On our last day in Tokyo this fall, we made another stop in one of my favourite stores, Tokyu Hands. Tokyu Hands is a large 8 floor department store south of Shinjuku station described as a ‘creative life store’. While it features home outfitting and small appliances, it also features one of the most incredible selection of crafting and hardware. Think of it as a Home Depot and a Michaels, but with a wider selection than either.

We were on our way out when we saw a girl setting up a table for a craft seminar. As we looked on curiously, she brought us the finished product, a plastic model Christmas cake (kurisumasu keki of course). These frosted sponge cakes are Japan’s national Christmas dining tradition, and the model was very cute. We asked her how long it would take and she said 45 minutes, which we sadly thought might be too long for our rushed schedule. 5 minutes later we realized it was a unique opportunity that we couldn’t turn down and went back to learn how to make a model cake. We were sent to buy tickets (1500 yen each) and wait the 8 or 9 minutes until 11 o’ clock rolled around to begin.

The girl teaching us was clearly very excited to have foreigners, and with her very good english (by Japan standards) plus some fumbling along and using her phone to translate, we had a fantastic time. The craft begins by putting on disposable gloves. We then measured out 10 grams of what was described as ‘liqi A’. I didn’t get a translation of the liquids, but she wrote the name down for me, of course in Japanese. ‘Liqi A’ came in a much larger jug than ‘liqi B’, and was VERY vicious and heavy. We poured it into a styrofoam cup on a tarred scale. If we over poured we were able to pour it out into another cup. Eva and I used each others cups to balance the liquid. We set that aside and measured 4 grams of “liqi B’. Our teacher delightfully verified each of these liquids were correct before moving on.

Next we would add the ‘chocolate’ to ‘liqi A’. The paint was a specific pigment for this type of mixture, also sold in the store. We precisely counted out 10 eye dropper drops into ‘liqi A’ and mixed it thoroughly. The next portion was explained to us in detail ahead of time because the timing was very critical. We would add ‘liqi B’ into ‘liqi A’ then stir *rapidly*, she was very specific that it had to be rapid for 30 seconds on a cooking timer. Once that was done we would immediately pour it into our silicone baking molds, half and half. The molds appeared to be tiny cupcakes. She stressed how rapid we would have to stir.

We began adding the liquid then stirring rapidly. 15-20 seconds into the stirring the mixture became very hot, exothermic. We scooped the goopey brown mixture into the molds. As soon as the timer was up. I was worried I didn’t get it all in, but it really didn’t seem to matter. Eva made hers rather lopsided, but we later found out it too didn’t matter. Our instructor had us feel the molds to see how hot it got and said this was good! We let the mixture expand for 10 minutes. It grew well past the end of the mold. Once this was done she squoze them to hear the ‘woosh’ of the air coming out, she imitated the ‘woosh!’ sound which was also very cute. We were then instructed to begin squeezing (quite hard) as evenly as possible across the molds. This would dislodge it from the silicone so we could yank it out. We continued this for quite awhile and she would periodically check, looking at the corners on top and squeezing listening for the air sound. She made sure we both heard the air sound too, as thats how you knew it was done.

When they were done we were able to pull our cakes out. With our cakes out we were instructed to slice the parts that stuck out above the mold (and thus lacked the cake texture) off using an exacto blade. The exacto blades didn’t have handles, which was more than amusing (that’d be a liability back home for sure), and we were to oil them using baby oil and q-tips to aid the slicing. We were instructed to slice by sawing while rotating the cake itself. At first it was tricky but once you had scored the outside it was easy to saw all the way through. Next we then had to chose which cake we wanted to frost, and were instructed we could take the other unfrosted cake home. I chose the less even of my two, and made a minor adjustment using the blade and a pair of scissors. The chosen cake was double sided taped onto a little metalic-plastic square tray where we would paint it.

While we’d been squeezing our cakes we were instructed on the frosting. The chocolate frosting consisted of clay and brown water color paint that had been premixed to us. Quite cool. We were instructed to lay it on quite thick, as she tried to explain to us that it would reduce as it dried. This was tricky for her to explain, it involved her pinching the skin under her neck, us going back and forth with many possible words for what she was describing, so she pulled out her phone and translated it as “to become thin”, which was good enough. We were also instructed to fill in the top dimple slightly, but not fully it seemed, this was slightly un clear to me but she liked my results. I started dolping it on the top ridges, and stroking it down until it was quite thick. Over strokes onto the tray were desired. Eva’s wasn’t quite thick enough and she referenced mine. We were then told that we had a choice, we could go for a smooth frosting look or more of a rough look, she had examples of both. We both agreed the decadent rough look was better and proceeded to swipe at our cakes to create less of a clean stroke pattern. When we had both frosted our cakes to our liking, we were instructed on the whipped cream.

The whipped cream was silicone caulk in a cake frosting bag. She described it as the stuff between the floor tiles :) She asked us if we’d worked with a frosting bag, and both of us had, though this was quite a different experience. She demonstrated and I could tell how hard she was squeezing by the way her hands shook. She offered to let us try on a piece of scrap paper, and I must admit it was pretty hard. She had instructed us to do 3 circles and then release, getting it spread evenly and in a nice circle was tough. My first frosting dolop was nice and even, but I didn’t remove it properly, so it wasn’t very pretty. She redemonstrated and instructed us to release pressure on the bag at the end, push down a bit then release. Sure enough my next dolop looked good. Before we were allowed to actually frost our cakes, we had to chose a bow and take some holly, a small jewel and the traditional strawberry. She stressed that we needed to figure out how we wanted to arrange them because we’d have to do it very quick after laying the frosting. The frosting would harden on the outside within minutes (though take a couple weeks to become completely solid I believe she said).

Once we had assured her that we’d planned our decorations we began frosting. I frosted my cake and was very happy, I immediately stuck my decorations in as I’d envisioned, Eva did the same. Our instructor came around and inspected our cakes, exclaiming both to be cute. We were quite pleased. She then began to bag our cakes, putting a little transparent box over the tray and taping them to the bottom of a bag. She asked us individually if we’d like to take our unfrosted cake and the sliced off tops home, and then proceeded to neatly bag those as well. We were instructed to unbox our cakes when we got home and let them air out for at least a week to dry properly. We thanked her very much for the experience, something I am truly grateful for. What a lot of fun.

The cakes made it home safely as carryon baggage sitting on my tray table and between my legs during take off/landing and are now airing out on my desk.

Boba Motoring starts with a 1989 Mk2 Volkswagen Golf and a 1.8L 1Z diesel engine running on E85 fuel. With reenforced internals they spin it up to 9500rpm, force fed with a Garrett GTX4202R turbo charger good for 900 horsepower. Thats all fed to the unexpecting road through a 4Motion four-wheel-drive system and stock 6-speed manual. This lunacy equates to 2.7 seconds to 62 miles/hour (100km/hr) and 9.3 second quarter mile sprint.

Yep, faster than a Veyron. Here’s a video of yet more runs, and a video from inside the car. This was way too good for a little link.

I’m working on that. However I have done some blog facelifts and improvements to hopefully re-inspire myself to do the writing that I really love.

First up the primary font has now been changed to Helvetica Neue Light, it’s really a gorgeous typeface. Likely this will still render as Arial on Windows desktops. Heck, it even renders different on Safari vs Firefox side by side on the same laptop. I really pity real web designers, doing a cross-platform pixel perfect UI in HTML 5 would be an exercise in pain and maybe impossibility.

I also changed some spacing and cleaned the general layout ever so slightly. There should be an extra line (or line and a half) of text on each page now.

