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Mon, May 31, 2010
Kubuntu Network Edition
Posted at 11:02 am MDT to Technology
You know you are in the right career if you spend your day off doing the same kinds of things you do at work.
My Dell Mini with Ubuntu Moblin Remix is a slick little computer, and the OS
seems solid and w.ell integrated with the hardware(one advantage to buying
hardware and software together: all the drivers work. The user interface is
clean and legible and the features I used seemed to work well. However, I am not
the demographic this system is aimed at. (Geek women who hand-wire-wrapped
their first computer 30 years ago are a very small demographic, so there is very
little aimed at us.)
- I never used any of the social networking features.
- The email client was
annoying -- it is a work in progress according to the developer's comments
on-line, and may eventually have the features I want, but it isn't there yet. I
ended up accessing my email through the web interfaces. - And, by design, Moblin does not support the use of a login screen or screen
locker.
The Moblin project has been absorbed by a competitor of Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) and there have been no updates to Ubuntu Moblin Remix for a few weeks and no reports about future release versions, so it seems to be a closed project.
The current version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx, 10.4) which came out at the end of April includes two netbook variants: Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE), based on the Gnome desktop, and Kubuntu Netbook Edition (KNE), based on KDE (the K Desktop Environment).
I have always preferred KDE, and my favorite email client is part of the KDE ecosystem.
On Saturday I did a full backup of the Mini to my server. I haven't loaded any music onto it yet, so it was only about 6 and a half gigs, and the rsync did not take very long. While the backup was in progress, I downloaded the KNE Livedisk and burned it to a DVD (it was a CD image, but needed the larger CD size, and I did not have any in the house).
The Mini has a cool feature: at boot, on the screen, it says to hit F2 to change the settings or F12 to control the boot source. The message saves me from wondering which boot setting key is appropriate out of the half dozen or so that are used by different manufacturers. The separate boot source setting means I don't have to drill down through menus and make a permanent change. I can just change the boot source for the current boot.
The Live Disk booted and looked great, but could not load the WIFI driver. Checking on-line I found that this was a known problem: the Hardware Driver updater has problems pulling data from USB sources in the absence of a network connection. There were reported workarounds, and I had wired Ethernet available if i needed it, so I rebooted into the Livedisk and told it to install.
The installer offered a dual boot setup. So now I can switch back a forth between Moblin and KNE. I already know I will eventually switch to KNE completely, but I don't need to do it immediately. I'm not short of disk space on this box (yet).
Getting the WIFI driver loaded and working turned out to be a royal pain. The Hardware Driver Updater really doesn't like working without a network connection. Even copying the contents of the DVD onto the hard-drive to take the USB drivers out of the mix didn't help. (And being able to copy the DVD onto the HD shows the USB drivers were not a general problem.) I finally broke down, grabbed the Ethernet cable from my briefcase and plugged into my router.
The WIFI driver loaded but did not want to sync with my router. I downloaded and installed all of the latest updates over the wired connection. Still nothing. I swapped out NetworkManager for Wicd, which I use on the big laptop. Still nothing. (When I booted back to the Moblin side, it connected fine.) But after a couple of reboots it suddenly started connecting.
I suspect I should invest in a new router one of these days... the old one seems reluctant to sync and also doesn't support WPA as more recent models do. With a newer router, even Network Manager might work.
The new software is mostly fine, The netboook layout is spiffy, but I think they should have spent less time on eye-candy like making the icons run around the screen and more time on functionality like providing a menu editor.
There is also a weird pattern of changes not showing up until after a couple of reboots. I think some of the new widgets have a caching or syncing problem. Or maybe the whole environment does, considering the behavior when I was bringing up the WIFI.
The main software infrastructure change I made other than the NetworkManager/Wicd shift was to supplement PackageManager with Synaptic (from the Gnome space) for software updates/additions/removals. The Package Manager user interface is very annoying: it shows rather generic package descriptions in large clear type, and the actual package name in very tiny, faint grey type suitable for the bottom of a sleazy contract. And they aren't sorted sensibly. The Synaptic user interface is at least legible and alphabetical.
The Mini's screen is small but very clear. The Moblin interface was readable as configured out of the box, but I find myself tweaking the KDE font size from 7 points to 8 in many of the apps. I should probably make that change global and be done with it.
What happened when I started loading packages with Synaptic, and also outside the package management system is a saga in its own right.
Continued on next rock...
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Thu, May 06, 2010
Daisy Chain
Posted at 7:32 pm MDT to Technology
Tomorrow I fly to Minneapolis to attend my niece's wedding. It would be nice to have my GPS refreshed so that I can get from the airport to the hotel.
To refresh the GPS I have to use a Windows image, even though the TomTom GPS uses Linux internally. Their update toolif not available on Linux.
