More or Less

Photo graphy

2008-10-06T12:03:22Z

I've finally posted my photos of my India trip. Also up are Berlin last week and Berlin this spring.

new pics

2008-06-19T22:43:23Z

Photos of Seville are up. As usual in Spain, I had a great time. Between tapas and great Moorish architecture I'm a happy man.

This trip was also a great opportunity to play with my new Canon EF-S 55-250 IS lens. It also represents my first outing with a polarizing filter. The filter was a great success in the full daylight scenes but was kind of a problem in darker indoor shots. I guess there's really no way around that.

I'm not completely satisfied with the lens, but I can say it's a good value. I really needed something on the wider end rather than a telephoto for Seville. Also faster glass would be much appreciated.

lolcandidate

2008-05-08T11:18:32Z

From John Scalzi's Whatever. For those that don't follow the memes, here is the original. I'm ashamed to admit I find icanhascheezburger.com unreasonably entertaining.

From Harlan Ellison, Via Neil Gaiman

2008-05-07T21:26:03Z

Advice from Neil Gaiman

In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. There was something that someone said at my first Milford, about using style as a covering, but sooner or later you would have to walk naked down the street, that was useful...

And then I remembered. It was Harlan Ellison about a decade ago.

He said, "Hey. Gaiman. What's with the stubble? Every time I see you, you're stubbly. What is it? Some kind of English fashion statement?"

"Not really."

"Well? Don't they have razors in England for Chrissakes?"

"If you must know, I don't like shaving because I have a really tough beard and sensitive skin. So by the time I've finished shaving I've usually scraped my face a bit. So I do it as little as possible."

"Oh." He paused. "I've got that too. What you do is, you rub your stubble with hair conditioner. Leave it a couple of minutes, then wash it off. Then shave normally. Makes it really easy to shave. No scraping."

I tried it. It works like a charm. Best advice from a writer I've ever received.

It works.

cous-cous recipe

2008-04-13T20:46:08Z

This recipe is not authentic but tastes awesome.

1 cup cous-cous (the quick cooking kind)
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1/2 zucchini, coarsely chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1/3-1/2 cup garlic salami, caorsely chopped
olive oil

Start boiling water for the cous-cous. Heat about a tablespoon of olive oil in a sauce pan over medium high heat. Chop the vegetables in the order above and add them as you chop, pausing between the zucchini and the pepper until the zucchini starts to get soft. Cook until the fat has come out of the sausage, like 5 minutes.

Transfer all of that to a serving dish and cover. Prepare the cous-cous in the sauce pan. This will cause it to soak up some of the flavors hopefully and means one less dish to wash. Mine calls for another tablespoon of olive oil then 1 cup of water. After that I cover the sauce-pan for 5 minutes. Fluff it with a fork and serve it in bowls with the sausage and veggies over top.

For a veggie version you'd have to add some salt and maybe some garlic or garlic powder in place of the salami.

The above serves 2 as a smallish portion (most cookbooks' idea of serves 2) or one very hungry person.

Poker

2008-03-29T00:39:08Z

I had to re-buy three times tonight, putting my total stake at €20. There were dizzying highs and punishing lows. Actually, until late in the evening mostly punishing lows. I was getting crap cards to the point where even J5 was looking ok. That's not good. But even worse, even my better cards wouldn't hold up. Early on I went all in with bullets (pocket aces) only to lose to 52s when Alan drew running 2's to make trips.

A few big late plays made up for all that and I was back in black by the time we decided to start mixing the game up. From Hold 'Em we went to Omaha, where I profited somewhat despite swings of €5 or more. I feel I'm getting better at identifying good Omaha hands but I still end up playing weaker hands. The problem is when you're holding four cards everything looks promising. We had a short run of Manila but it didn't really go anywhere. I like this poker variation, but somehow it wasn't the night. Then we played Omaha with the "Freedom of Information Act" (all folded and burnt cards get shown immediately).

At the tail end of the night I made up a new game. It's Hold 'Em but 2, 3, and 4 count double for flushes. So, for example, 28JK of clubs makes a king-high flush, and 23Q of spades makes a spade flush. No flushes came up in the 3 or so rounds we played but it was interesting. For example A2s becomes a more powerful hand.