I’ve also changed the ‘large’ image size that WP pre-crunches to be 600px instead of 1000px. I’ll be able to have full width images without breaking the layout now, however legacy images are all going to be the defaults. Over all I think it’s a definite improvement to readability and aesthetics, quite pleased with my cave-man with two sticks CSS efforts. Through a couple years of tweaking and modifying, the site is quite far from the original WP theme I bought. I’ve now changed the name of the blog from ‘nick@kavassalis.com’ to ‘nick@’, the kavassalis.com is now implied :P

The next major change is that I’ve “moved” the hosting of the blog to CloudFlare. CloudFlare offers free and lunatic-cheap CDN services as well as inline HTML optimization and security. The tech seems awesome, and it came with a glowing endorsement from Brandon.

I plan to use kavassalis.com as a bit of a test bed for other projects. Sadly it won’t be the best data, page views are pretty low compared to the 4-digit unique view days (and even a occasional 5-digit!), I’ll have to write something really controversial again…

I really love the tech, and I recommend reading up on what they offer. My only wonder is how they’ll make money at their current pricing. It’s wild value for the money compared to any other CDNs I know. Wild isn’t a strong enough word. It seems insane. But hey, maybe they have a really cost effective network (affordable hardware & colo, tons of peering?) and that’s their genius. I’ll definitely write more about my experiences in the future.

Behold: the definition of giving 110 percent in competition. Jason and John White recently took to the Targa High Country in Victoria, Australia in their Lamborghini Gallardo. The duo spent the final day of the event battling for the top spot with a menacing Nissan GT-R. The final stage of the day saw the Whites four seconds behind their rival when the green light lit, and the team proceeded to do their best to close the gap.

via autoblog

This was too good for just a normal bookmark.

boingboing.net's excellent tribute

No, it’s not the iPad, the iPhone, or even the iPod. It’s definitely the Mac. Steve Jobs real gift to the world was bringing the Mac to the market in 1984. The Macintosh was a major step in making personal computers pleasant and easy enough to use to gain mass market appeal. If the Mac hadn’t been released then, the industry, our industry, would not be where it is today. You likely would not be reading this, you would not be on Facebook or Twitter, you wouldn’t know many of the people you know, especially those met online.

The Mac was never the market leader, but it’s existence opened peoples eyes. Computers HAD to be easy to use like the Macintosh, cryptic commands typed into dark screens weren’t going to cut it. This changed the game, the competition released competing products and the personal computer industry as we know it was born.

That’s was what Steve did. He didn’t invent anything brilliant. He took fantastic people and technologies and integrated them into products that created market sectors that didn’t exist. He took huge gambles, that industry experts almost always said would not pay off. Sometimes they didn’t. But others really did change the world. I know it’s trendy to hate Jobs, Apple, heck, anything popular with hipsters. Just don’t forget the value of what Jobs accomplished with his much too short life. Certainly the world would look very different today if the modern computer as we know it was still sitting in the halls of Xerox and the labs of Universities for another 5 or 10 years as everyone continued to type cryptic commands into their terminals…

Rest in peace Steve, you changed my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

First off I need to apologize for the lack of updates, the summer has been really bad for blog posting. The last month has been pretty much the worst too. A week of preparing, followed by a week in San Francisco (which is more meetings than “work”), then Sarah’s wedding, followed by a week of being sick. All the while trying to fit in a  massive back log of actual work. Well here we are, things are sane again and I am no longer plague ridden. It’s actually been a really good summer, lots of projects have moved forward and I’ve got a lot of back logged blog posts to finish and publish.

I figured I’d knock a quickie one out just to post the above update. While sitting at home sick this week I started and finished Cave Story + on the Mac. For those not familiar, Cave Story is an indie freeware platformer/run & gun in the modern Castlevania / classic Metroid sense. It is a fantastic deep game (storywise) with awesome gameplay and music. Developed (scored and illustrated) single handedly by Daisuke Amaya (aka Pixel) over 5 years and released in 2004, the original is a treasured classic and as of the last year or two it’s finally gotten the attention it deserves. It saw an updated version released on the Wii last year with updated graphics and music.

Well as of last week, that updated version was released on the Mac AppStore. In fact there is an additional level (and bit of story) making the Mac version the most complete way to play Cave Story currently. (There is even additional new content promised in updates!) While it will be coming back to the PC-world via Steam eventually, this is truly an impressive moment for Mac gamers! We actually have something really awesome FIRST! (Who would gloat about that though, ha) Anyone who says $10 is a lot to spend on an updated version of a free game really needs to realize how impressive this game is, and that it is a bargain of a monetization for the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. The re-arranged music in this version is freakin’ fantastic and the graphical updates are just beautiful (and that is coming from a pixel-addict), check out this side by side I threw together:

Buy it now and enjoy it, seriously awesome. (Just make sure you don’t play it on the easy difficulty, normal is actually pretty easy, though hard is pretty nasty. ) It’s worth your time and 10 bucks.

First the good. The UI changes are great. I have always been a fan of tiny widgets and maximizing screen real-estate. In 10.6 and prior, I went to great lengths to shrink every font and widget. In 10.7 theres no need. Scroll bars are tiny and automatically fade out, you can full screen most apps, fonts and widgets are just smaller. Fantastic. New UI animations and transitions are everywhere and delay things a bit, hopefully there will be a TinkerTool or similar to disable them. They’re short and tolerable but as an example, I am typing a character or two into the ether when switching spaces during the animation.  I’m not really into the LaunchPad paradigm, but the MasterControl look works for me. Mail.app’s new UI is fantastic, iCal’s is a bit over the top. Mail.app’s performance (specifically around large operations and anything RSS related) is a complete train wreck. I expect a patch soon. Reverse scrolling took less than a day to adjust to (I am an iPad/iPhone user though). Autocorrect is a nice addition. The new Finder is great, Safari updates seem good, heck even the Terminal.app updates are nice! Grab an updated version of TerminalCopyOnSelect and away you go.

10.7 is a huge update, in the way 10.5 was to 10.4, and at $29. If Mail.app’s performance is fixed I’ll likely be very happy.

Here’s a very WTF bug though. I ran into it last night and figured it was just me, or I’d boned something up. I have a bunch of shell scripts that do SSH port forwards for accessing network appliances and infrastructure behind lock and key. Half of them stopped working on me, failing to resolve their respective hosts. How strange. Amusingly Brandon was complaining of basically the same problem this morning so we decided to take a look.

Some how OS X’s resolver library is no longer checking any hostname with a dot in it against the /etc/resolv.conf search directive in 10.7. Seriously. Let’s say I have a server called admin.omghi2u.com. My /etc/resolv.conf (and OS X network control panel) contain omghi2u.com in the search field. Surely, we can resolve (ping, ssh, web browse, whatever) to ‘admin’ since it can match that as admin.omghi2u.com. Cool. Now normally, in UNIX (heck even Windows land!) if I had admin.tor.omghi2u.com and admin.chi.omghi2u.com, simply hitting ‘admin.tor’ or ‘admin.chi’ would match the omghi2u.com hostnames. Not the case in 10.7. Something is clearly broken in the resolver in libSystem. Oddly despite being linked to the same library, the host command still functions properly… Maybe the search logic is handled by the command itself…

While it’s a simple bug fix, its an annoying oversight on Apples part. Breaking basic UNIX networking functionality is kinda shameful.

UPDATE (JULY 26th): Head over to Brandon’s site for a fix!

The deli experience, at home!

