Monthly Archives: September 2009

Beef in Wine Sauce

Posted on 2009-09-30 by pappp

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Beef in wine sauce, over egg noodles. This is my current favorite way to convert an iffy bottle of red wine into tasty, tasty food. About a third of a bottle of shifty wine (here, a $9 cab that wasn’t actually worth $9 even before it sat re-corked in the fridge for a week) and some sirloin steak, onions and mushrooms, seasoned with garlic, pepper, salt, and a dash of thyme, and thickened with milk and flour. This batch had a dollop of sour cream added at the end because it was handy and milkfat makes everything better. It’s sort of like a quicker, easier, cheaper Beef Bourguignon. I should really try using some bits of bacon for the initial cooking fat like you do for modern beef bourguignon, theres always some around and you can’t go wrong with bacon fat.

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Musical Barrel #1

Posted on 2009-09-29 by pappp

One of my hobby projects just came to fruition earlier tonight. A team from Collexion has been working on building a pair of musical Bourbon barrels to support local charity auctions. The first one (6 notes from an internal glockenspiel, triggered by capacitive touch sensors on the rings, with an excellent paint job by Sam Wilson) sold earlier tonight at Spirits of Giving, bringing in $1500 to be split between Collexion and the Nash Brigthon Project. It’s great to be doing technological art, and it’s great that it can be used to support good causes. I forgot to bring my camera, but as soon as I get sent pictures from the people who did have them I’ll throw at least one up.

Edit: I don’t have pictures, but here is a video of the demonstration.

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Paper Submission +1

Posted on 2009-09-29 by pappp

Got another conference paper out last night, half an hour before the deadline. I’m again the third author, but this time I am there for contributing content, not just huge amounts of editing. This is a better paper than the one that didn’t make it in at SuperComputing; our focus is more on the theory behind the LARs desing and it’s many interesting implications, and the polish is much better. The venue is also more appropriate, this paper is out to IPDPS, who have a better track record taking things as “out there” as this one, both because of their editorial process and focus.

It’s great to be working with committed people; both my co-authors and our advisor were there and working to make it better until 11:45 at night when we finally got it squared away and submitted.

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David Shippy Talk

Posted on 2009-09-26 by pappp

The David Shippy talk in my last post was quite good; it featured a solid mix of business politics, and computer architecture, which drew a room-filling audience. That said, a LARGE portion of the audience was made up of EE280 students, who were apparently there in place of class. This is not a bad thing; conditioning the underclassmen to pay attention to seminars is an worthy goal. It also means the level of the talk was very well suited, if the audience had been a bunch of specialists on the topic (and a non-trivial portion of it was) it would have been inappropriately general, but for the spectrum of people in the room I would say it was pretty spot on.
I hung around afterwards, both to ask a question and because there were some very interesting conversations going on among the stragglers. As for the question, I wanted to know about the relationship of the PPC based Cell PPE and Xenon cores, to the things Nintendo uses…He was also in charge of the Gecko and Broadway chips that IBM makes for Nintendo to use in the GameCube and Wii respectively as well; and they share a common lineage but not a common design. Some of the straggler conversation was the expected material about computer architecture (especially historical stuff) which was informative, but there was one about engineering education that I found VERY interesting. I’m not sure that I should be quoting it, but suffice to say there are apparently solid numbers that confirm the suspicion that a high GPA (in high school or college) or SAT/ACT scores are not strongly correlated with success in EE/ECE programs at UK.
All in all, a cool talk, with lots of encouraging side factors.

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Decent Seminars!

Posted on 2009-09-24 by pappp

UK (and the college of engineering in particular) is surprising me with the quality of seminar speakers this semester, Bruce Schneier last week, and tomorrow David Shippy , chief architect for of IBM’s microprocessor team for games (the people who designed the Broadway, Cell, and Xenon processors inside all three of the major game consoles at the moment), and co-author of The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 will be speaking. His hand is on so much of the buzz in the tech news it should be really interesting to hear from him first hand, especially if we get a seminar-appropriate highly technical version. I’ve seen reviews of the book that gripe about lack of technical detail (and writing style); hopefully an in-person presentation to a known technical audience will take care of both problems and get things up to good material + good presentation.

The seminar is at 1:00PM in CRMS (I forget the room number) which brings me to the other thought…
folks need to work on their seminar announcement system. No email (to the seminars list). No updated websites (there is a seminars link on the department website …which is about 6mo out of date), just some posters hanging on the walls around Engineering. There were regular, highly visible announcements for the uninspiring dreck last year, why isn’t there publicity for the good stuff now?