I ended the night up €1.50, due to getting some good action in Omaha and probably benefiting from the generally looser table at the end of the night.

I heartily recommend goat's cheese Camembert and Yamazaki whisky.

Research Arbitrage

2008-03-06T14:47:54Z

I've noticed a trend in some research talks I've been attending lately. There are lots of people out there that simply take ideas from one field (or domain as seems to be the buzzword du jour) and apply them in a different field. Like taking a technique from DNA matching in bioinformatics and applying it to internet search, or the other way around.

This is a great way to get a publication without much risk or work. One could argue that it's not very creative, but I think this approach actually has a lot of value. At its best it introduces new powerful techniques to a field that may be stuck on an unproductive approach.

I'd like to think I've coined the term research arbitrage to describe this phenomenon. Like a financial arbitrage it exploits an information asymmetry to give advantage to a player. Also like financial arbitrage it tends to bring markets (fields in this case) closer to a common level of price (or information).

idea: soft docking station via suspend to disk

2008-02-29T14:07:36Z

I'm about to get a MacBook Air and I was thinking about its lack of serious performance and lack of a docking station. It occurred to me that the main thing i want from a docking station over just moving to a desktop when i need more cycles is preserving my "session," i.e. the set of open programs I have.

People have tried to do session migration before, most notably I think in clustering systems for migrating distributed processes, though in some sense screen and even the original VNC allow you to move sessions across terminals.

What I'm proposing is to take advantage of modern suspend features of laptops to migrate a session. The model is this: Suspend the laptop to disk, connect it (perhaps via a firewire target disk mode-like mode or its moral equivalent over ethernet) to another computer and have that computer resume the laptop in a virtual machine. Desktop software is already robust to suspend/resume and the potential change in devices or network connectivity.

It seems like it would be pretty possible to do this in Linux but not really possible to do it for Mac OS X, which is my main platform these days.

Failed saving throw vs. Shiny!

2008-02-24T00:40:03Z

I just bought the most ridiculous alarm clock ever. Not to worry though, because I paid a lot more for it than it costs from Amazon.

Can I explain myself? No, I cannot. Well, I'll give you this: it supports USB.

Stuff

2008-02-15T17:12:46Z

The coolest thing about the install process on my new HP all-in-one printer: the it printed out an alignment page and then had me scan that page back in.

The dumbest thing: the way the 15 minute-long software install kept stealing focus. The funny thing is focus wasn't even going back to the installer... It would take focus and give it to nobody.

In other news, I'd like to post reviews of three books soon: Fairyland by Paul McAuley, Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and Accelerando by Charles Stross. But I won't do that today.

Also: most java programmers are morons. JSON libraries, I'm looking at you. This goes doubly for anything associated with facebook development...

Daft Punk Rocks the House

2008-01-25T15:31:14Z

And the office for that matter. They would likely also rock the car.

Specifically, Alive 2007 is very, very good. You can listen to a track at the AV Club review. Don't let the B+ put you off; these guys grade to a tough standard and there's no curve.

Something that other Daft Punk tracks hadn't really shown me is how much fun these guys must be having. This live album really brings out the joy in their music. Their previous live effort Alive 1997 was called "easily the best live non-DJ electronica record ever released" by the All-Music guide. Guess I'll have to track that down as well.

This album represents my first purchase from the iTunes music store, or of any music in purely digital form. I'm glad they've finally ditched the DRM on at least some albums (including this one).

Dinner and a Show

2008-01-18T14:22:59Z

The Vegetable Orchestra.

Kids, if you're going to bore out a carrot flute with a power drill, please put the carrot in a vise, don't hold it with your hands.

Something in the Air

2008-01-16T00:29:39Z

A little known provision of Steve Jobs' deal with the devil is that every Apple product must have a critical flaw. The new Macbook Air's critical flaw is that the battery is non-removable. I can see how making the battery removable would have involved design trade-offs, but.

The Macbook Air is the thinnest laptop ever. But I don't care how thin my laptop is. The regular Macbook is a perfectly fine form factor. I just want something with half the weight and twice the battery life. The new Macbook Air at least gets the weight down to 3 lbs, which is pretty reasonable. The lack of ports on the Air is also annoying. The lack of an optical drive I doubt I'll ever miss.

