Bluemini.com

Ginny's Pasta

posted: 07 Jul 2008

I made this for my wife, Ginny, to cheer her up a little as she's not feeling too good at the moment. She said that she wanted a 'naughty' pasta for dinner, so I came up with this. It worked out so well, I thought I'd share it. It's actually a grown up mac 'n' cheese. This recipe is enough for two, the ingredients are:

Pasta - Any choice of your favourite pasta, although something small-ish would be best, I chose fusili, but bowtie would probably work just as well, go for your life.
Butter - two large teaspoons for the sauce base and a little for frying the onions
1 Tablespoon of plain flour - or so, you'll only use what you need
1 Cup of milk - no fat/low fat is fine, full fat just makes it naughtier
1/2 a large-ish onion - I used a white onion
Fresh Oregano and Basil
4-6 cloves of garlic
1/4 a cup of grated Parmesan and maybe some Cheddar
Real bacon pieces - enough to taste, probably about a tablespoon
Chopped Bell pepper - enough to give some colour and taste

Sauce - Finely chop half of a medium to large onion. I prefer a white onion, however, a yellow one would probably be ok too. Skin 4-6 garlic pieces and put then to one side. If you have a garlic press, you'll need to get that ready, otherwise you can very finely chop the garlic or crush it using the side of a wide knife (just be careful of your fingers). In a small frying pan, melt a little butter over a low heat and begin to fry the onions. Soon after they start to cook, add in some finely chopped fresh oregano and basil. Once the onion starts to clear, add in the garlic (crushing it in if you can), cook for a minute or so more and then take off the heat.

The sauce base is a basic roux. I'd never made one when I first made this and I'd only ever seen it made on a TV show, some 5 or so years ago, so I was pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. I started with about two large teaspoons of butter which I melted in a pan over a low heat. I then took about one good tablespoon of plain flour, the quantity isn't really important as you only use as much as you need. When the butter is liquid, but not boiling, add a little (and I mean a little) of the four. Using either a small wisk or spatula, stir the flour into the butter. You're trying to prevent the mixture from going lumpy. Keep adding the flour, little by little until the mixtures gets to the consistency of a wet paste. It definitely shouldn't be dry at all but when you pass your spatula through it, it mustn't flow back too quickly either.

Now, keeping the mixture over a very gentle heat take the milk and again, SLOWLY, add it to the mixture in the pan. A small splash at a time, mixing it well each time. The mixture will thicken up, getting to be almost like a dough, but that is ok. Just keep adding the milk slowly and mixing well, keeping it smooth. The sauce will eventually begin to turn more liquid and runny again, at this point you can increase the heat very slightly. The heat will start to make it thicken into a white sauce, on which you add the rest of the ingredients.

The next step is to add the fried onion and garlic from the frying pan, mixing it into the sauce. Keep an eye on the temperature and consitency of the sauce, don't let it start to boil (or even get close) and you don't want it too thick either. Keep stirring as you add in the cheese, bacon and the bell pepper. Continue to keep the sauce over a gentle heat and keep stirring for another 5-10 minutes. You want the flavours to infuse a little. You can also add a little freshly ground black pepper, but go gently so people can add it later, you don't want too much.

And that's pretty much it. Cook the pasta, drain and add in to the pan with the sauce in it. Give it a good gentle stir and serve.

keywords: recipe

New BioEthanol Process

posted: 17 Jun 2008

I read this in a work technology email and just had to post it. It's an apparently new process, developed by a company in Florida, US, to produce ethanol from algae and sea water. They say the process does not harvest algae, but doesn't elaborate on what it does do! If the numbers are anything to go by, being able to produce 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre each year compares very favourably to using corn or sugarcane which produce 360 and 890 gallons respectively (figures are annual production).

This post in cleantech gives more information, media.cleantech.com/2961/algal-biofuels-algenol-ethanol-solazyme-sonora-mexico. According to the company, they have secured funding to build a fully working plant in Mexico using this process, I look forward to seeing that once it's commissioned.

keywords: renewable energy

Google IO Registration

posted: 29 May 2008

Well I'm here in the Moscone center in San Francico looking at the queues of people wanting to register for Google IO. I first arrived at 8:40 and the numerous queues for registration, broken down into letter groups (I'm guessing you are looking for a match on the first letter of your last name but that's entirely hypothetical) were snaking around the entrance hall. With no signage as to which queue contained those people with last names in the F-I range and therefore no idea which snake of people I should join, I left and headed bck to my office (I needed to charge my phone in any case).