Tonights nights dinner was a real easy one, and one any lovers of deli food give a go! Nothing beats a good corned beef sandwich, a strong mustard, flavourful rye bread and a garlicy pickle. I admit I didn’t beat any of my favourite delis, but it was good (and simple!) enough that I intend to repeat this as often as my health allows!

So I bought a brisket that was brine soaked and rubbed with a bit of garlic, thyme, rosemary and bay leaves. The directions on the packet recommend a 2-3 hour boil and serve, but I felt like improving upon that.

Step one was to fill the crock pot with a little water and quarter four cooking onions. The onions will give our roast a nice flavour, and will provide a nice side of onions we can serve as well.

Searing the brisket

Next we need to sear the meat. A stainless steel or cast iron pan, a tiny bit of cooking oil to prevent it from sticking, medium-high heat. You really want it to smoke and char a bit on each side, to seal in the delicious juices. Once you’ve covered all the sides, toss it into the crock pot fat cap up.

Thats basically it. Not a lot of prep work since this bad-boy came pre-rubbed. Top it up with water so the top of the brisket is covered. Set the crock pot to low-heat and 10 hours. Goto work or similarly kill time, I personally couldn’t sit around smelling a roast cook all day…

Falls apart!

Upon returning to work I fired up my vegetable steamer and loaded up a variety of cute little squashes, low water, 15 minutes.

I took the brisket out using two wooden spoons and plopped it onto my cutting board. Using a sharp knife I made many cuts across it, sorta mashing it up as I go.  The 10 hours of cooking will make it pretty much collagen free, there won’t be any toughness to speak of, it’ll basically fall apart. Plop it on your favourite fresh rye and slater on a strong enough mustard to put hair on your chest, French’s mustard need not apply. Dress the plate with a few garlicy pickles, and add on a serving of our squash and beef flavoured onions. Sauerkraut on the side would have worked well too!

I wouldn’t normally document such a simple recipe, but it really turned out excellent. The brisket is definitely one of my favourite cuts, and corned beef deli sandwiches are a treat! Enjoy and eat more beef!

By the end of the 70s BMW had renumbered to their now iconic schema: the New class was forked into the 3-series and 5-series, the New six forked into the 6-series and 7-series. Starting with the E21 3-series compact coupes and sedans, the E12 5-series mid-sized sedan, the E24 6-series coupe, and the E23 7-series full sized sedan. The BMW brand began to grow.

Things changed over times. Everything grew. The 6-series was once a 7-series coupe, but when it was reintroduced in 2004, it was a 5-series coupe. BMW released a few sports cars, the M1 at the end of the 70s, the Z1 at the end of the 80s, the 8-series (a 7-series coupe again) in the 90s, the Z3 at the end of the 90s, and the Z4 in the early 2000s. BMW remained true to its target market the entire time, the best handling and thusly most enjoyable drives in their markets. The 3-series sedan and coupe was always BMWs bread and butter, the popularity and sales of BMW was at an all time high.

The BMW brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, automotive or otherwise, so you can’t blame BMW for wanting to expand their brand. It began in the early 2000s with the X5, the least sporty car BMW had ever built. It sold gangbusters. Go forward 10 years and BMW sells an X1, an X3, an X5 and an X6 and a 5-series GT (yet another crossover thing) all cars panned by BMW’s original driver centric market. The X6 is a “sports coupe” that weighs as much as a small bus with a center of gravity to match, they even make an M model (remember when the M badge represented a car built, even just engineered by BMW M and not just shit bolted on?), what a joke… As of 2011 BMW now sells 11 distinct lines in our market…

Things looked good when BMW released the 1-series coupe in the North American market. A smaller (though not nearly light enough) sportier car at a lower price point, and as of 2011 BMW even has a 1-series M coupe. Perhaps there is hope after all? Perhaps not. Seems BMW wants to redefine the 1-series brand already. They intend to fork the 1-series coupe we know as the 2-series (more on that later) by 2013, and relaunch the 1-series as a front-wheel drive car (i.e. a stretched Mini platform) to be better aligned with the Audi A3. Thats right BMW is going to sell a front wheel drive car under the BMW brand. Why? Because the BMW brand is worth its weight in platinum, and a BMW badged Mini will sell better and for a higher price than a Mini badged one.

Next up is BMW’s decision to rebrand the 3-series coupe as the 4-series… That’s right, the car known as the 3-series coupe since 1975 will now be called the 4-series. Why? Not entirely sure. The 3-series coupe has always demanded a premium price over the sedan, and maybe BMW wants to give warm fuzzies to the brainless luxury target market they so love for spending an extra $10k to lose 2 doors and gain a better suspension… This action will ruin any residuals on existing 3-series coupes, confuse customers and obliterates 35+ years of heritage.

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper, more reliable Lexus of the 90s? They were fun to drive. Why are so many 3, 5, 7 and all the X cars 4WD now?

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper and faster Infiniti’s of the 2000s? They were more fun to drive. Why are you releasing a FWD 1-series and telling my the X6 is the evolution of the sports car?

Here’s the thing BMW, you are losing what made your brand awesome. I know things are doing great now, BMWs are selling better than ever. I can’t blame a company trying to obtain more money, that is their obligation to their shareholders. The problem is, the further you get away from what made you awesome, the closer you get to the competition. Look at cars up until the 200s, Audi made the most utterly boring cars on the planet, but have you seen the new S5? Gorgeous! Merc made slushy luxury cars, but look at the current C-class, and of course C63 AMG and SLS AMG, I mean come on! Fantastic cars. Look at Lexus, king of the sofas on wheels, they even have an M3 fighter in the IS-F… Infiniti is slowly eating out the bottom of the 3/C/A4 segment too, offering near 335i performance at 128i prices.

The further BMW gets away from its roots, the closer the competition seems to get to BMWs roots. The brand won’t stay strong on its own forever. This current obsession with 10+ distinct product lines has been tried before, look at what happened to all the American brands… Amusingly of all of the current 11 product lines, there isn’t a single car I like as much as the BMW I have and the one I had before that… Sure you can blame the fuel economy movement for the boring-up of the new M5 and M6 and surely the next M3s… How long before a 4WD M5 or even M3… Might as well buy an RS5 at that point, it certainly looks better!

Enough with the rant, I’ll leave you this video of Chris Harris slinging the new 1-series M and the Cayman R around.  Enjoy!

Bunapi mushrooms wrapped with sirloin, delicious!

I was out taking my mom grocery shopping at her favourite local organic market (Organic Garage) one Saturday aftertoon, and we came upon this cute package of mushrooms labeled as ‘bunapi’ mushrooms. They looked to be similar to enokis but a bit bigger, and a brief iPhone googling lead me to believe they would be delicious, so into the shopping cart they went. They grow in clusters and like enokis you discard the tough flavourless base and eat the stocks and heads.

One of my favourite recipes is enoki mushrooms wrapped in beef, so I set out to replicate this using these slightly larger, more flavoursome mushrooms. I hit up the supermarket in the morning and perused the beef section. There are lots of different types of thinly sliced beef readily available, but I chose sirloin for its extremely tender texture instead of a more flavoursome but potentially tougher cut.  I also picked up purple asparagus and fresh yellow potatoes. Had I not had fresh baby garlic and chives (optional) from the garden I would have picked these up too. Regular garlic would work too, but don’t go overboard, you don’t want to overpower the rather delicate mushrooms.