I have 2 vmware Windows images on my main laptop Ykchaua. I upgraded Ykchaua to Kubuntu 10.4 earlier this week, and downloaded the patch to allow vmware to run on the new OS version. The patch applied smoothly, but I could not bring up the console for the guest images in my browser. Googling indicated the problem is that the 10.4 upgrade also included an upgrade of Firefox to 3.6, which the vmware console plugin doesn't support yet. I tried downgrading Firefox, without much luck.
Fortunately, I have two other machines in the house that can run browsers. I haven't upgraded the browser on my server in a long time, so it should still work with vmware. And a couple of weeks ago I bought a Dell Mini running the Ubuntu Mobin package at the 9.10 level.
The Moblin browser is not exactly Firefox, but it is based on it. It turns out that it is close enough to FireFox 3.5 that I was able to use the Mini as the console to access the Windows images on the big laptop. I was able to refresh the GPS with the TomTom plugged into the big laptop and the TomTom Home app displaying on the Mini's browser.
This is a big relief.
However... this was a much bigger hassle than it would be if TomTom or VMWare or both were more reasonable about supporting Linux. I'm going to Europe for a couple of weeks in the fall, and will not have a Windows machine with me (that's what the Mini is for). If there is a TomTom competitor that will refresh via Linux, I may invest in one. (My Palm Pre has GPS functions, but I don't think it has coverage in Europe).
And I'm going to look into VMWare's competitors, too. I would hate to have to rebuild my images from scratch, but there may be ways to migrate the data from one virtual system to another. I have used VMWare for years (I was a paying customer until they changed their feature mix so that the free server was better suited to my needs), but I have had enough of being semi-supported.
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Sun, Apr 18, 2010
Bisquick
Posted at 11:55 am MDT to Technology
It turns out that all readily available unbleached flour in this country had malt in it. And with the other things I'm allergic to mostly removed from my diet,I'm really noticing the effects of the malt.
I switched my my sourdough starter to pure wholewheat via aerial contamination: mixture of wholewheat flour and water in one open bowl, well fed starter in another open bowl, stir both vigorously and leave them in the enclosed space of my microwave for a couple of days. The new starter rises, but not strongly... I may look for a true wholewheat starter on-line and in the meantime I may add baker's yeast to my batches of bread to get a better rise than the sourdough can provide alone.
And for brunch today I'm going to make Bisquick waffles (just like Mom used to make). I was reading labels in Costco the other week and discovered that Bisquick, being all industrial, uses chemical vitamins for enrichment, not the more 'natural' barley malt. It does have some dextrose init, but I hope that will be chemically pure enough that I won;t react to it.
Maybe at some point I can figure out how to use the Bisquick in an actual cake and other baked goods that I don't want to use wholewheat flour in: it should be a reasonable approximation in any recipe that calls for chemical leaveners. According to wikipedia, "One cup of Bisquick can be substituted by a mix of the following ingredients: 1 c flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tbsp oil or melted butter." So I will need to adjust recipes accordingly.
My waffles may be like Mom's, but my syrup will be real. One advantage of shopping at Costco -- you can get industrial quatities of real maple syrup at reasonable prices. I also have a jar of Canadian maple syrup from our sales manager, who lives and works in Canada, and gave maple syrup as Christmas presents this year.
Mom never bought real maple syrup. She bought this maple flavoring stuff called Mapleine and mixed it into a sugar syrup. One of the first things I did when I got my own place and started cooking for myself was start buying real maple syrup.
I don't remember if Grampa used real syrup when he made pancakes for us. If so, that would be part of what made them so wonderful. I'm pretty sure he did not use Bisquick, though -- Grampa had worked as a cook in a lumber camp when he was a young man in Canada. That would be nearly a hundred years ago now. And Bisquick wasn't sold until the 30s, probably 10 to 20 years after he left the woods.
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Sat, Mar 13, 2010
Phone Lines
Posted at 2:13 pm MST to Technology
Last Thursday (a week ago) I had another bogus 911 call. Fortunately, it was at 9:00PM instead of 3:00AM. On Friday I got a followup call from the 911 center admins about the address problem with the previous call, and was able to assure them that the address problem had been fixed. We chatted a little about the fact that GPS units can't find my house, and I explained some of the history of the addressing up here on the mesa.
I also got a call from Qwest saying that they would send out a technician, and on Monday he appeared. He said that my line that was making the bogus 911 calls was bad. Also that my other line. which carries my DSL, was even worse. He said there was nothing he could do about it and he would put in a call to their cable department.
On Tuesday a tech from the cable department came out and decided that my underground phone cable from my house to the nearest phone company box needed to be replaced. He put in a temporary line that just goes along the top of the ground. He said the trenchers would put it underground within 30 days...
I was pleased and surprised to get a call from the trenchers on Wednesday: they would send out someone to mark the underground powerlines and such on Thursday or Friday and plan to do actual work next week, weather permitting.
On Friday the marking was done.
And next week I should have a new underground phone cable.
