Aria Stewart's Journal

10:00: rpc.statd goes wild!

I came in to work today to find my mac workstation spinning running rpc.statd at 100% CPU.

A quick dtruss -n rpc.statc showed that it was looping trying to read its database in /var/db/statd.status

Removing the database solves the problem neatly.

0:09: Crustimony Proseed Cake

Inspired by Winnie The Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Make the vegan vanilla base cake recipe, and add toasted sesame seeds, toasted coconut, toasted poppyseeds, and whatever dried fruit you have handy. Bake as usual. Then turn out of the pan (upside-down), brush with honey or agave, and stick under the broiler briefly until a crisp crust develops.

23:59: Ann Swissdorf's Cocoa Cake (and a generally good vegan cake base recipe)

• 1 cup white flour
• ⅔ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup water
• ⅓ cup canola oil
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredients. Add the remaining and beat until well blended. Pour into a greased 8 or 9-inch pan and bake at 350 °F for 30 to 40 minutes.

You can make a white cake by omitting the cocoa and using double the vanilla.

Makes an excellent base to make gingerbread cake, banana cake, marble cake (mix half cocoa and white cake batter in the pan, leaving a swirl), and it's the base for my Crustimony Proseed Cake.

16:16: Useful Javascript

I just created a drop-down menu with an option to add your own entries. Feel free to use.

The skinny. Demo.

16:47:

I just asked my OpenSRS/Tucows domain reseller rep about AAAA (IPv6) glue records: They are planning to support them soon! In the mean time, they can configure them manually.

21:24: Syncing AOL contacts into Gmail (or other software)

Finally there's a way to sync contacts out of AOL and into something free. Since AOL Sync is based on Funambol, it uses SyncML, and the Funambol clients.

You'll need Java, and then:

1. Download the Funambol Google Plug-In. If you want to sync into Outlook, use the AOL Sync client, or look at the other Funambol plug-ins for other systems.
2. Extract it, and run it — look in the funambol, pug-ins, then bin folders. The file is called "runGoogle.cmd" on Windows, and "runGoogle.sh" for Unix systems.
3. Go to Edit, then Communication Settings
4. Put in http://m.sync.aol.com/sync for the Server URL. Fill in your AOL username and password, and your Gmail username and password.
5. Hit OK
6. Hit Synchronize

Voila, your contacts are in Gmail

Say good-bye to a provider that has until now worked very hard on locking your contacts in.

12:33: A tumble on social issues

Disability and class (Feministe), an excellent essay, starting off as personal touch and coming to some conclusions. The comments are good.

Presente is an organization, mostly latino, for immigration policy reform.

The Purity Myth (a book, read exerpt online with google). I'm inclined to agree that the notion of 'virginity' has to go away.

17:52: Caraway-Dill bread

Mix:

1 tablespoon yeast
2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup buckwheat or rye flour
2 cups flour
2 cups water

Let sit 30 minutes

Add:

1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon dill weed, cut
1 tablespoon dill seed, whole
1 tablespoon caraway seed, whole
2 cups of flour, kneading the last bit in

Knead and add flour until a firm dough is formed

Let rise until double

Punch down and shape into loaves -- rounds and sandwich loaves both work great.

Let rise until they've increased halfway, then bake at 350 for 35 to 45 minutes.

11:59: GCC needs pluggable runtime support for Objective C

We've got four runtimes for Objective C now: Apple/NeXT's, Cocotron's, the GNU Objective C runtime, and Etoile's.

Every one requires a modified version of the compiler, meaning three sets of patches to the compiler, plus one included by default. The default runtime is arguably the most limited and antiquated of them all.

Time for a change, folks?

(Anyone want to help write a pluggable backend and simultaneously help me target GObject?)

20:37: Quick Greek Salad

Chop 1 head romaine lettuce
Add 350g feta cheese, crumbled
Add one cucumber, halved then sliced thin

Mix 150ml olive oil
a few good pinches of garlic powder and oregano leaf
Add a pinch of salt, a dash of black pepper
Add 100ml red wine vinegar

Stir and pour on salad, serve.

20:34: Miso Soup

1.5L water
squeeze of lime juice
50mL fish sauce
spoonful of dulse

Heat to simmer

Ladle a bit of broth on top of 150g miso, let sit

slice 2 carrots
½ small daikon
3 mushrooms
1/8 onion
6 brussels sprouts, halved

250g tofu, chunks

Add to broth and simmer until delicately done

Add miso mixture to soup, stir and serve.