An epic combination in the making

I began by boiling my quartered potatoes, and steaming my purple asparagus in the same pot. This is a technique I like mostly to save stove space, and thankfully unlike many purple vegetables, purple asparagus is color-fast and doesn’t stain the potatoes below it. Purple asparagus does not need as much cooking time as regular asparagus as it is already more tender to begin with, and excessive cooking will remove the purple color. As an aside, white asparagus requires special preparation and almost 2x the cooking of green asparagus, where as purple is the exact opposite. Definitely the best asparagus if you can get it when it’s in season! The asparagus will be done before the potatoes, just test it with a fork, but both will be done before everything else.

Sautéing our bunapis

We begin by cutting away the base of the mushroom cluster off and throwing it away. Separate all the little mushrooms and put them in our pan. Next we can start sautéing our bunapis in a bit of cooking oil like canola or sunflower, nothing too flavoursome though. Medium-high heat (6/10) but not too long, just a couple minutes. We don’t want to over cook them, they should wilt a bit without destroying their texture. Add in your garlic and chives and continue to sauté for another couple minutes. Again you want the mushrooms soft but not overcooked, eat one and test :) Take them off the heat and put them in a bowl to cool for later.

Fryin' steaks... many steaks...

Next I fried my sirloins on the stove, and I think that this is the weak point of this recipe. Had I had access to a barbecue, or better yet a hibachi grill, I think the crispy texture of the meat would have aided the overall dish. (That’s high rise living for ya) Either way you cook them, high heat (8/10 on the stove) and just a minute on each side, you don’t want to dry the meat out. I rubbed them down with paper towel when they were done to remove any excess oil, the sirloin is a pretty lean meat on its own. It wont be pleasant to eat (since it is finger food!) if the outside is too greasy after all… I didn’t season the meat at all, again we don’t want to overpower our delicate filling.

Roll one up homie!

Once our steaks are cook enough to touch, we can begin rolling our wraps. Put a decent amount of the filling inside, and arrange some mushroom heads to point out at least one (if not both) of the sides. Roll the meat tightly and then tooth pick them closed and you’re done! Put a couple on a plate with some potatoes and asparagus and serve while its all still warm.

It’s delicious, easy and quick! The bunapis are sweet and delicate, you don’t want to over season them. I would definitely recommend using a grill instead of a frying pan, but either way it was a hit. Roll some up today, you’ll love ‘em!

Epic win!

Mmmm! Delicious pork noodle soup!

Pork stock is a staple of many delicious asian soups, and in the case of ramen noodles in Toronto, it seems to be the thing that every restaurant gets wrong. I haven’t tried my hand at a truly authentic ramen yet: I’ll have to get some pork leg bones from my butcher as well as some skin to break collagen down from. Not to mention authentic fresh ramen noodles aren’t locally available to cook. However I decided I wanted to make a versatile pork stock with the resources at hand, and work on the flavours from there. By keeping my soup fairly generic, I was able to produce both Koreany and Japanesey noodle soup dishes, pork stock is really awesome.

The ingredients!

I started with a big pork shoulder that was onsale, a little bit of pork belly (for added richness, more on this later), fresh garlic (was far more potent than I’d have gathered by the bulb size), a cooking onion and a giant head of napa cabbage (which was the smallest I could get :D). I began by braising my pork shoulder, just to seal the outside a bit. This was just done by using a stainless steel pan, maximum heat for literally just 30-60 seconds per side to get a nice brown. Tossed that bad boy into the crock pot. Next, I sliced the pork belly into some thick strips, and then braised it also. I then filled the crock pot with enough water to cover those guys and watched the delicious oils seep out into the water. I didn’t keep any of the pan drippings, as they contained a bit of char from the outside of the meat.

Crock pot locked and loaded!

Next up I sliced the lower half (maybe slightly less than half) of the napa, washed it and chucked it into the crock pot on top of the meat. I chose the lower half, which is the thicker half to make my stock from, and saved the leafier half for later. I peeled and quartered the onion, tossed it into the pot. I began peeling the gigantic garlic and tossed it in as well. After the first two bulbs, I tried a tiny slice and realized it was a lot more potent than I had imagined (very impressive for such large bulbs), and kept the third bulb for another day. I filled the crock pot the rest of the way up with water, covered it, and turned it on low for 10 hours, and went to work…

The richness is absurd

When I returned home from work I was greeted by a delicious smelling house and a rich full pot of pork stock. Upon tasting the stock I was shocked by the richness. The shoulder itself was a very rich cut, I probably *didn’t* need to add the belly, but no complaints from me. I added a few healthy shakes of MSG and tasted again, and refrained from adding salt as I wanted some versatility later. We boiled our fresh wonton noodles (the closest thing I could find to ramen noodles, fresh, at Longos) for a minute, drained, rinsed and left them to chill a bit. We took the other half of the napa cabbage and sliced off a bunch of leaves, washed and halved them, then blanched them for about 30 seconds in salted water and drained/rinsed them as well. By doing this we’ll have two textures of cabbage in the soup: both the stewed white parts in the stock and some crispier leaves.

Beginning to stage a bowl of our Korean noodle soup

With the cabbage and noodles ready, we can begin putting a dish together. I took a few leaves of the blanched napa and a handful of noodles and threw them in a bowl. Next I took some ladles of the soup broth, along with the stewed napa, garlic and onion and poured them over top of the noodles. I then hand picked some leaner meat from the pot and put them in the bowl. The shoulder has some very fatty parts, and the belly itself is exceedingly rich when boiled. While I did eat one of the belly slices on its own, it certainly isn’t a texture everyone wants, and definitely not in noodle soup. For the initial recipe, I added a half teaspoon of gochujang to each bowl, which is a sweet/sour spicy fermented pepper/soy/rice paste, stirring it in until it dissolved giving the soup a red tint.

Koreany pork noodle soup

It was a deliciously rich soup, maybe even too rich, but the little bit of spice kick and sweetness from the gochujang balanced it out. I wasn’t 100% happy with the dish, but I was pleased with the stock itself. After the crock pot was cooled, I skimmed off the fat, removed the larger bone pieces, and tossed out the fat cap that had become separated. It chilled in the fridge over night, and I skimmed off the rest of the fat that had congealed at the surface in the morning.

For todays lunch, I packed some more of the leftover blanched napa and noodles to some of the meat and broth in a tupperware. I then added a bit of water, a bit more MSG, and a bit of light soy (not low sodium). Upon a reheat at work I was delighted that I had a very Japanesey, dare I say, shoyu-esque soup! Delicious and definitely even better the second day :)

Shoyu-style ramen-esque noodle soup for lunch!

Pork soup is wonderful, and it’s definitely something I’m going to keep iterating. I will eventually get some bones and skin and do a traditional ramen, but until then I’ll be happily eating these left overs for weeks!

Despite what many of the people commenting on the Ars article think though, it’s not a case of ICE being sloppy or behind the “HTTP/1.1 times”. They seize upwards of 100 domains at a time, it’s far easier to just force a TLD to point a target domain at their nameservers and move on. Basically, ICE has configured their bind install to respond with 74.81.170.110 for *any* query. So anything pointed to ns1/ns2.seizedservers.com will respond with the takedown message automatically. No messing with any configuration, apache, bind or otherwise on their end, efficient! That’s pretty clever, whether or not you agree with what they accomplish.

Of course it does allow for some good pranks. Point your domains at 74.81.170.110, tell your friends you’re in legal trouble, good times ensue. For more fun, change someone’s local resolvers to ICE’s name servers, see how long it takes them to realize they haven’t actually taken down the entire internet.

Who knows, maybe parking everything there will stop all the electronic and postal spam sent to my multitude of vanity domains…

Twitter really sucks. The Lotus Evora S on the other hand, looks awesome.

