dresese

The most boring channel

I've seen boring channels in my life. When I lived in Mountain View, we got the NASA channel, which most of the time seemed to show a nice graphic of where the shuttle was, when it was orbiting the earth. Nice to look at for a second or two, but it gets old fast. But now, I've gotten cable. Not because I wanted it, but because it is temporarily cheaper for me to have cable plus a cable modem then just to have a cable modem by itself. The new cable system has something much more boring then the NASA station, it's the oscilloscope station. It's a video of an oscilloscope. I don't know what possible use this could have to anyone. It's not like it's a video of just oscilloscope output, no, that might conceivable have a use. This is just a video of an oscilloscope displaying a waveform. What the hell is it for?

Here's a picture of my TV displaying the oscilloscope, which in turn is displaying a waveform. If you look at this picture, you never have to watch this channel again.

Protest in Burlingame

Eric Wagner once again has the pictures from the latest protest, this one very close to home for me. It took place on June 27th, in Burlingame, a few miles north of where I live. Bush drove into town for a fund-raising lunch at a hotel near the airport, then left for more fund-raising in L.A. It's pleasing to see that Bush is not exactly getting a warm reception wherever he goes.

Kung-Log

I have recently been trying out Kung Log, a Mac OS X client-side blogging app. It solves huge problem for those of us that upload pictures (as I do to my family blog).

The problem with the web is that you can't upload multiple files at the same time. Well, it's not a problem with the "web", according to the RFC 1867, you should be able to upload files with a multipart/mixed mimetype. But evidently only Opera supports this, and because of that, most web server apps are not designed to handle multiple file upload.

So if I want to upload 8 pictures to my blog, I basically had one way to do it. I had to go to the Moveable Type UI for creating blog entries, and upload them one by one, specifying the size, directory, thumbnail, and link type parameters each time. It was an exhausting process.

Only a client-side app can solve this problem. That app can upload pictures and media through the newMediaObject xml-rpc call. Knowing this, I set out in search of a Mac OS X app that can do this. I found only Kung-Log. Trying it out, I can see it does everything I need it to do. But it's not open-source (it's donationware), and the UI is horrible - very confusing and un-Maclike in places. I'm using it currently, but I'm also experiment to see if I can make an open-source version with a reasonable UI. I don't know much about Cocoa and developing for the Mac, so it's slow going right now. Probably my project won't go anywhere. It's fun for the time being, though. If I can get it to do basic functionality, I'll put it on SourceForge.

Safari: Fixed at last

I still can't claim Safari doesn't hang a lot, but I have finally fixed my font problem. This morning I found a relevant post in Safari's support forum at Apple. Based on something else I found, I found out it wasn't a Safari problem at all, but a generalized problem with my fonts. I looked through all my fonts and deleted some bogus ones I had installed. It worked like magic after that. I've informed that discussion, and hopefully this will solve a problem several people have. Yay!

Safari: on the other hand...

Safari continues to hang on me once in a while. It's only been a day since I've gotten in, but it's hung on random pages three times now. But the news is not all bad. I noticed that my other big pet peeve about Safari is now fixed. Finally, I can cut text and it appears to be in UTF-16 format. Before, attempting to paste international text cut from Safari would instead paste a series of question marks, probably indicating that it was not using a standard encoding. I actually tried several different encodings, but none of them worked, meaning the text was some invalid encoding. But the new Safari 1.0 has this fixed. Perhaps I can live with this program after all.

Safari is 1.0, woe is me

So Apple has, among other things, released Safari 1.0 today. I was anxious for a new version, since my previous version, Safari 1 Beta 2, had a few problems. It worked well for web pages, but for some reason, when I looked at the preferences, it would get stuck on "Appearance", and refuse to go to any other pane. I couldn't change the appearance either. And then when I went back, Safari would freeze up on my next action.

I had reported this bug to Apple, so I thought it might be fixed. When I downloaded 1.0, I immediately went to the preferences, and lo and behold, I could go to the other panes, so I could actually change the settings for different items. But, to my surprise, I still could not change the font for some reason. I really would like to, I think the default font is a bit large. But I'm out of luck, unless I find out how to do it by editing the plist file.

Also, Java support seems to have regressed. I regularly use VNC, and Beta 2 worked, but this one just hangs seemingly forever.