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Chicken Paprikash

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

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Another “look what I made” format food post, chicken paprikash made with what was once this recipe, but has habituated and drifted over time. Served over rice ( I’ve never been terribly found of Spätzle, and rice is more my habit than noodles) and sugar snap peas, which make an amazing if slightly improbable combination. Also a glass of Moroccan-esque iced tea: it is brewed at unusually high temperature from gunpowder tea and fresh mint leaves, and it is sweetened beyond all reason, but I feel wrong calling it Moroccan tea because it isn’t pulled and is served cold. I love having time to cook, even when I know it is just a lull in the standard semester storm.

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Khorshteh Mosamma

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

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(This picture is after one reheating. I failed to take a picture right after I made it. The structure of the eggplant and a lot of the color were eaten by a night in the fridge and a trip through the microwave. It’s still delicious.)

I made Khorshteh Mosamma (an Iranian beef and vegetable stew) a few days ago, and it is delicious in that classic rich, slightly spicy middle-eastern way. What was unusual about it is I actually (mostly) followed a recipe, instead of my usual browse similar recipes -> freehand it to what I want technique. The recipe came from the last issue of the Penzeys Spices catalog. The only real decisions I made not specified by the recipe were using a 50:50 mix of sweet and hot curry powders (it just says “curry powder”), and a little bit of scale adjustment.

For the spice-deprived, Penzeys Spices is a chain of very, very good spice stores, and is one of my favorite little specialty shops. A visit there will make you poor, and it’s not because they charge a big premium or only sell in large quantities; it’s just because they have every spice you could imagine, and I’ve never bought something that disappointed (although I still haven’t figured out how to handle a couple things, I’m definitely still figuring out how to work the bottle of ajwain seed I picked up a few visits ago.) While I’m always sad there isn’t a nearby location, it’s probably a good thing… I usually end up dropping at least $50 when I visit one.

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Foodblogging

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

Foodblogging has always straddled the line between awesome and pretentious in my mind, but I’ve been feeling the urge to try of late. I tossed up one meal picture not too long ago, and I’m going to go ahead and add a category for food-related blogging to the primitive little tagging system Flatpress supports. I’m really not sure if it’s going to be an occasional “Look what I did!” picture or something more diverse and/or useful, but I fully intend to do whatever I feel like with it and find out. Food post to follow.

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Apple’s Flatland Asthetic

Posted on 2009-09-21 by pappp

I’ve found something very offputting about Apple’s much touted UI design since around 2001 (the advent of OS X), and have never quite been able to put my finger on what the issue is, until I came across this series of articles by Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, the founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group and one of the Distinguished Older Persons of the HCI world. He calls the problem the “Flatland Asthetic”, which he patly describes as “The new Apple seems to subscribe to the the belief that visual simplicity equals actual simplicity.” To put this more aggressively, Apple designs interfaces that are elegant until you use them in non-trivial ways. The biggest way in which this is offensive is where they have actively re-introduced problems long solved by hierarchy in computing, usually by taking away directories (folders. Whatever nomenclature you prefer) in places a consistent interface would allow them. I would also say the problem extends further back that Tog is giving credit for; even the much maligned one button mouse can be explained as an instance of the same ethos.

For some real-world examples, a few days ago I was watching my father use his G5 Tower (OS 10.4), trying to shuffle through a pile of icons which automagically piled themselves one on top of the other in the upper right hand corner of the (shockingly full) desktop, a behavior broken in exactly the same way as Windows 95. He then went to find an application in the dock… which had “elegantly” scaled down to near-illegibility because he had a non-trivial number of applications open or pinned (side-gripe: I still don’t like the confusing commingling of running applications and shortcuts, but with it being in Windows 7 as well now, it looks like I’m in the minority). Generally, any place where the UNIX-derived presumption “Everything is a File, and all files can be manipulated in the same way” is violated, I get unhappy (which explains my contempt for iTunes/iPhoto style “manager” programs as well).

I concede that some of the problems have been remedied, at least a little bit, in the most recent versions of OS X, with features like the the drawers (to use the CDE phrase, I have no idea what Apple calls them) in the dock. I would say these are band-aid solutions over a festering problem with mentality.
I’ve had my (obviously not entirely solitary) rant, now I’ll go back to my customized, bewildering to all others XFCE environment…

* a phrase I’m found of, borrowed from Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose’s White Mars, the first half (or so) of which is excellent.

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Dorkbotlex #6 – Results

Posted on 2009-09-20 by pappp

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It was, as always, a great show, with lots of inspiring local projects and an engaged audience. Hopefully sometime in the not TOO distant future I’ll actually get one of the hobby projects (the ones that are not so technical as to make non-engineers’ eye’s glaze over) done enough to show.

The usual, photos from the event are up on my flickr stream.

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