Rather cold

As some of you noticed, it has been rather cold the last couple of days. It’s the wind. Just yesterday I did the usual driveway shoveling and I nearly froze my hands off. People must be wondering who that fool is shoveling without gloves or hat. Yes, that’s me, and I still think I can handle this weather, just like I handled the last couple of years.

But anyways: cold it was and it looks like there’s no end in sight, yet.

“We are still in the dead of winter.There is still more winter ahead of us than behind us. Statistically speaking, the midpoint of winter doesn’t come until February 4.”

Nice reminder. Have another hot coffee (or hot chocolate).

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Rather cold

Clue in.

I noticed a couple of links over at Scoble, a blogger I typically don’t care about. But to keep it on topic: he talks about his meetings with the IE team at Microsoft.

“Now, about the darn security fixes. These are tough. Tougher than it might seem on the outside. Why? Because Internet Explorer’s engine is used in several different OS’s. Dozens of different languages.”

So does Mozilla:

“Another thing that the commenters generally aren’t thinking of is “how to get adoption.” I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn’t be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don’t care about those issues and won’t download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.”

I have no clue what Scoble means. I seriously don’t. Next:

Continue reading

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Clue in.

CVS, pserver and that

I had a fun time installing CVS at work, meaning a chrooted pserver. I should have been looking into adding SSH into the process, but couldn’t be bothered.

A couple of notes installing a pserver CVS. Do follow the instructions as instructed in the manual. Additionally, there are differences between Linux distros: this is basically because of different directory structures. Can be quite a pain in the rear-end.

Continue reading

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on CVS, pserver and that

Yo! Bum! Rush! That! Oliebol!

Today I decided to make a double batch of oliebollen (recipe) for the sake of self-amusement (or rather, our lunch packages for next week: naturally we take healthy stuff with us too, but so once in a while you want oliebollen right?). Once again, I had problems with the yeast: this time it took over 2 1/2 hours before the yeast was willing to ‘supersize’ itself. I have no idea why this is so. Maybe it’s the dough. Maybe it’s just too cold out here.

Supersize (and bite), quite alright as we speak, so to say.

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Yo! Bum! Rush! That! Oliebol!

Oliebollen

A tried and tested recipe, recovered from Me Olde Weblog: Oliebollen are a Dutch treat, generally served at New Year’s Eve. Naturally, that shouldn’t hold you back in making these things for your lunch package. The recipe beneath makes a total of 20 – 25 oliebollen, if you roll them in balls 1 -1 1/2 inch width. Naturally, this recipe scales pretty good, as any Dutch man (or woman) does, whether that’s in metric or imperial system.

1 cup lukewarm water or milk (mixed is OK too)
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 beaten egg
1/4 cup softened butter
1 chopped raw apple
1/4 cup raisins
1/2 cup currants
3 1/2 to 4 cups flour

Put the milk on a stove, and warm until bubbles appear: make sure it’s not too hot. That kills the yeast. Pour in bowl. Add sugar, butter, yeast and egg. Mix until smooth. Add currents, raisins and apple. Add 3 cups of flour and stir until the dough appears dry. Throw 1 cup of flour on cupboard, dump dough on top and start kneading until you have a dry, smooth elastic dough. Butter a bowl with shortening (or butter), roll the dough in the bowl. Cover the bowl, and let rest in the warmest corner of your house until the dough has risen twice its size (in my case it always took longer than 2 hours. Have patience). If it didn’t rise by then, it’s time to call in the artillery.

Heat up pan with oil (a wok will do perfectly) for at least 15 minutes on medium to high. Roll balls (you’ll end up with around 20 – 25) then (deep) fry them gold/ or dark brown. Let cool.

Posted in Recipes | Comments Off on Oliebollen

Pandas again

The Gothamist had an item on grammar, punctuation and pandabears. Plus that ‘Eats, shoots, Leaves’, joke. Last year, that particular joke ended up in the list of most appreciated jokes of Canadians, as I dutifully noticed (see also here for the actual link, which goes to Globe and Mail)

A bit different joke but (naturally) the same punch line.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Pandas again

Oh, technology!