UPDATE: Even worse. Twitter enforces the SLIGHTLY LONGER length of the t.co URL, causing me to actually LOSE 2 chars from my own shortener. Ridiculous…

I’m not a huge bash guy,  in fact nine times out of ten I’ll chose perl. I like the way perl hands strings, escaping and its general syntax better. Sometimes however, it’s just better to use bash, say for a cron, especially if you can pull it off in one line (instead of maintaining a script on disk). This is definitely advantages when you are adding a cron to an appliance, it’s nice to maintain everything that isn’t provided by the managed distribution in a single location (i.e. root’s crontab)

I’m a big fan of F5, the Big-IP product line is fantastic as is their support. Theres definitely a lot of way to get alerting, the best of which would be SNMP, or even have the included alertd directly email your pagers. Personally, I don’t have an SNMP driven alerting system, 99% of our devices/systems are actively monitored by dedicated monitoring systems. Modifying alertd has the problem that you have to port your changes forward during any OS updates, and we are currently split between OS 9.x and OS 10.

I decided to write a quick little non-intrusive script (no changes OS configuration, nothing to maintain changes to), and keep it as a single cronable line, to comb the LTM logs (though this could easily be used for GTM logs as well) and email out notifications. The log looks like:


Jun 8 17:31:09 local/tmm notice tmm[1823]: 01070028:3: No members available for pool db-cluster.omghi2u.dev
Jun 8 19:12:17 local/ltm1 notice mcpd[3377]: 01070640:5: Node 192.168.110.82 monitor status down.
Jun 8 19:13:51 local/ltm1 notice mcpd[3377]: 01070728:5: Node 192.168.110.82 monitor status up.
Jun 8 19:13:51 local/tmm notice tmm[1823]: 01070028:3: No members available for pool web-cluster.sup2u.qa
Jun 8 19:15:08 local/ltm1 notice mcpd[3377]: 01070727:5: Pool member web2.sup2u.qa:80 monitor status up.


The log formatting in OS9 is a bit less verbose than OS10, but basically it always starts with a timestamp formatted %b %e %H:%M:%S, then the log entry (OS9 lacks the log level and context). We want to check every 5 minutes (could be bumped to every minute) for any new entries in the last 5 minutes, and email them out if they aren’t stuff we don’t care about.

Some cool stuff of note: if you want to do a for loop on new lines instead of any whitespace, you need to change the IFS variable around. Just make sure you unset it when you are done or you will screw your terminal (or cron run!) up. The code originally looked like:


export IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b"); guts=$(for i in `cat /var/log/ltm | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3}'` ; do unixtime=$(date --date=$i +"%s"); if (( unixtime > `date --date="5 minutes ago" +%s` )); then grep `date --date="@$unixtime" +"%b %e %H:%M:%S"` /var/log/ltm; fi; done | sort | uniq | grep -v -f /root/ltm_excludes.txt); if [ -n "$guts" ]; then echo "$guts" | mail -s "$HOSTNAME logs" "ops@zomghi2u.com"; fi; unset IFS;


And worked like a charm on OS10, but OS9 is based on Redhat 3, and has an ancient version of the date command that didn’t support the @timestamp format. Lovely. Theres lots of people using the pure date command to get around this, but timezones become a problem and are messy. It’s way better to use awk’s wrapper to strftime() and thus our fully backward compatible cron is:


*/5 * * * * export IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b"); guts=$(for i in `cat /var/log/ltm | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3}'` ; do unixtime=$(date --date=$i +"\%s"); if (( unixtime > `date --date="5 minutes ago" +\%s` )); then grep `date --date=\`echo | awk "{ print strftime(\"\%c\", $unixtime) }"\` +"\%b \%e \%H:\%M:\%S"` /var/log/ltm; fi; done | sort | uniq | grep -v -f /root/ltm_excludes.txt); if [ -n "$guts" ]; then echo "$guts" | mail -s "$HOSTNAME logs" "ops@zomghi2u.com"; fi; unset IFS;


Only thing I wasn’t totally happy with was that I had to do a dumb echo | into awk. I couldn’t figure out (from the man page and a quick googling) how to get awk to do it’s thing without stdin or a file. Oh well. That was a lot of fun to write. You could change it to a whitelist by making a /root/includes.txt kind of file and losing the -v on grep. In fact you could have two crons. General alerts goto your ops inbox, alerts you are worried about (like pools having no members left :D) go to your emergency inbox (pagers). Or many crons. Or actually just hack up the alertd.conf… Or alert on SNMP! Either way, happy scripting!

UPDATE: (June 21st, 2011) On a day filled with a particularly large number of port scans resulting in lots of grep-filtered RST response messages, we decided to move the grep -v up to the beginning instead of at the end, this increases performance immensely. No more spikes on the CPU0 graphs! Here’s the updated script, smarter logic this time ’round:

*/5 * * * * export IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b"); guts=$(for i in `grep -v -f /root/ltm_excludes.txt /var/log/ltm | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3}'` ; do unixtime=$(date --date=$i +"\%s"); if (( unixtime > `date --date="5 minutes ago" +\%s` )); then grep `date --date=\`echo | awk "{ print strftime(\"\%c\", $unixtime) }"\` +"\%b \%e \%H:\%M:\%S"` /var/log/ltm; fi; done | sort | uniq ); if [ -n "$guts" ]; then echo "$guts" | mail -s "$HOSTNAME logs" "ops@zomghi2u.com"; fi; unset IFS;


I was pretty worried 3/4 through cooking, but this turned out delicious!

Tonights dinner started when I saw some really gorgeous eggplant onsale and picked a giant one up. One of my favourite dishes as a kid was a spicy eggplant and pork stir fry, I’ve attempted it before but never been happy with the results. However recently I’ve learned some new techniques for Chinese cooking and try my hand at this classic again.

I began by slicing the eggplant into broad slices and soaking it in salt water for a solid 10 hours. Generally I’d have even done this even longer, over night in fact, but I was too tired from a busy night of Yakuza 3 the night before. This technique removes the bitterness, and is generally key to doing many eggplant dishes.

Marinating our delicious meats

We took a pound of lean ground pork, put it in a large mixing bowl, added 2 tablespoons of light soy sauce (as in table soy sauce, not the low sodium stuff), 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of canola oil, a teaspoon of cornstarch (key in getting that nice texture Chinese meats enjoy), 2 tablespoons of water and then a few cranks from a pepper grinder. We stirred that mix thoroughly and left it to sit for 20 minutes. While that was marinating we began cooking calrose rice on the stove. Specifically we did 1 cup of rice, and a cup and a half of water, simmering for 20 minutes.

Blanching our bok choy

Next we took an entire giant head of bok choy and blanched it, though slightly differently than our nappa cabbage. We boiled a giant pot of water with a tablespoon of canola oil, a pinch of salt AND a pinch of sugar. We dunked the bok choy in for about 30-60 seconds and took it out and put it in a strainer. Also unlike our dumpling cabbage, we did not flush it with cold water, to let the insides keep cooking further. I took the time to slice our eggplant pieces up into strips.

At this point we had a pretty full kitchen! We began frying our marinated pork in a bit of canola oil at medium high heat (6-8/10 depending on your stove). When 80% of the pink color was gone, I tossed in the eggplant. The rice should have finished cooking a little while ago, so we can begin making fried rice. The trick to making restaurant style fried rice is two fold. First pour some canola oil into a big pan, then take our entire pot of rice and dump it on top. Scramble two eggs and pour it on top evenly.

