Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

The other night I tried Good Eats' recipe for 40 cloves and a chicken. It was excellent, meat tender and the garlic cloves were as soft as butter. What the recipe doesn't tell you (although it was covered in the episode) is the garlic infused oil at the bottom of the pan is great brushed on bread and then put under the broiler (then spread the cloves onto the bread like butter). Delicious.

The one compliant I have, not in particular about this recipe, but recipes in general, is that that they grossly simplify the prep time. This reciple says 10 minutes. That is pretty wack. It took at least that long just to peel the garlic. Man that was awful work after awhile. I couldn't imagine being a prep chef at The Stinking Rose. I love garlic but I think being exposed to it that much would drive me nuts.

• How to score high in Google - Pretty interesting article and has some fairly controversial things to say like list and link to your competitors.
• Cincinnati-Transit.net - A real labor of love that details the history of all major Cincinnati area bridges, highways and tunnels. It also covers the ill-fated Cincinnati Subway which was abandoned in the late '20s. Tons of pictures and maps.
• Key Grips of the World - Weird site that lists key grips and the movies they worked on. This was one of the first "weird" web site that I came across when I first started using the web back in 1994. It was also one of the first sites that I came across that asked for participation from readers. It was quite a thrill back then to see your name listed out on some web page that you had no control over.
• BlogStyles - Has Movable Type and Blogger templates and stylesheets
• Saturday-Night-Live.com - Site run by a big SNL fan that contains news, info and user submitted reviews of Saturday Night Live episodes.

Dylan Tweney posted awhile back on his scheme for a Movable Type BlogRoll. His is a clever idea that uses a secondary MT blog to enter Blog Roll items, one per entry. From there, a template produces a file on disk that list these blogs in an HTML fragment. He used the PHP include method to then include the blog roll right into his main index of the primary blog.

This is very nice and gets you out of the business of making template changes for things like Blog Rolls and other lists. I wanted to do something like this, but wasn't sure I wanted to change my default page to PHP. Luckily I was able to find a solution that accomplishes the same thing but doesn't use PHP.

The OtherBlog MT plugin is a container tag that lets you nest MTBlog* and MTEntries* tags. This is exactly what I needed to construct the blog roll. Here is what I did.

In my secondary blog, I created a category called "BlogRoll". I created entries using the Title field as the name of the blog and the Entry Body field as the url. In my main blog, I added the following code:

<MTOtherBlog blog_id="6">

<MTEntries category="BlogRoll" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>" ><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />

</MTEntries>

</MTOtherBlog>

The notable thing here is that the blog_id="6" is the MT id of my secondary support blog. I was quite pleased how quick and easy this was add to my blog. You can see it on my blog home page on the bottom left hand page.

Update: I fixed a small typo in my implementation so all should work now.

Part II: Categorizing your BlogRoll links

Jermey Zawodny has a comment spam reduction plan and I am more than willing to help him out.

And here are more of my favs from my inbox:

Loose Weight Now!!!

Claim your prize!!!

Governer Arnold t-shirts!!!

Get a perfect credit rating!!!

Need cash fast?

Ben and Mena of MovableType fame made a live appearance on CNN Headline News. Great to see them out promoting MT and their new hosted product, TypePad. Video of the appearance is available.

Thanks Ben and Mena for such a great product and keep up the good work.

In a previous entry, I showed how it was easy to use the OtherBlog MT plugin to setup an easy blogroll. Kerim Friedman asked in a comment if it was possible to print out all the entries in the secondary blog, grouped by category. Fortunately, the OtherBlog plugin supports this kind of output by nesting a <MTCategories> element in the <MTOtherBlog> element. Example:

<MTOtherBlog blog_id="6">

<MTCategories>

<div class="sidetitle"><$MTCategoryLabel$></div>

<div class="side">

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>" ><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />

</MTEntries>

</div>

</MTCategories>

</MTOtherBlog>

That's it...pretty easy.

Joel On Software hits the mark again with an essay entitled The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Its a good, informative and easy read.

I just found out from Josh Zelvy that "Zelvy" in Czech means "Turtle". Will Rodina's last name means "Motherland" in Russian. My last name is Masculine in Italian. Does anyone else's last name mean something interesting?

I've really enjoyed Alton Brown's cooking show Good Eats. Its entertaining, educational and makes me hungry. I love all the quirky camera angles. The show definitely has a visual style all its own. Thank goodness for ReplayTV. It just sucks down the episodes and I get to watch them at my leisure.

Brian's Belly has an interview with Alton Brown. Slashdot also did an interview with him. There is even a Fan Club.

Thanks Will for the Brian's Belly link.

A very cool clock...thanks again Will.