Now the lack of a replaceable battery. That's the first thing I decided when I starting shopping for a new laptop back in last August. My next laptop was going to have two batteries. There are just too many situations where I'm away from power for more than one battery duration (for example, long haul flights). As my battery has aged it's only gotten worse.

One thing is certain: the Air is not meant to be anybody's primary computer. That's fine, it's the direction I'm headed these days anyway. But at that rate I might go straight past the Air to the Asus EEE PC. At 2 lbs it's extremely light. If only it had a bigger keyboard or at least a bigger screen. At least the price is right. (also see the ars technica review)

So is the battery a complete deal-breaker? I don't know. Since it's not shipping for two weeks, I guess I've got a little time to decide.

Also: The new Apple TV finally looks like something somebody might want. And it's cheap enough that it makes some sense vs. just putting a mac mini next to your TV.

Also: I don't think Randy Newman should expect a Christmas card from Steve Jobs this year. That was really weird at the end of the keynote.

When the Memes Go Marching In

2007-12-17T12:44:46Z

This year wasn't much of a year for blogging.

January: Sunday Bloody Sunday (embedded video). rx now has a lot of content on YouTube.
February: none
March: 'brutal neck-snap' 'very satisfying' (ok, so that was the title, but almost the whole post is a quote from an article)
April: I haven't updated for ages, and I can't be bothered to do a proper update here, so a bit of a ramble will have to do.
May: I've got new pictures on flickr.
June: none. To be fair I was traveling most of the month.
July: these [photos] have been up about a month, but I haven't blogged them.
August: An explanation for the A710 being discontinued: Canon has released the A650 and A720.
September: Shakespeare's On First (embedded video)
October: none
November: For lack of a better name, I'm calling this southwest minestrone.
December: All of the following are recipes from a tex-mex dinner I cooked last Saturday night: ( tortilla soup, cheese enchiladas, mexican rice, black beans )

I'm thinking 2008 may be the year of the return of the blog, or at least more web presence in some form. I doubt it will be Facebook, though I signed up for that last week.

Mini book reviews: The two most memorable books I read this year were The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley. I picked up the latter on the strength of its unique Gollancz SF cover art in the UK, the first time I've ever bought a book based on its cover. The story uses lots of standard SF tropes but puts them together in a satisfying, well-written package that never feels stale. Looking at the other Gollancz SF titles, I suspect you couldn't go wrong with any of them.

Tex-Mex Dinner

2007-12-12T15:37:33Z

All of the following are recipes from a tex-mex dinner I cooked last Saturday night:

Tortilla Soup

2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1/2 jalapeño, finely sliced
1/4 red bell pepper, chopped
1 can chopped tomato
6 cups vegetable stock
1 lb chicken breast, cut in small chunks and pan fried (optional)
grated Monterrey Jack cheese and cilantro to garnish

If I would have had corn tortillas, I would have cut them into strips, fried them in oil, and used them as garnish. Make the stock. Dump all the ingredients in the soup and simmer for a couple hours. I added the chicken to bowls at the very end to keep the soup vegan. Makes 6 cups, serves 5-6. I marinated the chicken in chili powder, cumin, salt, pepper, and Jack Daniels.

Sources: [1] [2] Notice my recipe is much simpler than either of these two.

Cheese Enchiladas

enchilada gravy (my variation below)
- 2 cups vegetable broth
- 4 tbsp. chili powder
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
- big pinch salt
- tiny amount ground cinammon
- 1/3 tsp. sugar
- 5 tbsp white flour
- 5 tbsp cold water
1 dozen flour tortillas
1 cup chopped onion
500 g (1 lb) grated cheese (Monterrey jack would be best, I used a gouda / mozzarella blend)
250 g (1/2 lb) cheddar cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 350 F / 180 C. Heat all the ingredients for the gravy except the flour and cold water. Stir those together in a separate cup and add slowly to gravy while whisking (to prevent lumps). For each tortilla, spoon some gravy on it, then about a tablespoon of onions, then about 1/4 cup of Jack cheese. Roll it up and put it seam side down in a baking pan. Top the enchiladas with the rest of the gravy and cheddar cheese. Bake 20 or so minutes, until everything is hot and bubbly. These came out kinda salty, so I've reduced the salt in the sauce from what I actually used.