20:28: Tamal en Elote

Beat 4 eggs, add:
1 can kernel corn
1 can creamed corn
1½ cup cornmeal
1¼ cup buttermilk
some oil (on the order of ½ cup)
green chilis
onion
garlic to taste
salt
cheese, half in, half on top

Bake 325⁰F for 1 hour or so, covered

20:27: Capresish Salad

4oz chopped pepperoni, fake if you like
4oz shredded parmesan
1 head finely shredded lettuce
8 mushrooms, halved then sliced

4oz olive oil
2oz balsamic vinegar
2 oz shredded or powdered parmesan
4 teaspoons basil
1 teaspoon oregano
½ teaspoon salt
a dash of pepper

21:08: Asian Fusion Salad

2 teaspoons five spice powder
3 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
Scramble and cook, chop up the pieces

Chop a head of lettuce
1 cucumber, thinly sliced or coarsely chopped

Hydrate 1-2 tablespoons hijiki

Sautee 10 mushrooms, sliced thick, with 2 tablespoons oil, 1 teaspoon mirin

Add the hijiki, a dash of ume plum vinegar, a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil, 2 tablespoons flaked dulse

Toss and serve, preferably cold.

12:26: How I stopped worrying and learned to love errno.h

I just spent 16 hours debugging a complicated, annoying and frustrating problem involving pages not loading in a database frontend, and being spontaneously logged out of a webmail application.

The culprit was the SQLite library (or its bindings to Ruby) being useless with error messages. An example:

#<SQLite3::CantOpenException: could not open database: unable to open database file>

This is not okay. First off, not saying what file is a little annoying, but thankfully, I can tell which file by context since this program only opens one database. Second, and most grievous, it doesn't say which system call failed (though I guess it's open(2))

and third, it doesn't say what error code. There's a reason errno.h exists, people! perror is your friend. A happy little "It didn't work" exception is no replacement for an exception that could read like this: #<SQLite3::CantOpenException: could not open database important.db: EMFILE: The process already has the maximum number of files open.></p>

I wouldn't be hacking about supposing it's a concurrency and locking issue. I'd be knowing that something's not closing files like it's supposed to, like I now know after stracing the process and seeing the real value of errno(3).

Don't do this, folks! Let exceptions carry the most information possible. If you code in C, use perror(3).

Now I get to see why my web framework isn't closing the database on a reload.

9:18: DHCP without NWAM in OpenSolaris 2008.05

I just turned off NWAM so that I could get IPv6 auto-configuration working. That part's easy:

touch /etc/hostname6.interface
svcadm disable network/physical:nwam
svcadm enable network/physical:default

The hard part is that this broke IPv4 DHCP. The trick turned out to be simple, but take a lot of playing to find:

touch /etc/hostname.interface
touch /etc/dhcp.interface

This solved errors like Failed to configure IPv4 DHCP interface(s): interface and in.routed: route 0.0.0.0 --> gateway nexthop is not directly connected

8:48: Note to users

Signal quality is measured in dBm and error rate, atmospheric pressure is measured in bar. Just sayin'.

18:27: Personal demographics

I had a thought while I was working on replying to a thread on whetherwoman's journal.

What are the things that you think most define how you interact with the world? As an example, “I'm a woman” is particularly relevant in that discussion. What informs your reactions to the world?

I have a list that feels as long as my arm in my head.

I live in a small town, and I actively try to keep the good parts about small town culture alive wherever I go. I'm acutely aware of the amount of interconnection between people in any group, and I'm happiest when I can either be in an internally well-connected group, or one where I'm introducing people to each other.

I am a comfortable, confident, happy transsexual woman, who feels no need to play a game of “passing” as a XX-chromosomed woman. It affects nearly every interaction I've had in the past years. It's made my sex life, my love life and my body something that seems very public, and that people are quite willing to start a conversation on.

Within the queer, and especially within groups of transgendered folks, I find that my tendency to be calm, a peace-maker, and my willingness to be out without confrontation is distinguishing.

I'm a spiritual person, and I have a deep respect and interest to understand religious and spiritual traditions. In my teenage years, I'd taken my family's habitual bashings of all things Christian, and it left a hole in my willingness to understand people, to feel and to relate. Now I'm finding that I have more in common in my thought processes and feelings about things with the average religious person who really thinks about their faith than I do with the atheist liberal culture I grew up in. My own beliefs align relatively well with a lot of Quaker beliefs, and a lot of the traditions speak to me deeply.