I'm glad I repaired my decks and roof last fall instead of getting the patio paved: I think the new cable will go under the area that would have been paved. Now if I get the pavers put in this summer they will go over a good cable.
While my external phone lines are being upgraded, I should see about getting my interior lines upgraded (though not by Qwest). I'm pretty sure the interior line between the phone company box on the outside of the house and the DSL modem is mediocre at best.
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Thu, Nov 26, 2009
Stuffing for Breakfast
Posted at 12:15 pm MST to Technology
It's national appliance-using day
So far today, I have baked squash and pumpkins, and pureed the pumpkins (food processor), roasted potatoes, made my usual stuffing (stand mixer and food grinder), put the turkey in to roast in my fancy oven (I'm using Alton Brown's recipe, same as last year) and made stuffed celery.
Later today, I may make some pumpkin pies and some eggnog (which will use the blender).
The dishwasher is on it's third load, and I've washed a bunch of stuff in the sink...
I ate some of the stuffing mixture -- bread, ground cooked meats and veggies, and broth -- for breakfast. The rest of the stuffing is baking in a corningware next to the turkey.
Ounce for ounce, I think the most expensive item on my menu today is the stuffed celery I'm nibbling on as an appetizer. I was able to find goat cream-cheese this year but it costs about five times as much as cow cream cheese. But having proper stuffed celery makes it feel like Thanksgiving.
Soon I will take the turkey and stuffing out of the oven, make gravy, and reheat the potatoes and squash.
Then I will eat. Lots.
Spending a day cooking makes a nice change. I've been on a paying gig since last Wednesday and also worked on some computer side projects, so this has been a very busy week.
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Thu, Nov 12, 2009
Reconnecting ClearQuest to DB2 after changes
Posted at 1:22 pm MST to Technology
When changing the password of the DB2 database itself (as set in the CQ Maintenance tool), it is not enough to create a Connection in the Maintenance Tool that uses the correct password. Even though the Connnection succeeds, the other CQ
tools will not be able to access the database, and the connection will act as if the new password value is not sticking.
After creating the connection successfully in the Maintenance tool, Select Schema Repository->Update->Current Connection and set the new password again, then apply the changes. At this point the schema repository will be accessible using the ClearQuest Designer tools.
Then update the user database(s) if the password changes affect them too. The usual Database->Update User Database Properties tool in the Designer seems to be effective once the schema repository is connecting properly.
This update requirement is documented for Options changes. It just isn't clear in the IBM docs that it applies to password changes, too.
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Wed, Nov 11, 2009
DB2 settings
Posted at 11:51 pm MST to Technology
After a lot of thrashing with DB2 partially working, I finally dug out some DB2 error codes that were googleable.
SQL1084C Shared memory segments cannot be allocated. SQLSTATE=57019
SQL5043N Support for one or more communications protocols failed to start successfully. However, core database manager functionality started successfully.
The first problem, which was preventing runing of most of the dtabases on ykchaua itself, turned out to be shared memory limits inthe OS.
Running "sysctl -w kernel.shmmax=2147483648" seems to have made DB2 runnable on the server, but may be overkill. Checking some old backups, I found a section in sysctl.conf like:
kernel.shmmax = 1610612736 kernel.sem = 250 256000 32 2048 kernel.msgmnb = 65536 kernel.msgmni = 16384 kernel.msgmax = 65536 kernel.shmmni = 4096 kernel.shmall = 3774873
The existing values (for the values other than shmmax are) :
kernel.sem = 250 32000 32 1024 kernel.msgmnb = 65536 kernel.msgmni = 1680 kernel.msgmax = 65535 kernel.shmmni = 4096 kernel.shmall = 2097152
So I added the block back into the new /etc/sysctl.conf. And this time I commented the changes (which were probably made automatically when I first installed DB2) as DB2 related, so they are less likely to get lost again in the future. Having sysctl.conf set up should make the fix last across reboots.
The other error message I was receiving turned out to be because of a missing entry in /etc/services -- another case of updates stepping on config files.
After appending "db2c_db2inst1 50000/tcp # DB2 first instance" to /etc/services, DB2 seems to be running cleanly on ykchaua. Finally.
And....
My applications in the Windows images are able to connect... technically. I was able to configure the connections without error messages, But I can't seem to login to the apps, and the error messages are not being helpful.
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WICD
Posted at 1:07 pm MST to Technology
In my ongoing quest to get samba working again with the vmware images, I realized that part of the problem may be that the network was not getting set up soon enough at boot time. (Samba worked for a couple of days after I get it set up, but I'm nt sure it came back after the next reboot.) The vmware images were coming up with their network connections in strange states after the main machine rebooted, which seemed suspicious... or at least unhelpful.
The NetworkManager tool that comes with Karmic Kubuntu was not setting up the link until after I logged into the X window system. This could be a problem for samba because the authentication module that wanted to talk to the Active Directory server could not reach it until networking was running and vmware was up. Getting the networking stack to be active as soon as possible after boot would help the handshaking initialize properly.