Returning at 9:25, hoping to be able to make more sense of the situation I was confronted by an equal number of lines with no emergent order as to which one corresponded to which last name. Oh well, I thought, I've missed the keynote anyway so I might as well wait fo things to die down a little. Well how fortunate was I? After only about 5 minutes, the bright sparks at Google realised that the whole thing wasn't working quite as well as it should and cleverly decided to allow anyone, registered or not, into the keynote and the conference until 2pm. Well done Google.

So up we went, and enjoyed the keynote.

When I did go back for my pass, an hour or so later, there was no queuem perfect :)

keywords: IO2008 Google

Quick update

posted: 08 May 2008

Something that's been bothering me for a long time on this site was the fact that I was using two different rendering engines for the homepage blog list and the individual item pages. The reason for this, I have no idea, I think it was one of those times where I thought I would come back and correct it but never quite got around to doing it. Well not until now, about 3 years overdue, but finally I have brought the two pages into line and the beauty of it is that I am using a feature of Rhino to do it.

Rhino (sourceforge.net/projects/cfrhino) is the ColdFusion framework I use to power bluemini.com, I wrote its predecessor back in the day when Mach ii was just coming out and I have stuck with it and updated it over the past few years. We use if for all our CF applications at work and it seems to hold up well to the abuse that that environment throws at it.

Anyway, Rhino constructs its pages from a collection of pagelets, these are standalone .cfm pages that Rhino assembles by way of some XML configuration files and some helper CFC's. The XML merely determines how the pagelets all come together but the CF components provide some nice features that help code reuse and go some way in improving performance. One such feature is the concept of 'assets', these are smaller pieces of code than pagelets and are generally not standalone. In solving the problem I described at the start with assets, I simply took the rendering engine code that I wanted to use and placed it into a separate asset page. I usually name asset pages ast_name_of_page.cfm to separate them from pagelets for which I use the dsp_ prefix.

Once the rendering logic is placed into the asset all that remains to do is call it using a call to Rhino's built in asset object from within the pagelet of choice. <cfset request.asset.getAsset("application.path.to.asset.ast_name_of_asset")>

This step is repeated in both the homepage pagelet and the individual blog item pages and now consolidates the HTML rendering, link extraction and other string manipulation performed on items into a single reusable location, nice!

Xobni for Outlook Now Available

posted: 06 May 2008

I know that my biggest gripe with Outlook is its inability to find stuff that you forgot to file in a structured way. Different colleagues of mine use different third party products to alleviate the pain and one such third party plugin that I know some of them use is Xobni. Xobni (inbox reversed) was until last week and invite only download, however, it has now been released for general download.

Xobni can be downloaded free here: www.xobni.com/download

You can also read more about Xobni's public launch in a recent New York Times article www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html

If you are suffering from Outlook's lack of decent search, then this may be of help.

All done

posted: 04 May 2008

Over the past 3-4 months, Ginny and I (although mainly Ginny) have been focusing on our wedding. I haven't mentioned it on here very much as my involvement was pretty small. Ginny, being a crafter and ex Disney art director, put together an amazing day filled with lots of handmade touches. She made pretty much every fabric accent as well as the wedding favours and her dress. It was an amazing piece of work and I think everyone who came had a great time. She looked beautiful and I reckon I'm a pretty lucky guy.

We went on a short honeymoon to Canada, staying in Vancouver and Victoria. The B&B in Vancouver was a littler sterile, we never even got to meet the people who owned the house, they had a keypad entry to the house and to each of the rooms. They were somewhat paranoid about people taking things from their rooms, so much so that they listed the replacement costs of a bunch of items in the welcome folder. That said the house was lovely, just not quite what we had in mind (www.granvillebb.com)

The other B&B that we stayed in (www.fairholmemanor.com) was amazing. Our suite had views of northern Washington and the Olympic mountains and to the West, Government House and gardens, apparently where the Queen stays when she visits. The food was excellent, in fact Sylvia the land lady has just released a cook book and she was in Vancouver the day after we arrived, filming a TV segment about it.

We returned back via Seattle, where we visited friends for brunch and then spent a good amount of time being shown the various sights of Seattle. We are hoping to move there and were getting the lowdown on the neighbourhoods, commuter districts and general city layout. It was great, however, to get back to the house and see the cats and generally have a day (today) to relax.

