Month: August 2002

summer pudding

An easy one, and just the thing to use up lots of ripe fruit.

You need some bread, half a loaf or so, commercial cotton bread if that’s all you have, and 4 – 6 cups of fruit. Your choice of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries (any variety), peaches, nectarines, plums, whatever. Skin the peaches, nectarines, plums. Frozen fruit is fine as well.

Take a large bowl/pudding basin, and line it with de-crusted slices of the bread, cut to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, in a single layer. Put all the fruit in a large saucepan with 1 cup sugar and 3 tbsp of lemon juice and bring to a gentle boil, then simmer a few minutes.

Pour a third of the fruit mixture into the bowl, and top with more bread slices, again cutting to fit in a single layer. Repeat twice more.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and cover with a pan that will fit inside the inner diameter of the bowl. A cake pan should work if you have the right size. Press it down firmly, add 2 pounds of weight to it (2 lbs rice or sugar in a bag is fine).

Refrigerate overnight, or up to 24 hours.

Remove the weight and pan, and unmold onto a plate. It may take some persuading: the recipe I used suggested lining the bowl with plastic first, but I didn’t need it.

Variations: for bread, substitute angel food cake or ladyfingers.

Adapted from The Joy of Cooking.

faces

gladwell dot com / The Naked Face

That’s when I realized, “I’ve got to unpack the face.’

Fascinating article. I’m trying to understand the relationship between that and this.

From bradandkathy.com: Chernoff faces are simplified, cartoon-like faces that can be used to graphically display complex multivariate data. They draw upon the human mind’s innate ability to recognize small differences in facial characteristics and to assimilate many facial characteristics at once.

from Frank

tidying up old cruft

In the process of hosting the Oblique Strategies stuff, I found that the randomizer wasn’t very random. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff you find on the Internet is out of date: this is an example. This code dates from 1996, an eternity ago.

From the srand page at www.perldoc.com:

Note that you need something much more random than the default seed for cryptographic purposes. Checksumming the compressed output of one or more rapidly changing operating system status programs is the usual method. For example:

srand (time ^ $$ ^ unpack “%L*”, `ps axww | gzip`);

Seems to work much better now.

Forbes.com: Will Apple Put Intel Inside?

Forbes.com: Will Apple Put Intel Inside?

And therein lies the biggest reason that Apple will stick with the PowerPC chip for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t want to go head-to-head with Microsoft.

“By saying its machines are a separate OS on a separate platform, Apple can say it doesn’t compete directly with Microsoft,” says Kevin Krewell, analyst with MicroDesign Resources. “Moving to an Intel or AMD platform would put them directly in Microsoft’s crosshairs, and that is something Apple should not want to do.”

Apple gives break to multi-Mac homes

Apple gives break to multi-Mac homes – Tech News – CNET.com

Under the plan, which will coincide with next week’s release of Mac OS X version 10.2 (also known as Jaguar), consumers can buy a $199 a copy of the operating system and install it on up to five Macs in a single household. [ . . . ] “This is a great way to allow honest people to remain honest,” Bereskin said.

Thanks to Wade for the tip.

keeping up to date with FreeBSD

FreeBSD Ports

Since I just rebuilt this laptop 2 days ago, I have been filling in the gaps of stuff I need to reinstall. I received this tip via email:


pkg_add -r ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/packages/All/cvsup-without-gui-16.1f.tgz
&& /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h
cvsup2.freebsd.org

This will install the CVSup package, then execute it against an installed config file and update my entire ports tree, all 7000+ of them. And will probably do it in seconds as well: cvsup is lightning fast.

I love things like this: Apple’s software update is similarly cool.