The lack of a working network at boot time may be making DB2 unhappy, too.
I had given up on Network Manager completely in previous OS versions. But that meant I needed to manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces file whenever I needed to use the wireless connector in a different environment -- at the office, or a hotel, for example.
I hoped there was a way to make my wireless connection more flexible, even with the vmware subnet bridged off it. One of these days I want to get wired ethernet run to the livingroom and bedroom from the study where the DSL modem and router live, but for now I need to use the wireless connection for things it's not really configured for.
A bit of googling suggested that a tool called "wicd" would provide connect-at-boot, and also the flexibility to support some of the fairly strange networking requirements I have. I haven't tried a wired connection with it yet, but the wireless one seems to be doing what I wanted it to.
So far, so good.
Next step, get the samba permissions working again. Then get DB2 up. Then do the development and testing I'm really supposed to be working on.
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VMWare 202
Posted at 12:58 am MST to Technology
I refreshed the kernel modules (which should have just reinstalled the same stuff) and upgraded VMWare server to 2.0.2 and updated the vmware tools in all the guest OSs. VMWare seems to be working again now.
Samba permissions are still flaking out but I'll deal with that after I've slept.
I noticed when I was refreshing the kernel modules that even though I used an i386 installation disk, kubuntu seems to be using the x86/64 kernel modules. If I have any more problems, I should proably try to force it over to the i386 versions. I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing that safely.
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Tue, Nov 10, 2009
Gah
Posted at 8:37 pm MST to Technology
Well, drat. Samba stopped working again, and now vmware has decided it doesn't like the current version of the kernel, which it has been running with happily for over a week. The samba problem may have been the first sign that vmware was breaking down.
So annoying. One step forward, two steps back.
I just got the local laptop version of this blog working again (replicating the paths at my ISP is a little messy). And manually edited kmailrc to get signatures added to my emails automatically - I think the app that changes kmail settings is flakey in the latest kubuntu.
But I don't see how either of them could have broken vmware. I updated some stuff earlier, mostly pieces of the cups printer controller app. Don't see how that could have broken anything either.
Sigh. I wish vmware support for new linux versions was less clunky.
Time to google.
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Wed, Nov 04, 2009
Enable Local Display
Posted at 2:36 pm MST to Technology
Newer versions of Ubuntu have the X display locked down so that other userids cannot access the gui, plus there is a bug in 9.10 that makes it even less likely to work.
To fix the bug, I created a file. etc/X11/Xsession.d/60x11-localhost and filled it with contents I found at the online Ubuntu bug report 276357. It turns out that this file existed in 9.04, and the contents in my saved etc tree from before the upgrade matches. Which is encouraging.
Also useful:
emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ echo $DISPLAY :0.0 emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ export DISPLAY emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ xhost local:db2inst1 non-network local connections being added to access control list emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ su - db2inst1 Password: $ DISPLAY=:0.0;export DISPLAY $ db2cc
That gets me into the DB2 Control Center GUI, but DB2 itself is throwing some weird errors when I try to start up the database.
This is still the version 9.5 I restored from my backups -- I needed to install a down-level version of libstdc++ (libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb) to get it to run at all.
I have downloaded db2 9.7. I'm going to google for the errors I'm seesing. But I think my next step is to uninstall 9.7 and see whether 9.7 behaves better.
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Mon, Nov 02, 2009
Samba
Posted at 7:32 pm MST to Technology
Argh. I finally got samba working, but it took all day and isn't based on making sense of the documentation (which is very sparse). At least the permissions bug that broke things after the transition from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 seems to be fixed in 9.10.
I tried settings from a bunch of different sites that I googled, and even reinstalled pam, krb5 and samba when things had gotten very hung up at one point.
The final set of settings that worked were from HowtoForge.
There is still a problem with samba (even though it is working enough for the windows images to see the files on the host now). The utility for starting and stopping the samba services does not seem able to stop nmbd.
Tomorrow I will reinstall db2, the last major piece of infrastructure I need.
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Followups -- Upgrades
Posted at 7:17 am MST to Technology
The upgrade to Windows 7 and switch to Avira as antivirus seems to have fixed the processor-hangs. Other than that, Windows 7 is extremely annoying: Micrisoft is doing their usual thing of making it as difficult as possible to get anything done unless you are using nothing but Microsoft software. Since I use as little Microsoft software as possible, this obviously leads to problems.
The clean upgrade to Kubuntu 9.10 seems to have fixed the video hangs. It has been up three days. It has been a long time since I went a full day without X windows going unresponsive on me and being forced to hard reboot. I may be rebooting soon to see if that will bring dns-masq online (I need to recheck the config files first: I may have missed one), but it will be a clean boot, with everything -- especially the vmware images -- shutdown properly beforehand instead of having to crash them. Even if I still get an occasional hang, the improvement is wonderful.