So now we settle into married life and I have to be honest and say that I can't wait to get started on the rest of our lives together. And a big thankyou to Ginny, not only for marrying me, but for arranging the best wedding day I could have hoped for.

We can solve it

posted: 03 Apr 2008

I just wanted to post this. I support anything that gets the voice of action on climate change heard. And this seemed like a good way, they have a video on their website that you can view, so I thought I'd put it here.

We Can Solve It

keywords: video

File upload progress and CF

posted: 18 Mar 2008

I'm working on a video project at work, where we need to provide visual feedback on a file upload. You know the sort, fill in the form, pick your file, hit submit and watch the progress bar tell you how much has been uploaded.

Well my initial thought was that ColdFusion would be able to do this, submit to a hidden iframe and then monitor the files size, however, it appears CF won't even start to process the script until the entire request, file and all, has been received. So by the time you can do anything scripty, the process is already complete. Even if the script doesn't use the file, it gets it ready to process just in case.

So I turned my gaze to Java, CF being Java meant I could maybe sit a jsp alongside my CF pages, and I found FileUpload from those great guys at the Apache Foundation. The latest incarnation (1.2 I think) of FileUpload has the ability to watch the upload progress. You basically register an event handler class to the update() method of FileUpload.

So I got my Java books out and went to work on revising inner classes. I now have two jsp pages, one that accepts the form with an inner class that writes the percentage complete, and other status' to an application variable, and a second that provides a monitor on this status.

On submit of the form, JavaScript rewrites the form submission, hides the submit button, reveals the progress bar, creates a hidden iframe and submits the form to it. It then sets up an asynchronous XHR to watch it's progress. The monitor jsp file feeds back the progress and the page updates a set of divs that make up the progress bar. Once the file is uploaded a 'new' status is returned to the browser and the page redirects to a static 'success' page.

I am thinking about posting an example of the code, once I've ironed out any wrinkles.

keywords: java projects coldfusion

Made me laugh

posted: 16 Mar 2008

Just watching a show where they follow a guy looking to get fit. He has his body fat measured and the conversation goes:

trainer: You have 26% body fat, a healthy male should be below 20.
him: Is there any chance the machine could be wrong?
trainer: No chance at all. This machine is 99% accurate.

Awesome (well it made me laugh)

keywords: random

New phone

posted: 13 Mar 2008

So, it's my birthday approaching and my lovely lady was completely out of ideas on what she could buy me as a present. And I'd been thinking about replacing my Treo 650 for some time. Not only had I dropped it a few too many times and it was starting to reboot for no reason, but I was paying for unlimited 3G bandwidth on the free Razr v3xx I got when I signed with AT&T and couldn't use it on the old Treo. (it would work on GPRS.)

So what to do? Well my requirements weren't too strict, I wanted Bluetooth, but not necessarily for a headset, 3G was a must, a large screen was also a must (after browsing on the Razr) and a touch screen would be preferable. I loved the Palm (Access) OS, but wasn't going to be tied to it and I also loved the old Treo keyboard.

Well, after some pretty thorough, though not languishing, research, I plumped for the Treo 750. The device is similar enough to my old Treo to be familiar, but with Windows OS and a slightly better screen. At the outset, I liked it, but it was certainly going to be a learning curve.

First impressions, over the old Palm/Access OS is that despite the improved hardware, the response of the interface is not as good. Much like it's desktop cousin, the software seems to always require slghtly more than the hardware's got to give. There is a definite delay on opening an application that after the old phone, kinda sucks.

The applications that come with the device are adequate, the most useful being the Office Mobile suite. I used to be a big fan of the Notes app on the old phone and the power of greater editing sounds very attractive (although I haven't used it yet!) Having a file explorer bundled is a bonus, I know there was FileZ on the old OS, but still, an improvement there.

Besides that, my biggest gripe is Internet Explorer. The mobile edition is a total pile. It renders css badly, cannot zoom, is not very configurable and is generally an unpleasant experience to use. Within 48 hours of owning the device I had installed the trial version of Opera. I suspect the full version will follow pretty soon.

The biggest plus, I think, is the 'broadband' speeds. Coverage is now pretty good and with the full colour high(ish) resolution screen, browsing is very possible.

Would I recommend it? Yes. The combination of touchscreen, 3G and form factor make it the best of what's out there for me.

keywords: treo 750