antipaucity

Earlier this week my wife decided to surprise me with a dinner she thought-of more-or-less on-the-spot.

We are both big fans of The Melting Pot. Tuesday she popped out to Kroger and bought a small package of potatoes, some various broths, and an absolutely AMAZING meat rub spice mix. Also she found some strawberries (on sale – how cool), and “melting chocolate” (no idea how this is different from “normal” chocolate, but whatever).

Unbeknownst to me while I was finishing work for the day, she was busy in the kitchen mixing-up a broth to boil the veggies in, and eventually cook some filet we had in the freezer (which she had also been thawing – again on the sly in the kitchen while I was working).

Her approximate recipe for the main course:

• 1 small chicken broth
• 3 small vegetable broths
• veggies per preference (ours were carrots, mushrooms, and potatoes)
• small can of pineapple chunks – including the juice
• spice-rubbed filet

Green goddess (Melting Pot’s ‘signature’ spread):

• 1/2 C sour cream
• >1/2 C cream cheese
• chopped chives

Dessert:

• ~1 C melting chocolate
• splash of Southern Comfort (flambeed to remove alcohol content, but leave flavor)
• fresh strawberries

Cooking method:

• heat broth to near-boiling (I think this is “simmering” – but I’m not positive on the technical term)
• add veggies
• after veggies are between ‘hot’ and ‘tender’, add rubbed filet chunks (15-25 minutes, depending on heat and preference)
• remove from heat 2-3 minutes later and serve

Dessert method:

• melt chocolate in microwave- and flame-safe container
• add splash of SoCo
• flambe
• dip strawberries

This was an awesome dinner – not to mention less expensive than Melting Pot by, oh, 70% – and I was very sad I got too full to finish all of it

Thanks, babe!

BTW – LivingSocial had a Melting Pot special this week (which we have taken advantage of). Not sure if it’s still available, but check it out – it’s half off

*UPDATE@201107071203* the LivingSocial special has been sold out.

As with many others, I suppose, I have various email address come and go: perhaps via job changes, or graduating/changing schools, deciding to sell a domain, or any of a host of other reasons.

There’s a problem with that, though: when those changes happen, sometimes access to other digital resources becomes…difficult. For example, I have an old (now unused) merchant credit account that I opened about 7 years ago. For reasons I cannot now recall, I linked that account’s digital updates to my school email address. Problem: I graduated school Dec of 06, and my account ceased to exist sometime after that.

Woops.

And the password reset goes to that email address.

Double woops.

So the question now becomes – how do you ensure that when you switch email addresses, you don’t lose anything “important”?

It’s a problem I have yet to solve – any thoughts?

Sunday marked the my first anniversary with my lovely wife, Christina.

We spent the last week in Virginia, utilizing the one-year passes we bought on our honeymoon

Our flights into Norfolk were smooth, and since it was so nice, we just decided to head straight to the beach from the airport. The weather was just about perfect all week – highs around 80, with light breezes every day: great weather for wading, sun soaking, theme parking, and taking in the historical sights at Colonial Williamsburg.

Thursday we decided to do our anniversary dinner a couple days early after finding out there was a Melting Pot nearby (oh, and we had a coupon for them, which was even betterer).

We found great places to eat all week, returning to one of the places we ate last year (Captain George’s), and trying-out some new spots (or, at least, new to us) like The Cheese Shop, Seasons, and Food For Thought.

We hit-up Busch Gardens again, but were disappointed to find out they no longer do the all-you-can-eat wrist bands: apparently too many people abused the system – so now you have to buy meal passes that get redeemed when going through the lines .. not that I needed to be eating “all I can”, but still: it was a let-down.

One drawback of the great weather, though, was that water rides are distinctly less refreshing than when it’s 100 out, like it was on our honeymoon last year. Like last year, we did a paint-your-own pottery thing at Busch Gardens, and hopefully this time we’ll remember we did it and not be *quite* as surprised when the mugs arrive in a few weeks

I think the only disappointment of the week was visiting the Ripley’s museum in Williamsburg: definitely too small for the admission fee. But, oh well.

On our return trip, while sitting at the airport, we realized we hadn’t brought house keys

Woops.

Right, so – instead of asking her parents to drive 90 minutes (each way) to bring us the key they had for our house, and wanting to skip the emergency maintenance fee and/or locksmith charge, we stayed an extra night on vacation right here in Lexington at the nicely-appointed Springfield Marriott next to UK. Got a pretty hot discount, on the room, too

Thankfully, our rental agency has Saturday hours, and was able to unlock our door for us for free! Woot.