Reconfiguring my main KDE apps -- KMail and Konqueror -- to behave the way I like after the clearing the config has been a pain. But they are also behaving much better now in the clean KDE 4.x environment than they had been with the settings that had been through the migration from 3.x.
For a while I was worried because I was getting very bad networking bandwidth. But I think that was an aftereffect of some power glitches and outages during the big storm last week. Power-cycling both the DSL modem and the router seems to have fixed things.
I can't really reconfigure samba and try to see if the permissions problem is gone until I have dns-masq working, but at the moment I am very hopeful.
I have much of my working infrastructure back in place. The main piece that still needs to be reloaded (also after DNS is fully working) is the DB2 database that provides the ClearQuest backend.
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Sat, Oct 24, 2009
Melon Float
Posted at 8:00 pm MDT to Technology
A new use for melon sorbet: 8 ounces of ginger ale (I used good stuff -- Canada Dry) and a couple of scoops of melon sorbet.
I spent half of today trying to trouble shoot the video crashes and lockups my laptop has been having. I think part ofthe problem is the transition from KDE 3.x to 4.x: I'm not sure the Ubuntu upgrade processes cleaned out the obsolete stuff thoroughly. I tried forcing a reinstall of all of the KDE components, but I'm not sure it did any good..
The official release of the next version of Kubuntu is due this week. I think I'm going to back-up this laptop completely and do a clean install next weekend, or as soon afterward as I can manage to download Kubuntu 9.10. Hopefully, that will fix both the video problems and the samba permissions problems I have also been chasing.
The samba problems may be related to a cluster of new samba config paramters called "idmap config". I'm looking for detailed documentation...
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Tue, Oct 20, 2009
Overnight Oats
Posted at 9:03 am MDT to Technology
I can't stand the texture of regular oatmeal, not even real as opposed to instant oatmeal, which is even more vile. I keep some real oatmeal in my cupboard for use in recipes, but don't use it as cereal. I like steel cut oats, but they take forever to cook at this altitude, so I don't make them very often.
Target was having a clearance sale the last time I shopped there. One item marked down was a basic 1.5 quart slow cooker for about 8 dollars -- the price of a lunch. I picked one up because it looked like a good size for overnight oats as recommended by Alton Brown: a reasonable-sized batch of oatmeal would be spread too thin on the bottom of my big 5.5 quart crock pot that I use for stew and be sure to scorch. My rice cooker -- being from Costco and therefore huge -- would have similar problems of scale.
Last night I tried the little slow cooker out for the first time.
At about 11 pm I put 1 cup of oats, 4 cups of water, some raisins, a small pich of salt and a dash of ground allspice into the cooker and plugged it in (this is a very basic slow cooker with no controls). At 6:30 when I fed the cat and took my morning meds I stirred the oats and unplugged the cooker to let it coast the rest of the way.
At 8 am I added some brown sugar to some of the oats and tried them for breakfast. Yum.
Next time I need to use more salt and spices, but the texture of the oats was fine and the flavor was good. The raisins had almost plumped back up in little grapes.
I'll store the rest of this batch in the fridge and nuke them for breakfast later in the week.
Another trick I found online is to put a spacer between the bottom of the crock and the heating element, to make the bottom of the oats even less likely to scorch. People with large cookers talked about using empty tuna cans, but I don't need any that large for the little cooker. I think if I try this trick, I will use a metal canning jar band -- probably the small size I use on jelly jars. I had been thinking of using something like a biscuit cutter or metal cookie cutter, but the jar band will be sturdier, and I have LOTS of them in various nooks and crannies of the kitchen and pantry.
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Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Antivirus and Progress
Posted at 7:37 pm MDT to Technology
It looks like the lockups in the XP image weren't entirely the fault of XP itself. I started seeing the same pattern of pegging the processor and hammering the hard drive in the other windows virtual machines.
Googling led me to believe that the problem might be with the AVG antivirus I have been using.
I downloaded samples of Avira Antivir and Antivir server and loaded them into the 2003 server and Win7 images after uninstalling the AVG tools, and things seem to be behaving much better. It will be a day or two before I know for sure whether the lockups are gone, but the disk isn't running constantly, and it is nice to have reasonable keyboard and mouse response again.
Uninstalling AVG was ugly: I had to reboot the Win 7 image about 4 times to get the uninstall to take.
In other news, I'm now doing my TomTom updates from the 2003 image. The Win 7 one can't see the GPS, probably because the VmWare tools module is tuned to 2008 server rather than Win 7 itself.
And Samba on Ubuntu seems thoroughly hosed. I'm trying an installation of a newer version, which I will try to reconfigure from scratch. I really need to mount a share from the ubuntu server to get the Rational tools installed on the new image, though I have some ideas for workarounds. It's very annoying: samba worked fine on ubuntu before the 9.04 updates, and I can't find anything in google that explains what has changed. The next ubuntu update in at the end of this month... I hope they have fixed whatever the problem is in 9.10.
