These are the places I’d go if I were visiting my city, in order of preference. I sent this exact list to one of my colleagues visiting from Hong Kong.

Public - My favorite restaurant in the city won a Michelin Star this year. Great ambiance, interesting dishes, great mixed drinks.

El Faro - Really great, real Spanish food, in a super-casual atmosphere. They’ve been open since 1927 in the same spot; this was my parent’s favorite dinner date spot. Have the paella a la valenciana, and/or mariscada with green sauce, and some sangria, then some flan or laruca for dessert. This place is super packed on weekends; it’s best to go early on a weekday.

Casellula - A really great, small wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen/Midtown West with an amazing cheese selection and good lite fare.

Casa Mono - More upscale Spanish restaurant with an amazing wine list.

At least one of Eleven Madison/The Modern/Tabla/Gramercy Tavern - Danny Meyer’s restaurants; Eleven Madison is particularly great (but more expensive than the others), but all are worth visiting. The Modern is inside the MoMA, but eat in the Bar Room; the Dining Room is not worth it. All of them consistently get great reviews and awards, and are known for their great service.

La Esquina - Good Mexican street food upstairs (very informal), dressed up Mexican downstairs (reservations required; good people watching).

Tarallucci e Vino - a nice wine bar-turned-restaurant with a good menu.

I have many, many more, but I’d start with those.

Today, one of my colleagues inadvertently set off a linear fork bomb of ksh processes on a critical infrastructure machine. Linux held up well to this, since basically these processes were just entries in the scheduling table and very little else. The system was pretty responsive, albeit with a load average hovering between 800 and 3000, and we ran out of process identifiers fairly quickly.

Clearly, all of these processes would have the same process group, so we just needed to kill the process group as a whole. My other colleague and I came up with a good, stupid simple solution that neither of us had immediately thought of. As it turns out, Perl’s kill() system call interface has an interesting caveat that allows you to kill processes in exactly this way: when the signal is specified as a negative number, the function treats the other parameters as process groups to kill.

Actually, it turns out a lot of systems and shells allow specifying the process group ID as negative numbers to kill command/built-in where the pids would ordinarily go to specify the same action. It’s too bad my colleague was using an old version of ksh.