How did we not have keys but have a locked door? Ahh. Good question. Last weekend my wife’s parents and we went to Louisville so the girls could go to the Deeper Still Conference. My father-in-law dropped us off Sunday morning at the airport, and since we didn’t drive… we didn’t think to grab house keys. (OK, OK, ok: so *I* didn’t think to grab them… but since we’re *one* as a couple, it’s a “we” )

I can’t wait to see where the next years will take us .. but we’ll make sure to have our house keys on those adventures

I have been fortunate to both know and know of many folks in the US military over the past 70 years.

In approximate historical order, thank you for your service:

• Roger M
• Ralph M
• Ken C
• Joe M
• Ken C
• Warren M
• EJ N
• June N (C)
• Donald C
• Jeremy F
• Joe D
• Ben W
• Greg M
• James H
• Ben W
• Dan S

For everyone I have missed, I apologize.

Thank you so much for your service to this country.

And thanks for letting the “rest of us” grill hotdogs, play games, and enjoy Memorial Day sales because of what you have fought for.

This past Saturday, I gave a presentation/talk on Haiku for the BGLUG in Lexington KY.

For those unfamiliar with Haiku, it is an open-source reimplementation of my favorite OS of all time, BeOS.

Instead of having a formal slide deck for the event (as initially planned), I kept it informal with an oral history of Be Inc, some of the intrigue surrounding the company, my involvement with the platform back in the 90s with the developer program, and then the developments of the platform post-Be (through Palm’s mishandling of the IP, Yellow Tab, and Haiku).

I have found I can use Haiku for almost all of my day-to-day tasks (currently running a few VMs of it on my laptop), and it barely taxes the hardware – even with only 256MB of RAM and a single vCPU. Oh, and it’ll still render hyper-smooth 3D OpenGL video on such an “underpowered” VM.

There is a host of awesome software available for Haiku, and the community seems to just be getting stronger and stronger.

A couple of my favorites:

• Paladin – OSS reimplementation of BeIDE
• CapitalBe – financial tool

If you are interested in developing for Haiku, checkout darkwyrm’s programming lessons.

Years ago, my mom and I would routinely try to catch episodes of Square Foot Gardening (SFG) on PBS.

Hosted by Mel Bartholomew, a retired civil engineer, SFG was a program whose aim was to enable gardening by the masses in confined spaces (though, naturally, if can be implemented in larger settings as well). Mr Bartholomew’s aim was to take his years of experience as an engineer, and turn gardening on its head: too much focus was (and still is, though less prominently now) given to gardening as miniaturized farming, rather than as a practice in its own right. It also promoted organic gardening and growing years before the current organic marketing wave.

The basic premise of SFG is to plant cooperatively, intensively, rotatively, and sequentially (see the wikipedia, SFG.com, and SFG.org sites for even more information).

• Cooperatively: plant different types of flowers and vegetables together to reduce the likelihood for disease transmission, to ward-off predators, and to give a dynamic look to the garden.
• Intensively: carrots only needs a few cubic inches of good soil in which to grow – plant them 4×4 in a 1′x1′ square.
• Rotatively: once a given crop has finished, reuse the plot, but for a different plant type to not overly wear-out the soil.
• Sequentially: if you want to go with a more homogeneous garden, plant in a cyclic fashion to spread the harvest over a period of time throughout the year

Soil preparation takes a bit of practice, but once you have a garden going, continually supplying compost should become easier (take all garden waste and add it to the pile). The only ingredient you should need to buy on a semi-frequent basis is peat moss, and that only once every 2-3 years per box. Vermiculite refresh is needed less often – closer to every 4-5 years per box.

The program and book had enough of a lasting impact on me that I used it as the basis for a paper in college – Eating Off the Grid (full PDF^*` and appendix).

A second book referenced in the television series, CA$H from Square Foot Gardening (of which I also own a copy), goes into further detail of expanding the SFG approach into a source for local users to enjoy the fruits (and vegetables!) of your labors, in exchange for compensation. In particular, Mel highlights supplying local restaurants and/or farmer’s markets with your produce.

If you are interested in growing even some of your own food, I strongly recommend Square Foot Gardening as the place to start.

• Quality of writing: 4/5
• Accessibility: 5/5
• Understandability: 4/5
• Ease of implementation: 4/5
• Overall: 4.5/5

^{^_{Prices accurate as of Jan 2006}
*_{Yes – I know about the typo at the end of page 3 (“there” vs “their”) and on page 5 (“them” vs “the”)}
`_{See also PYOP review for information on windbreaks}}

On 21 May
I am presenting at the
BGLUG meeting.