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Sun, Oct 18, 2009
Windows 7
Posted at 1:12 pm MDT to Technology
I'm loading a Windows 7 virtual image.
My Windows XP image has been getting erratic, as well as obsolete, and I need to do some script development and testing. I have never put any flavor of Windows Vista on any of my machines or images.
I decided it was time for a new Windows workspace: the Win XP image is several years old, which is problematic for Microsoft products at the best of times. I'll move the XP image from the laptop to my server once the new image is populated.
I have to admit, the installation process has improved a lot since the XP/2003 days. The Microsoft downloads are very fragile and fussy about the DVDs they get burned to, but once I had a clean iso the install went quickly and smoothly.
The VMWare tools seem to be working well even though Windows 7 isn't officially supported yet, except that the video for the console is insisting on being fullscreen mode.
I have the OS installed, and linked into my Active Directory domain. And Firefox downloaded and installed. Now I'm working on the rest of my infrastructure.
- Firefox (done)
- AVG anti-virus
- Textpad
- OpenOffice
- winzip and its commanline utility
- apache
- TomTom
- ClearCase 7.1
- ClearQuest 7.1
- printer drivers
I will probably move my 2008 tax software across from the XP image so I have it readily available for reference, too. The previous years can stay on the Xp
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Tue, Oct 06, 2009
Meat
Posted at 5:30 pm MDT to Technology
I seem to be hungry for meat this week.
I've got some meat in the chest freezer that has been there for a long time. It's mostly a few big pieces like roasts that were left as I worked my way through the 1/4 cow, 1/2 pig and 1/2 lamb I previously stocked the freezer with.
A few days ago I pulled out a beef rump roast. Yesterday I cooked it using the convection mode of my fancy oven, which I haven't used before. The surface texteure came out a little peculiar (but delicious), but I'm not sure if that was due to the convection of the length of time it had spent in the freezer (though the roast was very well wrapped and showed no signs of freezer burn even after all the time).
The center of the roast came out rarer than I expected: it may not have been thawed all the way through. (Something to keep in mind when I tackle the next roast.) But that OK, since I will be reheating it and don't want it to turn to shoe leather. The end slices I had for dinner yesterday were tender and juicy.
Today I baked a pound of the old bacon -- less pink than commercial bacon because of the lack of nitrates, but it seems ok. If I order another half pig at some point, I'm going to ask for my bacon sliced thin. I like my bacon crispy.
The oven baking method works really well: spread the bacon on a cooling rack in a half sheet pan, place into a cold oven. Set the thermostat to 400 and the timer to 15 minutes, and check the bacon every 3 minutes after the timer goes off the first time. Drain the bacon on paper towels and pour the fat into a canning jar for future use when cooking eggs or greens. (Chard sauteed in bacon fat is delicious.)
I think I'm going to toss the old soup bones and one package of ground pork that was hiding in a corner: I don't think they will have stood up to long freezing as well as the larger chunks of solid meat.
I want to restock the freezer at some point, probably with buffalo instead of beef, and another half pig if Nanette will split one with me. But I want to use up whatever of the old meat is usable first.
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Sun, Sep 27, 2009
More Sauce
Posted at 11:14 am MDT to Technology
I brought home 30 pounds of tomato seconds and leftovers -- mostly San Marzanos -- from farmers' market yesterday. It's cooking down now.
I've promised to give Nanette and Rowan a few quarts.
I've got bread rising, too, so the Kitchenaid mixer is getting a workout today. It should rise well since the kitchen has three burners running.
It is so nice to be making tomato sauce in late September instead of late August. The kitchen is warm but comfortable, not unbearable.
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Sun, Sep 20, 2009
Melon Sorbet
Posted at 5:37 pm MDT to Technology
Nanette and Rowan are growing some delicious small melons. They are green and smooth on the outside (lightening as they ripen) and bright orange on the inside, with a small seed pocket and a wonderful flavor.
Most of them are softball size or a bit larger -- the largest are about 6 inches in diameter -- so they make nice single servings. They are either safe in their skins, or being eaten: I don't end up with a chunk of cut melon slowly dying in the fridge.
The seed company name for the variety is Serenade, but one of our customers said they resemble melons she had in Provence, so they may be originally a French variety.
Melons are sort of hard to preserve (although I think I've heard of melon pickles). But I have my ice cream maker attachment for the trusty Kitchenaid, and Alton Brown did a melon sorbet on one episode of "Good Eats".
The Kitchenaid ice-cream maker wants a larger batch than Alton's recipe, and I didn't have vodka in the house (must remedy that) so I used a couple of tablespoons of rum. (The alcohol is supposed to help bring out the flavor despite the chill, and also control the ice crystal sizes.) I use an organic sugar that has faint molasses overtones, so the rum should harmonize well with the that.