You sm_mini_cnn.jpgconnect a VIC-20 to a TV with every spare cable you have and you end up with CNN.

Technology sucks.

(I ended up with two Y connectors that had to be connected to VHF screws on a TV. Apparently modern TVs only come with Coax cables).

Posted in Truro NS | 2 Comments

‘Bout time

Over at the BBC an article discussing Sony’s latest attempt to push the MiniDisc: the successor is called Hi-MD. The new format for the disks allows for storage of over 45 hours of music. Sony finally got the clue too (I’m sure I wasn’t the only MD owner who thought about this):

   “Sony has learnt from the example of digital music players that use hard drives or memory cards to store music.
The new Hi-MD recorders will be able to act as external hard drives, letting people store photos, presentations or documents on a disc. ”

A kind of late, particularly since Sony had the disc introduced in the early Nineties to replace the old audio cassette and to make it compete against Philips’ DCC tape.

Posted in Hyperlinks | 1 Comment

Bitter cold

It is bittercold in NS. It snowed too. Not much, but enough to make the roads slippery. Roads weren’t plowed either. Not in the morning: too cold to use salt too.

   “Colchester and Cumberland counties will have the dubious distinction of being the coldest spots in the province today and Friday”

It figures: I nearly froze my hands while cleaning the car too. Snow that melted on my hands immediately froze up. Painful. Pretty painful. Stupidity too, people frequently tell me.

Posted in Truro NS | 2 Comments

Bring manned spaceflight to Canada now!

Apparently Transport Canada sm_saks.jpg has agreed with Russian authorities to provide an emergency landing site for Soyuz rescue pods. Saskatchewan.

I agree with the authorities (Canadian / Russian) that Saskatchewan is the perfect place to land those space vehicles. It’s just that a couple of mayors prefer that Ottawa informs them first before making these kind of decisions next time:

   “It’s entirely news to me,” he (ed. Mayor of the town of Estevan) said. “But it’s quite amusing. I must share this with the mayor of Yorkton.”

Posted in We-reflect-news | Comments Off on Bring manned spaceflight to Canada now!

Fame and the Bank of Canada

While doing
famed.jpgsome research for my employer, I had to look up some things on the Bank Of Canada site. Particularly I was thinking of making an interface between the the bank’s currency convertor and (our inhouse made) ordering and invoicing software. Which is possible, but looking at the used technology, I keep wondering if the bank should focus on other kind of formats or techniques. It would be a dream if they had an XML-RPC or SOAP interface to their precious data.

That aside: the IT guys over at the Bank are not as stuffy as one would expect them to be. They developed their own scripting language (I think, that part isn’t really clear), cutely called ‘Fame’. They don’t hide their pride either: a passionate (like in ‘geeky’) tale about the implementation can be found right here (Opens in new window).

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Fame and the Bank of Canada

PR stuff

I may have been the first Permanent Resident in NS that received that famous Permanent Resident card. Quite a coincidence: the card arrived in my mailbox the same day my twin flew in (he actually arrived the 23rd).

I’ve been proudly showing the card around: merely because I think it actually is a neat piece of plastic. I only wonder what exactly that bronze-like strip is on the back of the card.

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on PR stuff

Filesystems

Weird question that shows how the rise of the graphical user interface is confusing many beginning computer users: How can I use Windows’ file system as a photo database.

‘How about categorizing images by storing them in folders with recognizable names’, was my first suggestion. Hold on: says the person:

   “If you look at the properties of a Word document and click “Advanced” from the Summary tab you find a whole lot more properties and they are editable. There is also a Custom tab on a Word document in which you can create your own property name/value pairs. ”

A-ha: Phil is talking about the Property sheets API: something that has been added to Windows by Microsoft as a means for companies and developers in an effort to actually ‘standardize’ Explorer’s user interface for all those different file types and third party ‘objects’.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on Filesystems