The forging and grinding processes in particular are intriguing:

Most kitchen knives today are stamped out of large sheets of metal. They are never as sharp as those made in Sakai. Master Ebuchi has been forging knives for the past 40 years, but he still breaks one knife for each three he tries to make. This is delicate work […] Hell, these are not stainless steel knives from Ikea, but a shorter version of a Samurai sword, which still need to be coated with a drop of camelia oil from time to time to prevent any rust at all.

It’s an amazingly insightful look into a tradition I am sure hasn’t changed in decades, if not centuries (in the case of samurai swords).

The Kindle 2 is beautiful. I absolutely love the new design. I completely agree with Kottke in that:

Which makes Bezos’ aim pretty clear: Amazon : Apple :: Kindle/amazon.com : iPod/iTunes Store :: Bezos : Jobs.

$359 is a bit steep, and since I have no idea if I am going to be in the United States past May, is almost a waste given that I won’t be able to use the wireless functionality, I am sadly going to pass, but assuming this stands up to a few years worth of use, I’d carry this around everywhere.

Does anyone know if they designed the Kindle 2 to allow charging via USB?

I dismissed the large number of blank search referrers in my site’s logs from Google today as unimportant; I didn’t think much of it. But I stumbled upon this article that explains that Google’s new AJAX search results use anchors instead of query strings—anchors don’t show up in logs (the browser doesn’t send them in the referrer string)!

There’s a few issues here that I feel are worth addressing:

1. Will Google Analytics sort this problem out for itself? I think so. If so, then I think that this is one of the smartest moves in recent memory from the web giant—if not one of the most unethical. In one fell swoop, Google essentially made every single web analytics package (with the exception of its own) useless.
2. Obviously someone at Google knows that this is happening—they’re too large and have too many clever employees to be ignorant of this—and they may decide that the backlash of killing off search requests might not be worth it, so there might be some new method for web developers to access the information. I can’t think of what that might be, but why were the changes not rolled out with this new method? Millions of requests were probably lost because the software couldn’t decipher the requests.
3. While I understand the personal frustration of web analytics software developers, it’s interesting to note that they entered a market where they have to rely on a competitor for survival. It sucks, but it’s business. It’s hard to fault Google for looking out for itself.
4. I wonder if the people who are siding with Google here would be siding with, say, Microsoft here in the same situation.

I for one am not happy about this because I don’t use Google Analytics. I don’t get nearly enough traffic to care about losing a day’s worth of search referrals¹ so if Google pushes a change I’m OK.

As usual, email with thoughts.

I honestly didn’t even notice that this site was down for about two weeks. My redundancy index.html kicked in and displayed a message, but I didn’t think to make it clever enough to shoot me an email letting me know. It completely killed traffic for 3 weeks, but it’s nice to know that everything is sorted out now.

Hopefully you don’t find any more kinks, and if you’ve been trying to contact me, everything should work now. Please let me know if you find any major bugs.

In about three minutes, I generated this beautiful world cloud at Wordle with no effort at all.

I love data visualization—it’s why I am a sucker for site metrics, code_swarm, and other cool ways to visualize data on the web.

I read Hacker News on a daily basis; it has come to replace all other social news websites for me. The stories and comments are—not to sound cliched—just more insightful and intelligent than its predecessors Reddit and Digg. I don’t catch every good story, though. Only today, there was a story requesting submissions of what others considered their best stories of 2008.

There were some fantastic stories that I had missed. Before I get to my favorite missed story, I found it interesting how many of these stories were not related to the kind of hacking that I imagine the site was originally intended for. A few examples of great stories that weren’t:

• Porsche breaks the hedge funds
• Hedge Fund Manager: Good bye and F— You
• In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
• Inconspicuous Consumption

…to name a few. The one that really caught my eye was this: a story on how to get into the hottest restaurants in town. The article is brilliantly written, and closes off fantastically:

For as little as $100—that’s $25 each for a meal that would ultimately cost close to $375 per head—I had jumped what was rumored to be a 2,700-person waiting list and gotten into the hardest restaurant in the world that week. Also, I had shot the moon. And I had done it by following a set of rules so old-fashioned that my grandmother could have written them: Dress properly, act dignified, be polite, smile. And spend a little extra for good service—it will pay you back in droves.

Forget Frank Sinatra. Forget James Bond. For the rest of that day, for the time it took me to call everyone I know, for the three hours and 45 minutes it took me to eat my 11-course meal, I was the lights on the top of the Chrysler Building. I was the smile on the Statue of Liberty. I was New York.

I was money.

Forget the content, I love the writing. The Sinatra/Bond reference is a running theme in the essay, and I loved how he crafted it to a brilliant conclusion. But even the idea behind the essay is clever—the bribes were about what I would expect for the caliber of restaurants that he went to in New York, but it’s his admitted changes in demeanor that really struck me. I’ve bribed my way in front of crowds on a scale orders of magnitude smaller than what is described here, but the risk of doing it is something else. The last thing I want is to be that desperate guy who tried to sully the integrity of the bouncer/waiter/etc. of my favorite hangout to save twenty minutes.

Any interesting epic-fail-esque stories of restaurant bribery you have to share? Shoot me an email.