Rewriting Paul Prudhomme

I've been meaning to post about Paul Prudhomme for forever. Tonight I made seafood gumbo again (it's one of my favorites) and I'm reminded how I "rewrite" his recipes. First, let me say it's a lot of fun to cook out of his books. The spicing is interesting and the taste is delicious. But, let's face it, this stuff can be unhealthy! For example, in said gumbo recipe, he calls for 3/4 of a cup of oil for the roux. I cut that to 1/4 (along with the accompanying flour). Sure, that means less stock but who cares?!? Then, he calls for the roux to be added to the boiling stock! Say what? This reminds me of chem lab: it's acid into water and not vice versa --- likewise, it's liquid into roux, not vice versa. Otherwise, you can't control the thickness and you might get lumps! So, what's with that anyway? Of course, I add the stock to the roux and keep going. Also, a missing note from this particular recipe: I use the shrimp shells (I only buy wild gulf shrimp these days) to make a very simple stock. One of his pasta recipes literally calls for a stick of butter. That's just horrific. Might be tasty but I just don't cook like that. A final note: I use andouille sausage from my local sausage provider: Parma Sausage. Sure wish they made tasso!

Why I hate cables

Does anyone else besides me despise them? I started to hate them when I was building hardware. It was so easy to damage them, to get the pins backward and generally fail. Now, that I'm trying to get these machines to work, they are in my way again. For example, to talk to my very nice Sun T3 disk array, I need to have a special cable to connects to an RJ-11. Say what? A telephone jack for a serial cable? Thanks Sun. What about my SPARCy? Now I need a 25 pin to 9 pin converter. And of course, there's the matter of getting the gender correct. Sheesh.

One can never, ever have too many cables and connectors around. Also, FWIW, it holds for RF as well as digital. Is it SMA or 3.5 mm? Is it N or 7 mm? It never ends.

Once more, into the breech

I have been informed that my web page, now more than a decade old, will cease to exist soon. The machine that hosts it (www.caip.rutgers.edu) is "being retired". What's really going on is a typical academic stunt of changing names and seizing control. It's evil, but it's what happens in academia regularly. Life goes on.

So, I am preparing to move my web page to a new web site: but where? After considering all my options, it appears that the best option is to host it meself. Allow me to explain: First, why should I pay someone to host my fiiles? Second, if I ask Verizon for a static IP then I have to be a business (and be prepared to pay for the privilege). So, it would appear the cheapest thing to do is use dynamic DNS and host at home.

OK, so what next? Well, it wouldn't hurt to have an industrial strength router, but that's a story in itself --- next blog. So, besides the router, what else? Who's hosting the web page? No way is it my machine. But that's why I have a vax. Really! So, if I can have openbsd on the vax (which I can, to hell with VMS), then I will host from there. If anyone complains about the speed, then I'll tell them they don't have a sense of history.

So, then how to port openbsd on the vax? Wellllll, the "best" way (according to the web page) is to have it netboot. So, I could port over all the daemons to do that, but then since I need to bring up my Sun machine anyway to talk to my T3 fileserver, then why not have the Sun serve? And, what's more, it appears that Sun does this stuff regularly under the name "jumpstart".

Next step? Putting Solaris 10 on the Sun. I thought about netbsd, but if I want it to the talk to the T3, why not have it stay in the family. And I'm just getting started...

My cooking philosophy

My DSP buddy, Jean Laroche, told me I should have a cooking blog. Since I already started a blog, I thought I would just enlarge this one --- besides, who wants to hear me whine and complain about linux administration all the time?

So, since I lead a food centered life, I thought I would start by writing about my cooking ideas and philosophy. I don't believe in fast food, I believe in slow food. I don't like to buy other people's ideas of how things should taste, so I don't buy prepared food (for the most part). One of my strongest beliefs is in the transformative ability of a great meal. Babette's Feast is my example of what a meal can be. Not every day, but every once in a while.

Most of my cooking is of the Italian/French variety, in part because I am a carbohydrate eater and I like pasta. I have cooked other styles including indian and chinese, but because most of my life I am cooking like a short-order demon, I choose what I can do fast -- with minimum prep work. Most of the time I cook without measuring. And cooking requires all the senses: besides sight, I listen to the timbre of the frying food, I feel the meat to see if it's done and I smell what I am cooking. I taste when I am in doubt, but my sense of smell is often enough.

I am much more of a cook than a baker --- which is a bit strange since I excelled in the chemistry lab in both high school and college. But I am now to the point where I can use yeast very reliably. But to get the crust to have that nice crunch, that requires steam in the oven. I've tried but it just don't compare with what I can get from the nearby bakery. That's a topic for another entry.

There a very important aspect to reading a recipe: imagining what it will look like in the various steps. I can't explain how I know what to expect, but I do. I think this can only be gained by experience. So, when I read a recipe, I have to understand the transformation at every step. Only when I understand the procedure will I start. In complex meals, I will take the time to diagram the "flow" so that I know what I can do in parallel. It's task scheduling and it's NP-complete!

My last comment concerns guests: I look forward to having guests because they are my excuse to experiment and try new and complex recipes. But I don't have many guests for dinner these days, so most of my cooking is of the fast "trattoria style".

Woeful linux

Before I lose it again, let me praise the apt installation package. In comparison to "yum", this software seems to work effortlessly; upgrading to the latest and greatest Ubuntu distribution ("jaunty jackalope") was just a pleasure. Almost.

That's right, almost. You see, I decided to use my spiff Linotype scanner. And you see, that requires the sg kernel module. No problem you cry! Why it's just "modprobe sg". Not so fast. There isn't a sg.ko in /lib/modules anymore! Say what? Did it go away? After downloading the kernel sources (yes, I did that), I regret to say that guess what? You guessed it. The sources are there. As it so happens, I have the kernel headers. So, I stripped out the sg code and compiled it. Minor complaint but I get a .ko; and what happens when I modprobe it? You guessed it, didn't you? It didn't load.

A posting on the Ubuntu bugs list is of course ignored. Need I say more? It's linux, isn't it?