Our fried rice is coming together

Now mix the entire mix of rice and raw eggs up, and turn the stove up to a high temperature 6-8/10. By mixing it thoroughly first you won’t get any egg chunks. This will require quick hands and a decent amount of attention, stir/flip the rice around constantly. Thankfully Eva took care of this pan whilst I tended to the pork. Once the egg is pretty much cooked onto the rice, add a tablespoon of dark soy sauce (the thick stuff!) to the mix. This will give it that restaurant color and flavour. Continue mixing it continuously while keeping the heat high. When it becomes crispy but before it becomes dried out (taste a bit!) take it off the heat and leave it aside, you now have perfect fried rice!

Bok choy enters the mix!

In our skillet with the pork, our eggplant and pork should be cooked, and there shouldn’t be too much liquid in the bottom. Add our blanched bok choy in and keep stirring it rapidly and two teaspoons of crushed garlic from a jar. Increase the heat (8-10/10 depending on your stove) and keep it moving quickly, make sure all the liquid leaves the mix. Keep cooking until the water comes out of the bok choy and evaporates, we don’t want a watery pan. Once the liquid level is down, add a tablespoon of sesame oil (pure flavour) and two tablespoons of sriracha (rooster sauce!) and keep mixing quickly. Chop some green onion (to taste) into strips (vertical) and toss it in too. Once everything is mixed in and theres no large amounts of liquid bubbling away in the bottom, pour the skilet into your pan of fried rice. Mix everything up and serve it while its HOT! The flavour is rich but not overpowering, and the textures of everything should be perfect (the fried rice won’t be soggy). An awesome experiment, and a delicious meal, next time I would probably use baby bok choy instead, as its easier to plate and eat :)

Our finished product!

Delicious and healthy leftovers

First up was a vegetable bake. I 8-hour marinated some peppers, big shiitakes, LOTS of garlic and yukon gold potatoes in high quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar with lots of oregano. I added asparagus then baked the entire thing for like an hour. (You don’t wanna marinate the asparagus with the vinegar, it’ll get tough) I served it with some very crispy-fried Beretta organic thick cut bacon on top. Was an ok dinner, the flavours were great, all the ingredients were cooked perfectly but it missed a certain something, not a great meal. The following morning I fried up a Beretta spicy beef sausage and put that on top and took it to work for lunch. It was exactly the flavour the dish was missing, and the extra night of sitting made the vegies even more flavourful. A fantastic couple days of leftovers. Very pleased in the end.

The first version was vegetarian, the second attempt with sausage was much better

Next up is really a lazy meal, but still honestly fantastic. Our Longos carries a great selection of premium pasta (dried) and a line of Tiberino pasta+seasoning packs. Basically you take everything out, the pasta and the herbs, fry them dry in high quality olive oil (good oil is key) at high heat for a bit, add water, cook the water away, add cheese (I used a very nice Grana Padano) and serve. There is no ‘sauce’ just an olive oil + herb blend, and frankly its fantastic. The spicing is very good and it really lets through the quality of your oil. We liked it so much we did it a few weeks later, this time adding my favourite Beretta spicy beef sausage, it was even better. Made fantastic left overs the day after too! As far as lazy (20-minutes, no prep time) dinners go, you can’t really do any better in terms of flavour, just make sure to use good quality oil and cheese, its totally key.

Fun experiment, I love plaintains

Next up was an amusing experiment. I was having coffee with my mom who had come into the city for a visit one morning. We were both debating what to cook for dinner, both of us had defrosted beef and neither had decided what to do. I was leaning towards something with bok choy, but when we saw the plantains at Longos we both changed our minds. The dish was simple, I fried up some red and green peppers, cooking onions and the thinly sliced ribeye beef, seasoned with half a packet of fajita seasoning we had left over. The plantain was lightly fried just to crisp the outside without drying it out, served with Balderson’s 6 year cheddar, Garden Fresh salsa and corn chips. I really need to cook with plantains more often, its really a great starch to work with, flavour-wise.

Ugly but delicious

Next we have an ugly but tasty dish that was basically use of random leftovers. First I started by boiling then frying some potato and cheese perogies we’d purchased at a little local shop. I tossed them with some olive oil, spinach, collard greens, kale, cilantro, parsley and basil. At the last minute I added some leftover hotdogs, I had wanted to use sausage but we didn’t have any as I’d thought. It was served with rot kohl and picadilly chow-chow. The fish plates help the aesthetics of the dish.

Beautiful sandwich

I had a craving for steak sandwiches one night, so I bought a value-pack (i.e. a good kilo or two) of these thinly sliced rib eyes. I sauteed 4 cooking onions and some brown mushrooms, then added cider vinegar, ketchup, a chipotle honey rub and worestershire sauce. While this simmered and flavoured up, I began frying perfect medium-rare steaks. This is a quick process per steak (you don’t wanna lose the pink center, despite only being millimeters thick) but a dozen steaks is still a lot of steaks to cook :) We smothered them in the onions and mushrooms with their delicious BBQ sauce on. As leftovers, I just ate the onion/mushroom/steak blend a la carte, delicious!

I <3 MSG

Last up is a basic breakfast-for-dinner. While not an impressive meal, there were two little things I did that really make it special. First of all, I cooked the eggs with sesame oil, which really adds a nice Korean/Chinese flavour. Sesame oil is really an awesome spice, and definitely use it as a spice, cooking it reduces the flavour significantly. Secondly I added a good shake of MSG on top of the eggs when it was almost cooked. MSG gives it an awesome Japanese flavour, and gives me great memories of okonomiyaki restaurants in Tokyo, where you’ll always find an MSG shaker at the table. Finally, my current addiction is Longo’s own “cured pork backs in cornmeal”, which is what we often call peameal bacon and American’s often call “Canadian bacon”, though the later can refer to almost anything from the top half of the pig. I love this pork so much, I’ve purchased four packs this week, and heck even had a sandwich of it for lunch yesterday! At 130 calories/100 grams, it’s not even particularly unhealthy as meat goes, and is full of wonderful flavour. I have an awesome idea involving this delicious meat, which hopefully I will attempt next week :)

Happy eating, happy cooking!

Quite a mean stance!

vs the original BMW M exhaust

So the weekend before last, Tom and I set up to install a free-flowing exhaust on the M Coupe. I was pretty picky with what I wanted from an exhaust, the stock BMW M units are pretty good, albeit very quiet and thus quite heavy. I didn’t want a boomy american (or ‘rice’) sound just to shed some weight and add a bit of top end power, so I ended up getting bespoke exhaust makers Hayward & Scott of Essex (UK) to build me one. After a month of pounding on metal in sheds, the men from Essex sent me a hand-made exhaust. We waited for good enough weather to perform the install and got to work…

Flying M-Coupe

The process is easy enough in theory. In fact our biggest worry, seized bolts/joints was a non issue. The real challenge was fitting hands/tools in places to remove joints. We put the car up on four jacks, as high as we pretty much could. One of our jacks was low on hydraulic fluid, and was located at the back on the driver side, so we shuffled it to the front passenger side where it would be less of a determent. After playing with the jacks for awhile we were ready to begin. We began by removing the BMW back boxes. Each one was held on to two brackets, rubber mounts. Getting them off of the brackets was much harder than just removing the brackets from the body, so thats what we ended up doing. Each muffler was connected to the mid-section with two bolts and a metal ring, easy enough to remove. Removing the BMW mufflers, you really got a feel for how heavy they were, in excess of 30 pounds a pop.