Speaking of hanging, Safari just did hang. It seems to still have problems. I tried to leave feedback for fellow Hyatt David Hyatt, but got the curious error while adding comments that comments are not allowed. Strange to have a link that allows you to add comments, but then not allow them.

It doesn't matter really. From a few web searches, it appears my problems are fairly unique, so expecting anyone to fix it is a bit unreasonable. It's just one of those things.

George W. Bush, scientist

Accoring to the New York Times, the White House has significantly altered an EPA report on the environment to play down global warming.

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

Is there any doubt that Bush is a stooge of industry, and is not interested in an honest account of the environment?

My contribution to free software

Today a beta release containing my contribution to the free software movement was released. I made a feature I personally find very useful for the JDEE project, which is the Java Development Environment for Emacs. The feature is a call cross-referencer that will build up a database of all the method calls in your program, and allow you to find all the places that call a particular function. You can also find uncalled functions, and display a call-tree that displays several levels of who-calls-who information. This is enormously useful for figuring out the logic of a program. Of course the information is incomplete, because you cannot factor in calling functions through reflection, so the user must keep this in mind.

I started this project before my daughters were born, since I knew my free time was soon to run out. I strongly believe in free software, and I personally have benefitted from it greatly. It was time to give something back. So I whipped up this thing in about a week, and through subsequent weeks and months rewrote parts, expanded parts, and increased the functionality a bit. I wound up learning quite a bit about this sort of thing. Basically it works by parsing Java class files in emacs itself (not the typical use of emacs), and creating a call database, which is cached and loaded on a package-by-package basis. It was more complicated than I first thought, with interfaces and inheritance muddying the waters of what it or what is not a call to a particular method. But largely it's been in the JDEE's cvs code unchanged for the last few months. Now it's seen the light of day, and I get to field everyone's problems with it. I just learned that my reliance on UTF-8 conversion may have been foolish, since xemacs does not always come with MULE (the multilanguage extention).

To check it out yourself, go to the JDEE webpage (see the link above), and download the latest version (2.3.3 beta or above).

Seasoning cast iron

There are approximately 10 trillion webpages that talk about how to season cast iron pots. However, like a lot of cooking resources, they don't really talk about what to do when something goes wrong. As mentioned in my last posting, I recently bought a large cast iron pot. It was technically a Lodge Chicken Fryer, but I don't intend to fry any chicken in it. I'm just using it to braise meats, making stews, curries and the like. I like cast iron a lot - it's cheap, nearly indestructible, cooks well, and when properly seasoned, has a nice nonstick coating. The only bad part is you have to create and maintain this nonstick coating.

There are a lot of different methods of seasoning nonstick cookware, from coating it with Crisco and putting it in the oven, to heating it with oil on the stove. I did both methods to season this pot. I first heated it with oil on the stove, but that method isn't very good. The problem is that cast iron does not have good heat conductivity, so the sides never really get hot enough to properly burn the oil in. Plus, anytime you season cast iron, you are going to generate a lot of pretty noxious smoke. Having two kids, I'm a bit reluctant to subject them to this smoke, but doing this outside on a burner means that other people in my apartment complex are probably smelling this smoke. So it's not a great solution. But, seeing as how the stove method was not working that well, plus having an lid to season as well, I had to resort to using my oven. The result of all of this was that I had a pot that was somewhat well season, but for some reason had some streaks and spots that apparently had no seasoning at all.

At this point, I didn't know what to do. All I knew is how to season something. I don't know how to fix the seasoning on an improperly seasoned item, which this appeared to be. If I simply put more oil on it and put it back in the oven another day, would it damage the seasoning that's already there? I didn't know, so I called up Lodge's customer service number, and asked them. They told me that streaks are normal, and it should even out over time. What they recommended, is to coat the pot in oil, inside and out, and put the whole thing on a grill for a few hours. They told me it would be nice and black after that, and doing this would not damage the existing seasoning. It just makes everything better!

I couldn't follow this advice, however, since my grill at home is not big enough for my pot. I have a very tiny grill. But I decided to season it outside over a burner again. This time I was for some reason less concerned with the smoke, so I coated it with oil, put it on medium-high heat, and just let it smoke and smoke for more than half an hour. At this point the bottom surface was almost all black, which was great, with no streaks. However, the next time I cooked with it, the streaks came back. They still exist to this day. Cooking with this pot has not made them disappear, but perhaps its because I never fry things without finishing it out as a stew.