Josh Zelvy has been banned. Why do companies continue to use crap filters like this. There should be some consumer punishment against these companies that take such draconian measures. Don't these people care about false positives? Or has the wacked out lawsuit happy legal system and people's crazy fear of seeing "some of the bad stuff" giving these companies the mandate to ban with impunity?

15 of us went to the Barrelhouse Brewery Beer Cruise last night at the Cincinnati Tall Stacks Music, Arts & Heritage Festival. Thanks to Barb for organizing the trip.

I must admit that the idea of Tall Stacks and the river boats isn't something that I wax nostalgic about and it certainly isn't something that I have romantized in my mind. With that said, it was a fun gathering although it was a bit awkward since our group was so large and the boat was filled to capacity. Due to some problems, the boat left about 30 minutes after it was supposed to but that didn't stop us from getting to enjoy four of their beers. We got to try their Hocking Hills Hefeweizen, Cumberland Pale Ale, Redlegg Ale and StearnWheeler Stout all while getting some beer commentary by their brewmaster. I enjoyed them all except for the pale ale (but then again, i usually don't like pale ales).

My only other critiques concern the food and the boat's bar. The food wasn't the best, hopefully not indicative of Hamburger Mary's food at their resturant. The chicken was kind of dry and the wings had some funky sauce on them. Also the potato skins weren't very crispy. I know it is hard serving a ton of food away from the resturant, but you should still try a bit harder. The ship's bar is the other complaint. They were selling cans of Bud Light for $4! $4! I felt like I was at a baseball game or something. Couple the high prices with the delays of starting and the delays between beer tasting flights and conspiracy theorists might conclude it was all a scam to make a ton of money selling overpriced Bud Light.

There are more pictures available.

Angela and I tried China Gourmet last night for the first time. We have lived in the area for over five years and we just noticed the resturant in the last few months. It is located underneath the Matt Bradley Salon on Erie Avenue. (For those of you in Cincinnati, Matt Bradley Salon is the business that places all those odd, creepy advertisments on the bus stops). China Gourmet makes good use of location with very high ceilings and large windows that let the natural light into its submerged entranceway.

Because of the Cincinnati Enquirer review, we had high expectations of fine service and fine food. I'm pleased to say that we were not disappointed at all. First the food: We started with an order of pot stickers. They were wonderful, with a lighter, more delicate enclosure then I have had at other resturants. Like always, the accompaning sauce is incredible. For our main course, Angela had Kung Po Chicken and I had an order of New Chicken. We split a small order of the Szechuan Asparagus. This was Angela's first experience with Kung Po Chicken and she was quite happy with the assortment of indgrediants and the tenderness of the chicken and water chestnuts. My New Chicken consisted of batter coated deep fried chicken chunks in brown garlic sauce with onions, mushrooms and snow peas. I was quite impressed at all the flavors and textures. This definitely is something I will try again. Lastly, the asparagus was incredible and I am not a huge asparagus fan. It was cut into matchstick size pieces and they cooked perfectly and served covered in a nice sauce.

Now the service: Everyone there was impecible dressed from the men in suits to the women in traditional Chinese Silk blouses. It was a very formal without being stuffy. We ordered our appetizers right off the bat and they came out several minutes later hot and fresh. As we close to finishing our pot stickers, the waiter appeared again and took our orders. After a slightly longer delay, our food appeared again. It was brought to a table side stand, where one of the staff members assembled plates of rice, entree and vegetable before our eyes. It felt like we were in a fine, French resturant. The best part was when the owner boxed up Angela's leftovers. He brought them back to the table in a brown bag, and told us that he noticed that she didn't eat a large portion of her food and he was concerned that she didn't like it. On the contrary, she loved and said she was looking forward to eating it tomorrow (She is generally a small eater at places like this). I was throughly impressed with his attention to detail. Its not often that attentive service adds so much to a meal, but in this case it did imensely. Oh an attentive fine service doesn't have to mean slow either. We were finished with our meal in about 50 minutes and we didn't feel rushed at all (note that we didn't have dessert and we took longer than usual to look over the menu).

So, if you ever have a desire for some upscale Chinese like P.F. Chang's, you will want to consider China Gourmet. Maybe I shouldn't have said that, I don't want P.F. Chang like 2 hour waits for a table. ;-)

As a loyal ReplayTV user, I don't watch too many commercials but the recent Liberty Mutual ad did. It depicts all other drivers as being members of a Demolition Derby, complete with the garish paint schemes and the frequent collisions. What a great way of saying "you are a safe driver, but everyone else out there is complete nuts, so use our services". Great commercial and it didn't even have to resort to usual themes to get me to watch it. ;-)

A very nice story on doing forensic analysis of a hack in progress ( via Will ).