Mexican Red Rice

1 cup long grain white rice (I used Basmati)
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup tomato sauce (or tomato puree)
1 tsp. salt
2 cups water
3 tbsp. olive oil

If I were to make this again I might add some finely chopped carrot. Fry the rice in oil until it starts to get brown. Then add the rest of the ingredients, cover, and simmer 15 minutes. Remove cover, stir, and simmer uncovered for about 5 minutes or until the rice dries out a bit. Serves 4. Sources: [1] (cracked out) [2]

Black Beans

2 cans black beans
2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
2 green onions, chopped

Dump it all into a pot and simmer until kingdom come. Serves 6.

I also made guacamole, pico de gallo, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

Southwest Minestrone

2007-11-30T14:36:10Z

For lack of a better name, I'm calling this southwest minestrone. It's got chili peppers, beans, and pasta. I've made this three times, once vegetarian. I'll give both variations here. Please use some judgement with the measures; I never measure anything when I cook so these could be a bit off. Beginning to end, the whole thing probably takes 2 hours. At the measures below it serves 3-4.

Ingredients

1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 red bell pepper
1 long thin red pepper (looked like a cayenne but was only moderately spicy after roasting. The name was in Turkish in the market)
2 medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 large split chicken breast, cut into 1 cm strips (optional)
4 large celery stalks, or 3 carrots, or other veggies (say 2-3 c), coarsely chopped
2 cans red kidney beans
125 g. (about 1 cup) conchigliette (mini shell) pasta
marinade (below)
2 tsp vegetable bouillon (Marigold, "Swiss-style" or whatever, really)
1 tsp whole cumin seeds (if you don't have them, see marinade)

Marinade

1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin (use 2 tsp if you don't have seeds, above)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
a good drizzle of hot sauce
2 tsp sesame oil (can substitute olive oil)
1 tbsp good quality vinegar (I've used rice or cider before)

First, mix the marinade ingredients together. If you're using chicken, mix it with the marinade and put it in a covered bowl in the fridge. If you're not, marinate the chopped onion. Preferably do this step several hours in advance.

Start boiling about 2 liters (quarts) of water in a big stock pot.

Turn the oven to broil at maximum temperature, with an oven rack in the highest position. You may want some aluminum foil on a lower rack to catch drips. Cut the stems of the peppers and try to seed them as much as you conveniently can while keeping them whole. You may have to cut the bell pepper in half to fit it in the oven. Lightly brush the peppers in olive oil and place them on the top rack. Roast them for what seems like forever (20-30 minutes) checking on them and turning periodically.

While that's going on, add bouillon to the stock pot and start chopping vegetables. Add the celery and tomatoes whenever they've been chopped.

Heat up a medium frying pan on maximum heat. Put the cumin seeds in the pan dry and heat them, stirring constantly, until they start to smoke. Toss them into the stock pot.

Add a teaspoon or two of sesame oil to the frying pan. Put the chopped onion in the frying pan and cook the onions until they start to get some brownness. Toss them into the stock pot and if you're using chicken, add it to the frying pan. Cook the chicken until juices run clear and you can easily cut the pieces with your turner. Add them to the stock pot. Turn the burner to low and deglaze the pan by adding enough water to cover the bottom of the pan. Stir until you've got all the spices into solution and add the liquid to the stock pot. You may have to do this a couple times.

When the peppers are limp and the outside is mottled black take them out of the grill and let them cool a bit. Cut them into strips and toss them into the stock pot.

Open the cans of beans, rinse and drain them, add them to the soup. Add the pasta.

Let the whole thing simmer at least 20 mins.

Shakespeare's on First

2007-09-21T11:29:03Z

For those about to shop

2007-08-20T13:41:03Z

An explanation for the A710 being discontinued: Canon has released the A650 and A720. At price points of $400 and $250, respectively, these are some good buys. The SX100 with a 10x zoom for $300 is interesting as well.

more photos

2007-07-24T16:00:56Z

these have been up about a month, but I haven't blogged them. I've got a huge backlog to go through, but this covers my trip to New Zealand in June. I haven't linked to the wedding photoset as that's probably not of general interest, but it's easy enough to find from these links if you're so inclined.

I should have written this post earlier when I was still interested in writing about the travels.