Two weekends ago, I was grilling, and after I finished, I decided to try to season my lid again. So I coated it with oil and left it on the grill, while the charcoal burnt itself out. The great thing about is that even though it generated noxious smoke, it didn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary since it was coming from my grill. Everyone expends a grill to make lots of smoke. When I retrieved the lid later the same day, it was nice and brown. The grill did a much better job than the oven did. There is a large communal grill downstairs from me, which anyone in the apartment building can use. I may try to season my pot one more time on this grill. Hopefully, I'll have a good seasoning one day.

A busy day

Greta and I like routine. We try to not to do too much out of the ordinary on any particular day. Recently, we've been trying to spend one day a weekend and entertain people. We've successfully had one family over so far, and it worked out very well. So we decided to invite some more friends on Sunday. We don't plan very far ahead, so we invited our friends Sunday morning to come over for dinner that night. They said OK. After that, it was time to cook a nice meal for 4 adults. No problem.

I started by preparing Greta's specialty, Oxtail Stew. Greta was busy with the kids, so I took the liberty of preparing it in her style. I introduced a few differences, by roasting the oxtail after blanching it. Greta usually either blanches it then fry it a bit, or just blanches it. But roasting was good, it got rid of a lot of oil, and browned it pretty nicely. I used my new cast iron pan, a big, wide, deep skillet which is perfect for stewing lots of food. It has a nice tight-fitting lid, with spikes coming out of the bottom, so condensed water will drip on the food. After roasting it and draining the oil, I sauteed some chopped onions, put in some carrots, green onions, some parsley stems as a bouquet garni, a bay leaf, white wine, tomato paste, and Greta put in the salt, sugar, and soy sauce. I covered the pot and put it in the oven at 350 degrees, and left it there to cook for 3 and a half hours.

After that, I got a call from our friend Monica, who takes care of an elderly lady who used to live in the same apartment building as us. This lady was in the hospital, and Monica needed a ride to go there. She lives a few blocks from me, and has no car. No problem. At this time it was 11 am. I went to get her, and we stopped by Pizza My Heart to get a few slices of pizza for us and Greta. Perhaps it was the result of sitting in the box for a few minutes, but when we went back to the apartment and ate it, it was a bit soggy, not as good as the last time I went there. She mentioned that she was in the hospital working yesterday as well, and she was very hungry because she didn't get out of there until midnight. So I told her she can come by our place to eat tonight when she gets off of work. OK, so we had 5 adults now, instead of 4. Well, no problem, I guess.

When I got home, Greta said that her cousin Adriane and family wanted to stop by and bring us dessert, so she said she invited them as well. OK, 2 more adults. And since we have two kids, our friends have a kid, and Adriane has a kid, that's 4 kids. So that would be 7 adults, and 4 kids. This was becoming less like a simple dinner, and more like a party. Well, OK, so we figured we'd have to cook a lot more food. No problem.

Besides the oxtail, Greta had prepared some stuffed bitter melon yesterday. She has a way of doing it where she stuffs it with a ground pork mixture, fries it, then braises it with a bit of water, soy sauce, and garlic, for half an hour or more. So we could cook this dish, which would feed a lot of people, since she made enough for four or five meals.

I flipped through a new recipe book I had recently purchased. It's a Chinese/English bilingual cookbook on Sichuan cooking, published by the Wei Quan school of cooking. The interesting thing about this cookbook is that in many, if not most recipes, it will say to use MSG in Chinese, but not include it in the English translation. I decided to make Ants Climbing a Tree, a dish with bean-thread noodles, ground pork, hot bean paste, and other seasonings, and Napa Cabbage with Dried Baby Shrimp. I doubled both recipes so we would have plenty of food. I went to the store, bought the cabbage, some pork, and some chicken backs and necks to make a quick stock to use for both dishes.

When I came back, it was around 2pm. I started making the quick stock, which was easy to do. The rest of the dishes are actually pretty easy, and I figured I would only have to spend a half hour on both dishes. So I was pretty confident. Then, the fire alarm rang. Greta and I each took a baby and rushed downstairs. For some reason Annelie thought the whole thing was very funny, and was laughing as we came out of the building. I don't know why, since the alarm was at ear-splitting loudness.