I needed 6 and a half of the little melons to get the 5 1/2 cups of fruit the Kitchenaid manual recommended for making sorbets.
There are 4 and a half pints of soft sorbet hardening in the freezer now. I'll bring a couple of them over to Nanette and Rowan sometime this week.
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Canning Sauce
Posted at 5:14 pm MDT to Technology
- lbs tomatoes, quartered, salted, drained, and divided between a 12 qt and an 8 qt stockpot (the San Marzanos drained in the smaller pasta insert, while the other tomatoes were in the larger one, but I distributed both kinds of tomato into each pot)
- large onion cut into 8ths in the large pot
- medium onion similarly in the smaller pot
- bunch parsley divided between the pots
- large rib celery cut into chunks in the smaller pot
- medium ribs celery cut into chunks in the larger pot
- red bell peppers cut into chunks, 1 in each pot
- Anaheim pepper, starting to turn color, ribs and seeds removed, divided between the pots.
- sweet Italian frying pepper (green) divided between the pots
a little garlic in each pot
Cook until onions and celery are soft, stirring occasionally. Once the tomatoes released their juice and started to break down, each pot was about 1/2 full, so spattering wasn't much of a problem. After an hour or two I consolidated everything into the big pot.
I am very glad that tomato season runs later in Colorado than it did in Connecticut. Processing bushels of tomatoes around Labor Day when it was 100 degrees F in the shade (and the weekend we processed tomatoes ALWAYS was the hottest weekend of the month) was really exhausting.
The routine is: Run hot veggies through strainer. Have another stock pot or a huge mixing bowl available for the strained sauce from the first stock pot. Then clean out the emptied pot and use it for the strained sauce from the next stock pot, etc. I have accumulated lots of stock pots due to my quest for a good pasta pot, so I didn't need to use the small canning kettle for sauce this time around.
Actually, due to shopping at Costco, I have some large stainless steel mixing bowls available, too.
Canning is so much easier with enough equipment available. And sane sized batches. We always ended up using every large pot and bowl in the house. And hot sauce spattered a lot because we ended up overfilling them. The Vittorio strainer spattered a lot too, and it didn't have tight seals around the crank, so it also dripped. We used to carpet half the kitchen in newspaper.
The Kitchenaid strainer is cleverly designed to not spatter or drip much. The mesh cone that the good stuff comes out of is enclosed in a housing that leads to a spout at the right height to fill a standard mixer bowl sitting on the counter under the grinder. Much neater than the open tray the Vittorio uses. That's good, because I canceled my last newspaper subscription a couple of years ago.
It helped that when I ordered the strainer parts, I also ordered and optional wide tray for the grinder's food hopper. It also helped that I stood on a footstool when I was using the strainer, so I could see what I was doing and reach over it easily. Standard counter height is actually a little high for me to work at comfortably.
I decided to use the 8 qt stock pot that came with my set of pots and pans (which doesn't have a pasta insert) for the second round of cooking down instead of the 12 qt one (that has the insert), which is kind of hard to work with (a bit tall for me to see into and reach into easily). Also, using two 8 qt pots, not overfilled, means things should be happening at about the same time in each of them. All of the strained sauce would fit into the large pot, but this way I have twice as much surface area for the cooking down.
One nice thing about a gas stove and good quality pots with built-in heat-spreader disks: I was able to cook the sauce way down, very gently, without any problems with sticking or scorching. I have 4 quarts of sauce in the canner (I should probably have done pints) and about 2/3 of a quart in the fridge, from 18 pounds of tomatoes. So it works out to about 4 pounds of tomatoes per well cooked-down quart.
A full canner batch is 7 jars, so if I want to do a full batch of tomato sauce quarts in the future I should probably aim for about 30 pounds of tomatoes.
Or not cook them down as far (having the canning gear ready ahead of time would help).
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Sat, Sep 19, 2009
Tomato Sauce
Posted at 10:16 pm MDT to Technology
Nanette's tomatoes have come on gangbusters. Last week they didn't sell out which I found very annoying.
I decided that if it happened again I would can some tomato sauce from the leftovers.
I have a Vittorio strainer like the one I helped my Mom and Nonna use when we used to turn bushels of tomatoes into a year's worth of tomato sauce over the course of a weekend. The strainer is sort of like a meat grinder with a long snout: the seeds and skins from the tomatoes (or apples if you are making apple sauce) come out the end of the snout, and the sauce comes out the side. This is really nice, because there is a lot of flavor and nutrients in the skins and seeds, and you get a better sauce if you leave them in during the first phase of cooking down. And not needing to peel everything saves a ton of work.
But the Vittorio is kind of messy to use and really needs at least three hands to work it. I learned recently that there is a strainer attachment for the meat grinder attachment for my Kitchenaid stand mixer. Just as with the pasta maker attachments I got earlier this summer, the mixer motor serves as the third hand. I ordered the strainer attachment last Saturday -- Amazon is sometimes very useful. (I told Nanette -- either we would sell out of tomatoes this week or I would make sauce.)
