wiredfool

Archive for August, 2003

Overabundance

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Sometime you have to ask what if everything produces, rather than what if it doesn’t. This year’s abnormally warm and dry weather has been really good for the pepper plants that we impulsively planted this spring. We’ve got an Ancho, Golden Bell, Cayenne, Thai Dragon, and Habenero. The Ancho and Golden Bell are coming along nicely with 6 or so peppers per plant.

Ring of fire cayenne peppers

These two pepper plants have 30-40 peppers growing. Each. We haven’t found a ripe cayenne yet, but the Thai Dragons are on par with a serrano, maybe hotter. It’s uncomfortable for me to eat more than a nibble or two of the fresh pepper. They have enough flavor to stand up to being added early in the cooking process and still have some bite at the end.
Thai Dragon peppers

The Habenero is the only one that hasn’t really set fruit yet. It doesn’t have any fruit larger than a tiny bud, but there are a bunch of them ready to grow.

not quite ripe yet...

And then there are the tomatoes. I’ve pruned them so that you can get down the path. It may help control the things, but I’m never quite sure. I think they’d be considered invasive weeds in this climate if they were any more prolific. The cherry has produced a couple so far — I expect the bulk to ripen in September.

No comments

Shiny whirry things

I’m attracted to shiny whirry things, especially when they have blinkenlights too. So I’m really tryingn to figure out if I have any use for really cheap scsi drives. 18 gig, 10k rpm, $15. Cheap enough to go for a 10 pack. The rub is that they are SCA connectors (read enterprise class), so finding a chassis to put them in is probably significantly more expensive than the drives themselves.

And that 10k rpm scsi drives are not known to be quiet, power efficient, cool or otherwise compatible with home datacenter use, especially when one is threatening to use 10 of them. But it would be really cool to have a big honkin drive array to play^H^H^H^H experiment with.

No comments

New World Spanish Rice

Sort of mole, sort of spanish rice.

  • One sweet onion, diced
  • 2 fresh Thai Dragon peppers, chopped
  • 1 block tofu, 1/2″ chunks
  • 2 tsp cumin – ground
  • some cumin seeds (1/2tsp?)
  • 2 small cans stewed tomatoes
  • 1 cup arborio rice
  • 1 cup basmati rice
  • 1 fresh ancho pepper
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
  • handful semisweet chocolate chips
  • Salt, lime juice to taste.

Saute onion in olive oil, make somewhat soft. Add Thai dragons, tofu and cumin. Saute for a little while more without burning anything.

Add tomatoes, water, rice, and ancho. Simmer covered for a while, keep stirring every so often. Add the chocolate after 10 minutes or so. Salt and lime to give a little non-pepper bite to it.

This will end up as a spanish rice with just a hint of mole in it. The thai dragons are pretty hot, and stand up pretty well to being added early. Somehow I managed to make balanced flavors, instead of any one component dominating.

Of course with a whole plant of thai dragons, I think we’ll have that dominating flavor soon.

No comments

Organizing the virtual sock drawer

I spent yesterday working on the equivalent of reorganizing my sock drawer, in this case, reconciling two (legal) 10 gig mp3 collections on my laptop and linux machine to one 16 gig collection.

The tracks have been ripped with at least two programs (iTunes/cdparanoia) and 4 different naming conventions. Each platform had songs ripped to filenames that the other couldn’t understand — either by length or character set issues. Some of the albums had been copied from one to the other, and had metadata corrected on the new platform. Generally multidisk sets, just to helpfully use more space. And to top it off, I didn’t have enough spare space on any single drive to hold the entire possible 20 gig combination of the two, and I didn’t want to touch up filenames or merge by hand.

So to sum it up, I have duplicate files with different names and (slightly) different contents, and the ones that are most likely to be like that are part of the collections that take up the most space. And I don’t want to do any of it by hand.

So after playing with perl to make a bunch of consistent, safely named soft links on each platform, md5summing both archives, and transferring the files that didn’t have matching checksums, I wound up within 200 megs of filling the target, while only transferring an extra gig or so. And realizing that duplicate checking manually might have been faster.

I think there’s one other learning point here, and that’s that automated processes are no match for bad metadata.

No comments

« Previous Page