The alarm appeard to be caused by a company who was fiddling with the alarms. I suppose they just made a mistake, but it took about half an hour or more to correct it.

When we were back inside, I managed to finish up making all the dishes, including the Stuffed Bitter Melon. Our friends arrived at 7, and we did not hear from Monica or Adriane, so we had a ton of food for 4 adults. But all the better for us, since we now have enough leftovers to last us the week, as well as all the lunches I need to bring to work.

That's the story of my surprisingly busy Father's Day. We've never thrown a party, but this may count, since we at least had cooked enough food for the party. So it was an interesting time for us. But we'll stick to our routine for a little while to cool off from this flurry of activity.

Pizza My Heart review

Not much interesting has been happening lately, so let me share my thoughts on Pizza My Heart, a small chain pizza restauarant that's recently opened up in San Mateo, on 4th Ave. Reviewing a pizza place is pretty easy. You don't have to eat a variety of dishes, all you have to do is eat a pizza, or even a small part of a pizza, and you have all you need right there. So let me cut to the chase. The pizza is pretty good, if you like a nice thin crust.

Pizza is essentially about the crust, it basically just is a form of flatbread with some stuff sprinkled on top. So it should taste like flatbread: dense, chewy, and a bit dark. Places like North Beach Pizza don't get this, their crust is thick and actually tastes like bread, which strikes me as totally wrong. In San Mateo, I think Amici's gets it right. However, the problem with Amici's is that they don't offer slices. Pizza My Heart is not as good as Amici's, but it does offer slices, so for a quick lunch, I would recommend it without hesitation.

Built St. Louis

Built St. Louis: A very thorough and interesting site dedicated to historic architecture in St. Louis. I found this link today via Metafilter, I recommend reading the comments to this article as well.

Joy Luck Place

The SF Chronicle has a review of Joy Luck Place in Cupertino, which I noticed is also opening up soon on 4th Ave in San Mateo. I will definitely be going once it opens, and I'll report back here.

Dried limes and preserved lemons

Last month, I started an experiment to see if I can make preserved lemons. These are often used (chopped up with the peel and all) in Moroccan cuisine, and they taste very nice. It was my lunch at Baraka in San Francisco's Potrero Hill which made me appreciate it so much. The lemon recipes you find on the web are a bit confusing. Here's an example of part of the recipe from the Seasonal Chef:

Set a lemon on one end and make a vertical cut three quarters of the way through the fruit, so that the two halves remain attached at the base. Do not cut in it half. Turn the lemon upside down and make a second vertical cut at a 90-degree angle to the first, again three quarters of the way through fruit.

Well that makes no sense. If you stand it on end and make a vertical cut, then turn it upside down and make a second vertical cut, they won't be perpendicular, they will be parallel. But the idea is simple, salt a lemon inside and out, stuff them into a jar, press them down. They should be in a mixture of salt and a little lemon juice covering the entire thing. Leave them there for 1 month I think I had too much lemon juice to salt, since my lemons came out mushy. But they tasted nice! I already have made a Moroccan Chicken Tagine (without a tagine), with saffron, olives and preserved lemons. I'm having it for lunch at work today, but I tasted the sauce last night, and it's quite tasty.

Last month I also received a bunch of limes. I didn't really need them, so I decided to continue by citrus preserving experiments by trying to make Persian-style dried limes. I know that the things we call limes in the store are not what Persians call limes. In fact, they aren't the true limes. The true limes are the Mexican / Key limes / Persian limes. What is commonly sold in the stores in a cross between the true limes, and lemons. But I wanted to make do with what I had, and Google wasn't helping in my quest to learn how to dry a whole lime, so I called up my Persian friend Farhang, and asked him what to do. He had no idea, and neither did his wife. He did manage to find something on the internet which said to boil it in salt water, then dry it. Well, that seemed good enough for me. I boiled them in salt water for about 5 minutes, then left them on the balcony to sun-dry. It didn't work. After a few weeks, they all went bad. There must be a better way. But if I need them, I think I'll just go and buy them.

