Month: December 2006

Already the well runs dry

Well, I’m sure not going to blog about Saddam Hussein, and I’ve “already blogged about”:http://www.tendentious.org/food/pho_cali the Vietnamese restaurant we went to yesterday, and while an amusing experience, the hispanic supermarket we went to yesterday:http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/ wasn’t _that_ earth-shattering (having been to one of the Fiestas in Houston, it’s pretty small potatoes, really).

And I’m otherwise occupied with making tortilla using “this Cook’s Illustrated recipe”:http://soup.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/Tortilla_Soup/2168 (warning, it’s behind a membership firewall, but you can find a copy someone’s put on the web “here”:http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~seck/kitchen/tortilla_soup.htm).

Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up with a bunch of New Years Resolutions that I won’t keep. Once I wake up.

The Water Callers

I was involved in the prior discussion while at a performance by “The Water Callers”:http://www.myspace.com/thewatercallers, a local pair. If you go to the myspace page, I would suggest you listen to _In The Moonlight_, which I think is the best of the tracks they’ve got posted, though not the best they’ve written.

It was fun, even if it does end up with me posting this after midnight. We saw a number of people from the kula there, some expected, some not. I don’t think we’ve been as likely to run into people we know out of the blue since living in Tuscaloosa.

It’s rather nice.

Divestiture

I’ve decided to get rid of a lot of books. Mostly, but probably not exclusively, technical books. Many, but not all, fairly up to date. The fact is that for years I’ve bought them simply out of habit–I browse them, or maybe even actually sit down and read them, and discover that there’s little in them that I didn’t already know. And then they go on the bookshelves, or the floor, and take up space.

Getting a subscription to “Safari”:http://safari.oreilly.com has made them doubly redundant.

If nothing changes, one day there will be a nice layer of humus where this house was from all the books that slowly composted–so here’s your chance to benefit from my compulsive behavior: I’m giving them away. I’m going to be going through the shelves over the next few weeks, and entering all the items in “a Google Spreadsheet”:http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pTyL0Vsb4VwTwPEgPlmD2Zg; if you see something you want (I imagine you could subscribe to the RSS feed for the sheet for best results), email me at mdorman@tendentious.org, and I’ll see about boxing it up and shipping it.

I may look into what’s involved in being able to accept some compensation through my paypal account–I just want to cover the cost of packaging and shipping, but this could be a lot of books, and even at book rate, it can add up.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please point them to the spreadsheet as well.

_Sous vide_ on a budget

“Ted Tso”:http://tytso.livejournal.com/–better known as a Linux kernel hacker–documents a way to do _sous vide_ cooking using a slow cooker.

This is the technique that you occasionally see on _Iron Chef America_, using special units that heat and circulate water at very precise temperatures. Using a slow cooker makes it a bit more accessible as a technique.

Funny enough, I seem to have just gotten one of those for Xmas…

Busy as hell

!/2006/12/29/1.png! I truly have been busy as hell the last few days. It’s a pretty good sort of busy, I suppose–I’ve rewritten huge chunks of code (we now no longer have a stand-alone spam checking daemon, it’s instead managed through postfix, which makes a certain sort of sense), implemented a number of new independent processes, etc.

And that’s just what’s happening in my little *intense development* branch; Chris and Dad have been working away on web stuff, with me providing the occasional prod to keep them on course.

Which brings me to the real purpose of this post: cool distributed version control tricks, AKA pretty pictures!

The image attached here is a graph of the revision history of the system. All those lines done together like spaghetti towards the bottom? That’s the sort of mildly disturbing pattern you see when people really start to get used to working with a distributed system–merging from one another as stuff goes along, perhaps from other branches they work on, back from the master, etc.

I don’t know why I think it’s so cool, but I do.

Moving to TypePad

I have decided to get out of not only the blog-software-writing habit (a bad tendency anyway, and one I never really had the spare time to give proper attention), but out of the blog-software-hosting gig.

I’ve got all the old posts imported (ah, beloved perl, an hour to hack together something to convert 500-odd posts), and I’ll be redirecting the URL to typepad shortly.