Car parts scattered across the lawn like hillbillies

With those removed we could focus on removing the mid-section. The mid-section is guarded by several heat shields, which also keep it snug with the chassis. Removing those was trivial. The mid-section is attached to the rear cats (the car has four catalytic converters in the North American spec) with six bolts. Removing the top bolts proved to be exceedingly difficult but we managed to do so. At this point we felt pretty pleased with our efforts. We began to try and jiggle and slide the mid-section out from under the car to no avail. It was being blocked by two large pieces of the rear subframe that cross the back of the car and add to the overall rigidity. After hesitating and trying to partially undo and move them out of the way, we gave up and removed both cross bars. This made removing the mid-section a snap, and we put it on the lawn with all of our other parts.

The H&S mid pipes look pretty

The stock BMW M mid-section is an X-pipe and contain a mid resonator, and was also quite a heavy part. The Hayward & Scott mid pipes we were replacing them with were a straight stainless steel X-pipe. This change reduces back pressure, reduces overall weight (although not by more than 10 pounds) and produces an awesome crackley overrun noise on lift off and during engine braking… After a short break, we installed the mid pipe, having similar trouble getting those top bolts in. After putting those in, we reattached the cross bars, and then put the heat shields back up. From there we were able to begin installing the H&S back boxes. We rotated and snug them onto the mid pipes until they lined up with the brackets. This wasn’t particularly hard, though the mid-section was not perfectly symmetrical (an issue with any non robot made parts), and thusly made fitment on the drivers side a bit trickier than the other.

The heat shielding in the exhaust housings is impressive

We finished up, put the drivers side wheel, and lowered the car. I then proceeded to fire her up. The sound of a cold start was pretty impressive, you could FEEL it. Pretty soon the car warmed up and it became silent as it hummed a long in neutral. I took her out for a quick spin. Low revs are a bit deeper than I had anticipated, but the scream at high revs is just spine-tingling. Better yet is the sound between gear shifts, as unspent fuel burns up on the pipes and crackles out the back. This becomes more pronounced as the pipes heat up, to the point where a throttle blip with a fully hot exhaust is just incredible. Highway cruising is completely silent thankfully, however any throttle under full transmission load is quite a bit louder than I had anticipated. Superficial (though important, since you have to live with it) criteria aside, performance is fantastic. Though its really hard to say as the car has always had a ton of power put down to the road, so detecting a predictably small peak power improvement is impossible, we’ll have to book some dyno time to really know for sure.

The weekend after we did a bit more fitment work on the drivers side, as the pipe still sits crooked, more so when the exhaust heats up and expands. We’ve not quite gotten it perfect. I’m also not 100% happy with the volume level, it’s a bit TOO loud for my taste, though it sounds fantastic and raw, not synthetic and big-tippy. Never the less it’s been a fun project, however it turns out! Thanks to Tom for his hours upon hours of work.

The following is a video I made with a cold exhaust, the overrun is not nearly as noticeable as hot pipes, sadly. I had made a better one earlier but had completely forgotten to TURN THE MICROPHONE ON (as was the fate of my ‘before’ video). I might make another one one day, but I generally don’t like sitting and revving the engine like a child in place, its rather anti-social :)

Delicious dumplings were delicious

Steamed, boiled, in soup, or fried: dumplings are one of my all time favourite foods. Every asian country has its own dumplings, with their own unique fillings and spicing. I was tossing around a bunch of ideas for dumpling fillings, and sorta came up with a bit of a fusion recipe based on what I could find at my corner grocery store before work.

We started with a pound (and a bit) of lean ground pork. I personally tend to like pork dumplings, but ground chicken and chopped shrimp are also great bases. Next up was a head of nappa cabbage.  Nappa cabbage is a staple green in asia, and frankly is a great delicate substitute for western cabbage or even lettuce in any cooking. We washed the head and then prepared to blanch it. Fill a large pot with water, a couple shakes of salt, and a tiny splash of vinegar, we bring it to a rolling boil. Once the water is boiling, we dunk the entire cabbage in and submerge it completely for 10 seconds. Take it out and rinse it in cold water. Put that in a colander to drip dry, and later we are going to squeeze every bit of water out we can.

The vintage blender made short work of the carrots

Next up we’re going to prepare some veggies. I personally like cilantro, and so we used quite a bit, 70g of the frozen puree to be exact. A heaping amount of fresh leaves would have probably been better. A last minute addition by Eva to this recipe, we peeled 8 small carrots, and tossed in all 70g of frozen cilantro into the blender and set the sucker on chop. With some spooning around of the contents to make sure it blended evenly (texture is very important for dumpling filling, a large chunk of not quite soft carrot wouldn’t work) we eventually chopped all the carrots and blended them with the cilantro. The result smelt delicious but looked awful. We also took our squozen dry nappa cabbage and chopped it finely on a cutting board. We are now ready to begin mixing our ingredients together.

All the fixings together at last!

With all the pork, cilantro, carrot and cabbage added, we begin to season. I added a heaping tablespoon of sriracha (rooster sauce), a tablespoon of rice vinegar (to add a nice tang), a teaspoon of sesame oil (for aroma more than anything), a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of MSG (gotta have some umami!). In retrospective, I probably would have doubled the salt to 2 teaspoons, and maybe gone to 2 or 3 teaspoons of sesame oil. Once the dumplings are wrapped and cooked, these flavours were slightly lost, not to say it didn’t turn out wonderfully… The mixing process should be 100% done by hand, roll your sleeves up, dig your hands into the meat, goo and vegies and just kneed through it until its as homogenous as possible. Now begins the lengthy process of wrapping.

Eva wraps dumpling after dumpling after dumpling

Dumpling wrappers come in small packs, that should be used as soon as opened and the rest thrown out. They are impossible to work with if they aren’t refrigerated and moist, but not too moist… Buy them when you plan to use them too, they are best fresh. You take a single wrapper out, place it in your palm, dab a ring around the edge with a blend of scrambled egg and water (the exact ratio isn’t hugely important, its strictly glue). Put a heaping teaspoon of filling in the middle, pinch the top closed, and then close the rest, making little folds every so often for style. It’s important to make sure theres a good seal around the edges, otherwise it will burst when we cook it. All said and done, Eva wrapped 60 of these dumplings, this is the single most time consuming aspect of the preparation.  Thankfully you can (and we did) freeze the wrapped dumplings, and cook them straight from frozen at a later date.

Dumplings cooking away in the pot

Once all your dumplings are ready, it’s time to cook them. We bring a huge pot of salted water to a boil, and make sure its a good rolling boil before we begin. Drop a few (6-8) dumplings in at a time, you don’t want to crowd them and have them sticking together before they’re cooked. With many kinds of dumplings the rule is that once they float to the surface they are ready to fry (or eat), however since these are pork we need to make sure the internal temperature really gets up there. I wasn’t timing them, but I let them boil at the top for at least 5 minutes. On another burner prepare a skillet with some oil (safflower, sunflower, etc) on a pretty high heat (8/10 or higher depending on how insanely hot your stove can get). Once they are ready, put them in a colander to drain off as much of the water as possible. Toss the dripped dry dumplings onto the oil skillet, guard your eyes as they are going to spit oil back fiercely. This is an inevitability dealing with a moist dumpling into a hot oily pan, deal with it!

Early stages of frying dumplings, note the single really ugly crepe-like one that I rolled on the left

Frying the dumplings is totally an eyeball thing too. Texture is important, we want them to be crispy but not dried out. Using high heat, flip and move them frequently to make the outsides golden brown. A little char is ok too as long as you aren’t burning large portions of them. Just make sure they are nice and crispy before moving on to the next batch. Keep adding oil to the pan as need be, they will soak up quite a bit. Cycle through boiling, dripping dry, frying until you are out of dumplings!