Frank Chu joins the protests

Eric reports that Frank Chu has been going to all the anti-war protests. He's faithfully been to every one. The rest of the protesters probably want to get rid of the guy. To put it mildly, his message doesn't quite line up with theirs. Although I don't know whether those protesters are pro or anti-12 Galaxies, but probably they would rather focus the message back home. After all it's "Think globally, act locally", not "Think across the 12 galaxies, act locally". But I think he should be at all these events. The guy is definitely the king of the protesters.

Eric has a great picture of Frank.

In other Frank Chu news, a friend of a friend ran into him and offered to buy him new shoes. Frank evidently insisted on a pair of really uncomfortable looking shoes.

Chicago knock-off

While at guest at someone's house tonight, I saw they had gotten a hold of a cheap Chinese knock-off of last year's hit movie Chicago. It had both Chinese and English on the cover, and the usual things you usually see on DVDs, and in most respects seemed just like the real DVD cover. But I guess whoever put it together didn't know any English at all, and must have just cut & pasted a reviewer's quote, because the quote featured on the cover said "Frankly, you won't be all that jazzed by Chicago." Well, you can't say they didn't warn you...

Signature prank

An article on one man's quest to replace his credit card signature with various bizarre doodles is incredibly hilarious. Read it! (via Metafilter)

24 Hour Fitness rant

I exercise 3 times a week. It used to be 4. I used to go to Gold's Gym, and I was happy. Everything was straightforward. When I moved to San Mateo, there was only a 24 Hour Fitness around.

Wait, I realize I need to start farther back in time. One day, when my friend Trejo and I were eating lunch at Koi Palace, in Daly City (the best Dim Sum around), we had a long wait to get in. Next door is a 24 Hour Fitness, a gym neither of us had heard of. So we went in and asked how much it is per month. Here's how the conversation went:

Us: Hi, I'm wondering how much it costs per month to work out here.

Them: OK, let me take you on a tour, and then we can sit down and discuss the pricing options!

Us: Uh, no. We don't really want to go on a tour. We just want to know how much it is.

Them: Well, we can't tell you unless you go on the tour.

Us: What? You can't tell us how much it costs to join? Why not?

Them: We are not allowed to tell you unless you go on a tour first.

Us: Whatever. Bye.

Here's how the conversation would have gone if we were at Gold's Gym:

Us: Hi, I'm wondering how much it costs per month to work out here.

Them: 30 dollars a month, or 40 is you want to use any Gold's Gym location.

Us: OK, great! Goodbye.

So, even before I moved to San Mateo, I knew there was something fishy about 24 Hour Fitness. But I had little choice, there's simply no other gyms around San Mateo. My wife and I joined after we got married, and took their stupid tour, and had their stupid pricing plans explained to us. Their pricing plans (yes, they have many plans) are ridiculously complicated, and take about half an hour of explaining. As some have said, it's like dealing with a car salesman. Eventually, I wound up with a deal where my wife and I would have to pay something like $100, and we'd get a deal where we can go 4 times for the week for $30 a month each. That's the same prices as Gold's Gym, where you can come in any day you want. So basically, the best price I could get sucked.

When you do go there, they are hawking their snake-oil fitness supplements like mad. Everything is geared around selling their protein powder crap. They even interrupt music to tell you to buy this stuff!

Next complaint: My wife, when she was pregnant, called to suspend her membership. To do that she had to talk to a manager. The manager of the 24 Hour Fitness is a mysterious creature that only comes in for 15 minutes a day. She'd call at 10 am, he's not in yet. 11, he should be coming in any minute. 12, he went to lunch. 1, not yet back from lunch. 2, he's left for the day. Call back tomorrow! It took my wife about a week to get a hold of this guy.

So, today, I went with my brother-in-law. I figured they probably have a guest pass I can get. In fact, I had a coupon for a free guest pass. So I showed them the coupon, they said it's only valid from 8am. It was 7am at the time. I said, well can we pay something? They said it's 15 dollars and he'll have to take a tour! That fucking tour again! I said he's from out-of-town, and I didn't want to pay $15, which is pretty outrageous. No dice. He had to go home without exercising.

So, 24 Hour Fitness sucks. I only hope that one day this rant will convince someone not to become a member there. The depressing part is that this is a chain. You'd think with this crappy of a user experience, it couldn't be successful. Capitalism just doesn't work.

Crazy bagpipe music

There's some weird bagpipe music coming from somewhere in downtown San Mateo. I heard some smattered applause, as well. Weird.