Today I brought home 18 pounds of tomatoes. They are now quartered and salted and set to drain in the pasta inserts of my stockpots. My Mom used to put the tomatoes into a clean peck peach basket lined with cheese cloth standing in the kitchen sink over night. I have fewer tomatoes to deal with, and pots with pasta inserts to use, which my Mom never had.
Tomorrow morning I'll start cooking down the sauce in the stock pots where they are draining now. Mom used every stock pot in the house, and started things off with some of the tomatoes in the canning kettle. After they had started to cook down they were consolidated into the other stock pots so the canning kettle was freed up for the actual canning. We used to bail the watery stuff at the top of the tomatoes in the canning kettle into saucepans to boil it down faster without scorching the tomato solids in the main batch.
I won't need to cook things down as much as we did with the juicy tomatoes Mom and Nonna used, which were just whatever was available locally. About 40% of the tomatoes I got from Nannette are San Marzanos: actual paste tomatoes bred for a lower water content for sauce making. Most of the rest were an heirloom variety that are fragile and ugly, but very flavorful.
I'll add some onions and celery and green peppers to the tomatoes when I start cooking them ... maybe some parsley and a little garlic, too. We made a fairly plain sauce, and added herbs and spices when it was used to make actual spaghetti sauce or whatever.
When Mom and Nonna made sauce, they also made bagniat or bagnat(not sure of the spelling) which was a hot sauce. I'm not into hot sauces, so I never paid that much attention to that part of the operation. I think it was mostly a matter of adding a bunch of hot peppers to the basic tomato mixture in one of the stock pots, but I don't remember what kind of hot peppers were used, or what other ingredients might have been added. Maybe some parsley and other herbs. The mixture that went through the strainer had more green stuff in it than the tomato sauce did, and I don't think it was just the hot peppers. Maybe some extra garlic? Maybe a lot of extra garlic?
In those days I don't think I ever heard the name of the variety of hot peppers. They were just "hot peppers" as opposed to bell peppers. I suspect if my brother ever wants to recreate the bagnat he remembers, he needs to find out what kind of hot peppers were grown in Connecticut in the 60s and 70s.
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Sat, Aug 15, 2009
Foxy Car 2
Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Technology
Man. The Forester is a zippy car, even though it has only a 2.5 liter engine. It wants to go fast. I'm going to have to keep an eye on my speedometer until I get used to it.
And it is really nice to park after the Dakota, too -- today I pulled into the parking garage near the farmers market, parked, got out, looked at how I was parked, and got back in and pulled about a foot and a half closer to the wall.
The driver's area is very well designed. When I am in the driver's seat, with it adjusted properly for reaching the clutch, etc., I don't see any part of the hood of the car. It is all below my sight line so all I see is road. And none of the gauges and meters are hidden by the steering wheel at all.
And the height of the mount for the seatbelt shoulder strap is adjustable, so I could make it stop sawing into my neck. (The shirts I wear to work have upstanding collars, so I hadn't noticed the rubbing until today.) I may lower it one more notch, but the current improvement is already wonderful.
I've made an appointment for Tuesday to take it in to the dealership to add some options and accessories: towing package, roof rack, engine block heater (much cheaper than building a garage) and a cover for the cargo area.
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Mon, Aug 10, 2009
Foxy Car
Posted at 9:35 pm MDT to Technology
I have my new car. It's a color they call Paprika Red: more or less fox colored. It has all the cool modern features (radio aux jack, external temp) and one that I hadn't expected: a backup sensor that is supposed to beep if there is something behind me when I back up.
They took FOREVER to get the paperwork set up.
Now I need to update my insurance and see about getting the Express Tool transponder account updated. I also need to find out whether Forresters use truck plates (so I will re-use my old plates) or car plates (so I will need new plates).
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Thu, Jul 16, 2009
Wok
Posted at 7:38 pm MDT to Technology
Today I attended a technical conference in the Tech Center (south Denver). As I was driving home, in rush hour traffic, on a hot afternoon, in a truck whose AC has gone wonky, I realized that by making a slight detour I could visit Pacific Mercantile.
I got the 12-inch round-bottomed wok I've been wanting, and a lid for it, and a donburi (a sort of Japanese casserole dish) and some groceries that are hard to find elsewhere.
Driving back to the highway, I passed the building that used to be Restaurant Mori. The building is still there, but appears to be empty. The landlord forced them out by being greedy, but doesn't seem to have had a new tenant lined up. What a waste.
I suppose it's possible they were planning to redevelop the site and things stalled when the economy tanked.
When I got home I had problems swallowing my supper for the first time in a long time -- I was insufficiently careful and paranoid when eating the meals that were supplied at the conference. But this is more evidence that the swallowing problems are related to the food allergies.
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