Jeff Mills just started a blog. No, not that Jeff Mills, this Jeff Mills. Welcome Jeff.

The Mozilla Firebird project just recently released a 0.7 release. My initial reactions are amazement at how fast the browser start up. It is lightening fast on start up, very close, if not better than Internet Explorer. I can't determine if does a better job a site layout just yet because I haven't used it enough. Slate renders better but has different flaws, but then again they did do a site redesign recently so it isn't an apples to apples comparison.

I do however note that Flash and JRE plugins are still not included out of the box. You would think Macromedia and Sun would donate developers to make sure this work got done. Hopefully, the future windows installer will have some check boxes to toggle these features on or off to plcate those who are vehemently opposed to plugins.

On a similiar note, they also need a way for plugins to auto-install. If I can click on a link and download and install a new XUL theme for Firebird, then I certainly should be able to do the same for plugins.

But all and all, they are making good progress. I just wish more of my work sites weren't coded to IE specific features.

Bob Costas was in my dream last night. He was angry at me for referring to him as Bob rather than Mr. Costas. It was quite odd when I woke up.

Computerworld hits the mark when they show that is just good business sense to offer free WiFi at your place of business. Its pretty cheap and a nice losss leader. What a better way to attract afluent people (at least enough to support a wireless device of some sort) to your business for hours. Undoubtably you are going to win some business for providing such a conveience.

(via Boing Boing and Computerworld)

Ever wondered why all the tv cooks use Kosher Salt and Sea Salt rather than your run of the mill Iodized Salt? Sara Moulton exaplains why.

The Call Letter Origins site lists many television and radio station call letters from the UK, Canada, US and a few other places along with how their names came about.

Pan Seared Ribeye was so simple to make and super delicious. AB comes through again.

You know you watch too much tv when you just installed an uninteruptable power supply for your DVR, cable box and television.

The Bengals played the Seahawks on Sunday and they won 27 - 24. Harry, Jeff, Jena, James and I went to the game. My gallery has more pics.

Andrew has very kindly installed Active Spam Killer on our production mail server some time ago. As of late, I've noticed that some mail is getting through that really shouldn't. To that end, I've found a nice debugging technique for the rules that ASK uses. If you look at the headers for mail that makes your inbox, a header called X-ASK-Info will contain the name of the rule that was used to allow this message through. Handy feature and made me suscipicous of one of my regexes so it gave me a good head start on tracking down my problem.

The Kroger in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati was recently refurbished and expanded. Along with the new changes, came the Kroger U-Scan, which is the groccery store's name for self-checkout lines. I have used similiar systems before but since this is at the store I normally shop in, I've gotten a chance to build up an idea about how usable these systems are.

For the most part, I rate Kroger's implementation as quite usable with a couple of things that they could do better and with one flaw. First what they got right:

• Big Buttons: The buttons on the screen are very large, very bright. No one is going to have fat finger problems with these buttons. Likewise, people with less than steller vision aren't going to have a problem either.



• Icons: Most of the buttons have icons on them that would be well understood by everyone (e.g. $ on the "Pay Now" button).



• Audio and Visual Cues: The U-Scan uses audio clips as well as on screen displays to direct people to do certain tasks.



• Help: A help button is always on screen and easy to notice. I've had to use it once when a barcode absolutely would not scan. They manually looked up the price and entered it into my running tally. Likewise, when dealing with fresh produce, there is a case where their list of codes for the food are not complete. Pressing the no label button on that screen alerted the single cashier to enter the code for my obscure produce.



• Localization: The product is localized into spanish and english with language selection buttons on the first screen. For the most part this was very good except for I describe below in the failed section.

Now to what could be better:

• Line Item: The left side of the main screen keeps a running total of what you have previously scanned. This list could be easier to read. They could also take steps to make sure the last item scanned was in a bigger font or some other color so that people would more clearly be able to see that last thing scanned.



• Localization: I use my Kroger loyalty card each time I go, they should be able to remember what language I choose before so I don't have to pick it each time.

Now to what failed:

• Localization: While the whole UI and audio system for the screen are localized into Spanish, the credit/debit card reader is not. Regardless of what language you choose, the card reader uses English prompts.

One other thing I noticed is that english dialog is spoken by a woman, but the spanish dialog is spoken by a man. I am unaware of any language or cultural implications of gender in spoken prompts in a retail situation (but of course I'm far from an expert on that or have researched it). It would be interesting if anyone can shed some light on that subject.

Lastly, you might be wondering why this is posted on a blog where I normally talk about software development. To me, this is no different than producing a reporting application for some business area. It also shows to demonstrate that doing localized applications are still tricky and involve a lot of attention to detail.

I woke up this morning lying completely horizontally across my bed. Too bad I don't remember my dreams...it must have been something big.