Singapore
New Zealand
Melbourne
Tokyo

New pictures

2007-05-15T14:49:34Z

I've got new pictures on flickr. Newest are Amsterdam and Salisbury and Stonehenge. Slightly older is Köln. I'm also uploading my back catalog as it were, starting with Barcelona from 2005.

There's lots more backlog to go, but I don't want to exhaust people.

This is also as good a place as any to plug the Saarbrücken Daily Photo Blog, part of a network of daily photo blogs from cities around the world. I've hardly taken any pictures of Saarbrücken but this girl's doing a great job of showing the city.

A weekend in the life

2007-04-09T20:59:22Z

I haven't updated for ages, and I can't be bothered to do a proper update here, so a bit of a ramble will have to do. Easter had great weather but was rather quiet in town here. Friday and Monday were holidays, which meant that everything except some restaurants, cafes, and bars were closed. Sundays are always like that. Saturday Davina and I were in Strasbourg.

Strasbourg is about 1.5 hours by train from Saarbruecken. I've been there before but it was Davina's first time to a French city other than Paris. We had a bit of trouble on the train in that the conductor couldn't sell us a round trip ticket between Saarbrücken and Strasbourg since the SNCF only sells tickets between French cities. We ended up buying a ticket from the German border (a few kilometers from Saarbrücken) and Strasbourg. Luckily the conductor spoke English and German as well as French so this wasn't too complicated.

Once there we had galette for lunch. Mine had Andouille as a filling. The woman at the crêperie asked me if I was sure, because it was made with tripe. I was mostly interested in comparing the French original with the New Orleans variety. The original is also good though not as spicy as the Louisiana version. It's more smoky than spicy. We climbed the cathedral to the observation platform. The cathedral in Strasbourg is the highest in Europe, just like every other cathedral.

Back in Saarbrücken on Sunday we mostly had a quiet day drinking alternately coffee, beer, and pastis in various street cafés around town. I don't really care for licorice flavor, but pastis is growing on me. Patrick claims that if you drink enough of it you'll get drunk the next day on water alone. Luckily I haven't been in a position to find out yet.

Today (Monday) we got up late, had a lazy breakfast at a local café and made hot cross buns, a traditional English Easter pastry.

This leaves out a ridiculous amount of detail and is already too long. I could add stuff about Belgian food and beer, learning German, poker, bumping into random friends, and pickled fish, but I think I'll have to leave it for now.

Hail to the King, baby

2007-03-28T11:26:56Z

Jacko looks for a jackpot in Vegas with 50-ft. robot
Yeah, it's a 50 foot robotic statue of Michael Jackson in the desert. With lasers.

That word ... I do not think it means what you think it means

2007-03-26T20:32:28Z

From an article on the new Samsung Upstage phone:

It took us about an hour to master it completely, even after we took the handy tutorial. But once we got the hang of it, we thought it was quite user-friendly and intuitive.

Sure, reviewers take this word in vain all the time. After all, the only intuitive user interface is the nipple. But come on.

'brutal neck-snap' 'very satisfying'

2007-03-16T10:51:18Z

From here (but originally seen at ars technica):

The final results are very cool. For instance, once you've grabbed an enemy mobster, you can slam him against a wall by pushing the controller forward, or swing him around by jerking the controller left and right. If you sneak up behind an opponent and grab him, you can even perform a brutal neck-snap by giving the controller a sharp twist. The experience is deeply immersive, and very satisfying.

Travelling

2007-01-24T06:54:34Z

I'm in Perth. My first meal in Australia was kangaroo satay. And gourmet pizza. And beer frm a micro brewery. I had the 'bright ale', which isn't Pale Ale (less bittered) but along those lines. Lighter than an amber ale.

Before that we were in Penang for about 48 hours. Penang was awesome. Beautiful rain forest, beaches, awesome street food. I really want to see more of south east asia. Malaysia is good to visit because so many people there speak English. Though the announcement just before we landed in Kuala Lampur that the penalty for drug smuggling is death was a bit scary. You'd hate to have somebody slip something into your bag.

So far Perth reminds me in a lot of ways of America, at least compared to other places I've been. I think it's the way that things are spread out. The city is structured less like a European city and more like an American city. It probably has everything to do with growth of the city vs. when cars were introduced. The coffee's better though. I've been here less than 24 hours though, so I still need to take things in.