I'm white, of a lower-middle class family. My parents have no college degrees, though they're very smart and well-educated.

I have cultural associations to Argentina, latin in culture and racially white.

I grew up in a family where taking care of things oneself was the normal way to do things. My father can fix most anything around the house. We never called a plumber, handyman or repairman for anything. We educated ourselves, we designed our house ourselves, we built our house ourselves. I've watched my father repair cars, roofs, sidewalks, computers, desks, faucets. My mother made a lot of our clothes when I was young. Asking for someone to do something for me is not something I think of first.

20:22: Idea: migrating autotools into a pure gnu-make system

What if autoconf could be replaced by moving the configuration steps into makefiles, rather than vice-versa?

File paths and library lists can already be handled nicely with systems like pkg-config, with the only requirement that the pkg-config tool be in the path.

Why not move feature-detection and other configure sort of tasks into makefiles too?

A library of makefile pieces could be built that represent various autoconf tests, stored in a central directory like /usr/share/pkgconfig, ready for inclusion into GNUmakefiles. Rules might look like this:

include $(shell pkg-config gnuconf-make --variable=MAKEFILE)
all:	check-configuration

PKGCONFIG_PACKAGES=gtk2 atk lua-5.0.0
check-configuration: check-c-compiler check-cpp check-ld my-custom-check check-pkgconfig-packages

my-custom-check:
	do something here to check some part of the build

21:00: Eggplant sloppy joes

Just do it. Surprisingly yum.

15:35: First thoughts on the Nikon D70

I just picked up a Nikon D70 from a friend. It's really nice to be working with a camera and lenses that have apertures somewhat more varied than my Fuji S5200's 4-8, and a bigger sensor to boot. The Nikon sensor is just slightly grainier at ISO 800 than the Fuji is at ISO 100. Apertures as wide as 1.8 on the 50mm lens I'm using are fun!

23:03: Happy pi day!

I made blueberry-strawberry pie today in honor of pi day. Tastiest sacraments ever.

I used empanada dough instead of pie dough, and I like it a lot better. It's easier to work with, too, since you can re-roll it and it won't get tough. It's fine-textured, and flakey in a different way than pie dough. I like the way it flakes better too.

A recipe — filling:

1/4 C flour, 1/2 C sugar, 3-4 cups mixed berries, half a lemon's juice. Stir until it's a slightly mushy consistency. Kinda like oatmeal, only awesome instead of gross.

Dough (translated from Spanish):

1 cup flour, 1 stick butter (cut in pieces), a quarter teaspoon of salt, blended well. Add a third of a cup of boiling water and mix until it forms a smooth, elastic dough.

Roll like pie dough, but without the fuss and hands-off approach. Just go for it, the dough won't even stick to much thanks to the butter melted through it. Bake at 350°F until the crust starts to crisp.

13:40: News on polis

Polis, the server for nbtsc.org, went down with a two-disk glitch int its storage system. That's Not Good in general. It took 30 hours to rebuild the filesystem, but most things are intact. Mail should be up later today, web sites shortly following. I hope.

20:49: IRS drinking game, or "how to drink yourself to death to avoid paying taxes"

Rules:

• Every time a tax form's instructions refer you to the instructions for another form to determine eligibility, take a sip.
• Every time a tax is more than 20% more than expected, take a sip.
• if that tax is more than double what you expected, take a chug. If you took a sip then a chug, refill your glass and take another chug.
• Every time you see a convenience for especially small payers of tax that no business or individual could ever hope to use since amounts that small haven't existed since the depression, check this box [ ] and take a chug.
• Line 5: please enter the number of alcoholic drinks consumed so far: [ ]
• Line 6: If you are not drunk yet, enter the number of drinks required to get you drunk: [ ]
• Line 7: If line 6 is larger than line 5, enter the difference here: [ ]
• Line 8: If line 5 is larger than line 6, please calculate your blood alcohol level and enter it here: [ ]
• If line 8 is smaller than 1%, take a chug

16:57: Don't do this at home. Heck, don't do it at all.

So I picked up my phone last night, and managed to drop it backward over my shoulder into a pan of water.

Don't do this at home, guys.