Dumpling dipping sauce is a must too, it cuts down on the grease a bit, and adds to the flavour. A traditional one would be maybe 3 parts light soy sauce, 2 parts rice vinegar, maybe some sugar even. I decided to get creative, and made our own recipe, 4 parts light soy sauce, 1 part lime juice and it was absolutely delicious. Serve the dumplings with this sauce, sriracha and green tea and enjoy!

Frozen dumplings ready for future cooking and consumption!

An army of fresh dumplings ready to be cooked

Solution: Ask the switch who lives where, make perl do the heavy lifting!

Our HP ProCurves provide what they call ‘port address tables’ which basically tell you which MACs are seen on which ports. A bit of digging and that info was just an SNMP call away. The MACs are stored in decimal format, in the OID, and the integer value it points to is the port number. Ports after physical ports (on ProCurves) are VLANs and Trunks. (The mappings and locations of ports is probably completely vendor specific though!)

Once we have that MAC address, we can pretty it up, map it to an actual hostname, and then label the ports with that. No more will you have to check another table, database, text file, etc and say, hey where is XYZ plugged into… The 30 minute dirty perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# switchLabel.pl - 5/10/2011 (dirty 30 minute hack version)
# label ports on an HP Procurve switch with their boxes MAC address (easy to lookup)
# and even their hostnames! --nick@fmpub.net

# configs
$debugMode = 1;

# code dont touch
if ( $#ARGV < 1 ) {
       print "usage: switchLabel.pl [switch IP/hostname] [community]\n";
       die("Please specify a switch IP and a valid r/w community string!\n");
} 

sub debug
{
        use vars qw($debugMode);
        if ($debugMode == 1) {
                print $_[0];
        }
}

my $switchIP = $ARGV[0];
my $snmpCommunity = $ARGV[1];

my $numPorts = 48; # after this is trunks and vlans, which we're going to ignore
                                  # label them manually kthx
                                  # change me for big chassis switches
                                  # could become another (optional) config variable

my @snmpWalk = `snmpwalk -On -c $snmpCommunity -v2c $switchIP 1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.2`;
my %switchPorts = ();

foreach (@snmpWalk) {
 	$_ =~ s/.1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.2.//; # lazy ass formating
	$_ =~ s/ = INTEGER: / /;
	chomp;
	($decMac, $port) = split(/ /, $_);
	if ($port <= $numPorts && $port > 0) {
		my @macOctets = split(/\./, $decMac);
		my $hexMac = "";
		foreach (@macOctets) {
			$_ = sprintf("%0.2X", $_);
		}
		$hexMac = join(':', @macOctets);
		debug("[found] $hexMac @ $switchIP: port $port\n");

		# put code in here to map MACs back to boxnames
		# or leave a MAC for now...
		my $machineName = $hexMac;

		if (!$switchPorts{$port}) {
			$switchPorts{$port} = $machineName;
		} else {
			$switchPorts{$port} .= ", " . $machineName;
		}
	}
}

for ($i = 1; $i <= $numPorts; $i++) {
	if ($switchPorts{$i}) {
		my $portName = $switchPorts{$i};
		if (length($portName) > 64) {
			$portName = substr($portName, 0, 61) . "...";
		}
		debug("[assign] $i => $portName\n\t");
                debug(`snmpset -c $snmpCommunity -v2c
                      $switchIP .1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.18.$i s "$portName"`);
                 #the above line was broken in half for awful wordpress formatting
	}
}

I’ve removed our implementation specific MAC address to hostname mapping bit. Basically you can tackle that a few different ways, do an ARP lookup on a box that sees and knows all, query an SQL table where you do inventory, whatever you want. Just drop it in, and if (!machineName), put the hexMac in instead (i.e. you have an unknown box!) You could (and I probably will) extend this code to alert you if boxes move around (i.e. without you knowing), for audit-ability purposes.

This awesome reverse mapping of MAC addresses looks to be the same as Cisco’s dynamic CAM entries table, and they are on the same OID. (In fact I wager Cisco came up with that specification) That means this above code should work on a Catalyst with no modification but I haven’t tried it :) I have (and always will be) a Cisco big iron fanboy, but these ProCurves are totally awesome for anything other than edge and carrier distribution. All the SNMP goodies you’d ever need can be found on a sub-$250 HP 2510, and thats with a lifetime warranty and support…. (insane)

Grab the code and play around and always remember, snmpwalk is a network admins best friend!

As any foodie (well at least the carnivoury steak variety) knows, wagyu (formally refereed to as ‘kobe’ in this part of the world) beef is some of the most delicious beef on the planet. It’s both a particular strain of cattle that has its lineage monitored and closely watched and a way of raising the cows that involves pampering them. The meat is more marbled than anything including white veal and features a level of tenderness not available on anything this side of butter. (It’s often referred to as butter beef) I don’t recommend having your first wagyu experience at home, goto a nice steak house for a special occasion and don’t hold back, it’s worth it. (Jacob & Co in Toronto is my recommendation for a western style steak, or Inakaya for some more traditional hibachi fired wagyu slices)

Two weekends ago I was in my grocery store (Longos, ACC center location downtown) and I realized they had Snake River Farms wagyu. I was totally disappointed to learn that they’d carried it since they opened many months ago and I’d never noticed until now! I have always liked SRF’s wagyu in restaurants, and having a local source is just too good to be true. In the days following it was pretty much the only thing I could think about, and that Thursday I bought a kilo and began planning a meal. Given the $109/kg ($50/lbs) price tag, I really wanted to figure out how to do it properly so as to do the epic cows justice. I consulted with my fellow wagyu connoisseur Ken who recommended the following cooking methodology.

We started by cutting the steaks in half, to make them thinner and thus easier to cook, say a centimetre to a centimetre in a half. We heated a teflon pan up to a lowish heat with a little bit of sunflower oil, say 4/10 on the stove. I began to cook the steak for a few minutes on each side, to make it a rare but not blue rare. We did this two at a time and placed them in a warming tray in the oven.

You want to cook these so they aren't raw, but don't overcook, that's totally a waste of delicious beef.

While the steaks were finishing up their initial cook, I began heating a stainless steel pan up to maximum heat, 10/10. I made sure to give it a good 10 minutes of preheating to make sure all the steaks would be cooked equally at huge heat levels. (Ken points out this time sitting is also critical to let the steaks cool down so the insides aren’t further cooked) We tossed in a bit of salted butter and before I could even get a steak on it had burned off filling the kitchen with smoke. With the window open we team cooked the steaks, butter would get tossed in a steak dropped down, flipped with tongs a half minute to a minute later and then taken off. This gives that nice crispy outside while retaining a juicy rare inside. We performed this on all the steaks, sacrificing much butter to the smoke gods, and then cut the steaks into a few cm wide strips, Japanese style. We served the strips with asparagus (green & white, note white asparagus takes much longer to cook than green), fresh organic yellow potatoes and roasted garlic and cream of spinach. The meat was juicy and flavourful, living up to all of my expectations. I have always been pleased with Snake River Farms meat, and I was very pleased with the preparation at home. It was non trivial (compared to slapping ‘em down on the BBQ), but was totally required for meat of this calibre. This is something I will be definitely doing again (as often as I can rationalize that is!), and I recommend that anyone who really likes steak to give it a try too.

Nick's plate