The topic will be Haiku.

I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to really run with the platform.

I’ll post the slides I use after the meeting.

^{*_{wrote that about 8 years ago}}

As recently promised, here is my review of Bruce Schneier’s seminal work, Applied Cryptography (2d edition).

I received my now-signed copy of Applied Cryptography (2d ed) for my 16th birthday – about a year after it was published.

Of all the “odd” books I asked-for when I was younger, this single volume had to take the cake for being both the most expensive, and the least-likely-to-be-read of any.

Bruce Schneier is a world-renowned cryptographer, researcher, and generally Smart Guy™. He has written several other books (many of which I have read (Beyond Fear, Practical Cryptography, Secrets and Lies), and several I own). I also follow on an intermittent basis his blog: schneier.com.

A warning before I go any further – since this book has not been updated in 15+ years, many of the technologies outlined now look incredibly dated or quaint (a 100Mhz processor being “top of the line”, for example). Likewise, measuring computational feasibilities in MIPS-years seems bizarre to me… then again, I’ve never used a MIPS processor.

Back to the book. A lot of time and space is spent on the mathematics and theory behind crypto systems: which is quite cool… except when you don’t understand any of it (as I didn’t a dozen+ years ago [and still don't to some extent now]). Protocols for a variety of “interesting” activities are discussed: key exchange, digital cash, contract signing, digital signatures, etc.

The most interesting part of the book is the appendix containing C code for several of the algorithms in the book.

Schneier’s writing mixes the highly technical with the amusing (eg p157):

Another biological approach is to use genetically engineered cryptanalytic algae that are capable of performing brute-force attacks against cryptographic algorithms. These organisms would make it possible to construct a distributed machine with more processors because they could cover a larger area. The plaintext/ciphertext pair could be broadcast by satellite. If an organism found the result, it could induce the nearby cells to change color to communicate the solution back to the satellite.

Assume the typical algae cell is the size of a cube 10 microns on a side (this is probably a large estimate), then 10¹⁵ of them can fill a cubic meter. Pump them into the ocean and cover 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) of water to a meter deep (you figure out how to do it – I’m just the idea man).

In the intervening time, AES has been adopted as a national standard, replacing DES. We all rely on encryption in daily life on the web (https) when banking, making purchases, or even reading our facebook and twitter accounts. Cryptography has become ubiquitous and invisible to most of us. The product I work most heavily with relies on certificate-based https for all of its internal communication.

In my opinion, this book is still of immense value – though in a different way than it was in the mid 90s: now it’s to serve as a warning about relying on technology and not considering the source, rather than upon how to implement and promulgate that technology.

• Quality of writing: 4/5
• Quality of content:  5/5
• Readability: 3/5 (if you’re unfamiliar with the terminology)
• Historicity: 5/5
• Overall: 4/5

Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and part-time theologian, is a fascinating member of history to me.

Several years ago I borrowed a copy of his “Pensées” from a friend, and skimmed it. At the time, I was impressed more with the randomness of the collection than with anything specific he wrote.

A few days ago, I began re-reading the book from the free Kindle edition on my phone.

There are far too many awesome quotes to repost them all here, but I have been heavily highlighting my digital edition for future reference, using in conversation, etc.

Pensées looks like a weird cross between 17th century twittering and a diary – but it’s well-worth the $0.00 investment to have a copy.

• Writing style: 3/5 – not something you “read” so much as “process”
• Concision: 5/5
• Overall: 4.5/5

My interest in cryptography has extended, now, for more than 15 years. The first book I read on the topic was David Kahn’s seminal work, The Codebreakers. Several years later, I received a copy of the book for Christmas, which I promptly reread.

Kahn’s writing style is eminently inviting, sucking the reader into an extensive history of code making and breaking over the centuries. Much of his time is spent going over the work of the Bletchley Park researches during WWII. It is truly astounding to see how much was going on “behind the scenes” compared to the popular historical works which only focus on the fighters on the ground, the strategic decisions made, or the technology enabling victory (or drawing it out, as the cases may be).

If you are interested in learning more about the work of the “intellectuals” during WWII, or about codes in general, it is an excellent work. For more of the theoretical aspects of modern cryptography, I’d suggest Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier*. But for a general history, in a style sure to appeal to even those who hate nonfiction and histories, David Kahn’s work is unmatched.

• Quality of writing: 4/5
• Quality of content:  5/5
• Entertainment value: 4/5
• Historicity: 5/5
• Overall: 4.5/5

^{_{* to be covered in a forth-coming review}}