Baklava

4 cups chopped nuts (pecans and/or walnuts)
1/2 cup sugar
1tsp cinnamon
1 box fillo dough
1 cup butter (melted)
12oz honey (heated until runny)

• Grease a 13×9 baking pan
• mix nuts, sugar, cinnamon
• alternate 6 buttered layers of fillo dough and 1 cup nut mixture
• cut serving slices 1/2 way through
• pour remaining butter on top
• cook at 300 for 1hr 25min
• remove from oven, immediately pour on honey
• let cool for several hours

Variations:

• add ground cloves to sugar/nut mixture
• add whole cloves to honey while heating, remove cloves before pouring
• add a whole clove to the top of each serving
• substitute honey with syrup (water + sugar + small amount of lemon juice), works best with pistachios

Anyway, I don’t usually do the meme thing here but I couldn’t resist this one.  Very Good Taste has a list of 100 foods all omnivores should try.  Here’s my results.  I’ve tried all the bold items and refuse to try the crossed out items.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Amy prepped her camera … I stood by ready to perform the most sacred of fatherly rituals of holding him upright and running beside him for the next half mile while he struggled to stay upright. What happened you ask? I held on for about 3 seconds before he realizes he’s under control then he speeds away and starts doing figure eights in the cul-de-sac. All I can do is watch as he does 3 perfect laps. And I mean perfect. After 3 laps he gets confident and starts doing tricks. Riding with only one hand on the handlebars. Sticking both legs out to the side. Sitting on the frame. He had this down.

WE YHD 2 D FREZ

Ben (very excited and hopeful): “Daddy, can you read it?”
Me: “Um, sorry buddy but I can’t. What does it say?”
Ben: “We watched the Tour De France. Did I get it right?”

I was very proud of him. He’s so ready for Kinder in a few weeks.

First, Ben graduated from pre-school and lost his first tooth on the same day. Awesome! He’s such a big guy now I can’t believe it. We are so proud of him.

Then a few days later we lost Daisy, our Golden Retriever, to cancer. That was pretty traumatic as one can imagine. Amy and I adopted her before we were married and she’s been such a close part of our lives ever since.

And now Amy is scheduled to be induced on June 10th. One week from tomorrow. That’s 8 days away. Wow!!!

• Food (I don’t think I’m a “foodie” but I REALLY like food, there’s nothing I patently dislike)

• wine: I’m not too particular but I really like a good shiraz or merlot
• beer: anything but american piss-beer, I really like these brands: Guinness, Duvel, Sierra Nevada, Rahr, Shiner
• cheese: blue, havarti, sharp swiss, blue cheddar (I’m drooling just thinking about it)
• bread: anything crusty, whole wheat, with chunks (that’s for you Amy), pumpernickel etc
• fruits and vegetables: about anything fresh, I’m currently growing: tomatoes, 3 kinds of peppers, squash, lettuce and watermelon
• Ms Sandy’s snow cones, mmmmm, tastes like summer

• my Ridgid 24V cordless hammer drill, it’s the best cordless drill you can buy IMHO hands down
• my Craftsman radial arm saw, it’s my general purpose work-horse saw, I love it
• my BBQ pit.
  

• U2, Toadies, NIN, Muse, Sparta, Stone Temple Pilots, Chevelle, Metallica, The Mars Volta, Burden Brothers, and many more….

• Davis Mountains, not the most beautiful mountains I’ve been to, but this family place is my zen-spot, my centering place
• our back yard, very relaxing and comforting
• my workshop (or my Man Room as Amy calls it)

• My wife and son are the joys of my life. Period.
• My family (immediate and extended) is incredible and I don’t get to spend enough time with any of them.
• My friends are all wonderful and different. Every time we have a BBQ or gathering I realize how fortunate we are.
• My job and career. I love where I work and what I do. I couldn’t ask for a better team, boss, department or company to work for. I’ve never been happier professionally.

And, as usual, we have lots of pictures.

The semantic web will become more fully realized. But you won’t notice it. It will power more and more of your daily functionality yet remain very transparent. All of your news feeds, TV listings, calendar items etc will all be managed more and more by web related delivery mechanisms. Look out for Google Mashups and Yahoo Pipes to become a lot more interesting.

The push for pure-play SOA will be replaced by simpler message bus style architectures. Techies are tired of having large scale infrastructure and application architecture pushed on them. The message here is to start small. the introduction of message bus driven architectures to solve scalability issues will help long term SOA adoption by bringing the tools and techniques in the back-door. Players to watch for in this space: WSO2, ServiceMix.

The “Web 2.0″ label will officially be retired. Subsequently “Web 3.0″ will be announced by Tim in mid ‘08.

MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn will be hit by a serious security vulnerability that will expose enough personal information (more than they already perhaps) that serious questions will be raised regarding online privacy legislation.

Google’s gPhone will launch and Android will be a smashing success. Riding the coat tails of the iPhone (and Apple fandom) will tough and traction will be difficult. Once Android is running on more platforms and people start to understand its power then phones (and their networks) running it will slowly start to become more popular. This will begin in ‘08 but wait another few years to see the revolution. Eventually even the iPhone will have an Android compatibility layer.

Kindle will fizzle more than it already has.

OLPC will not change the world. Don’t get me wrong, some really cool inexpensive technology will eventually trickle down to the masses. It will not have a significant impact on developing countries though. Reliable drinking water systems. Sustainable food supplies. Advanced education systems. These are the things that developing countries need.

Do you have an application architect? Why didn’t the application get carved up into distinct loosely coupled systems?
Do you have sufficient business representation that prevents the “just add it to application X” problems?  How does the scope of an application grow so much with no oversight?

The application bloat I’ve seen typically takes three forms:

1. Very little code reuse is taking place.  How many separate logging infrastructures do you have?  Using multiple ORM tools in the same project?  How long does it take a developer to understand all that?
2. Reinventing the proverbial wheel.  This is loosely related to #1 but I’ll call it out here because it’s so important.  If you wrote from scratch any of the following for your project you need to seriously justify your decision IMHO: ORM, logging, web framework. If your language of choice doesn’t already include suffucuent choices for these utilities then you need to reconsider your platform choices.  Avoid the “not built here so I don’t trust it” syndrome.
3. Feature-itis.  Knowing when to say “no” is a very valuable skill.  Knowing when to say “yes” conditionally is also important.  It’s ok to add that new feature but require some refactoring time so it doesn’t just add to the collective mess.  Think of architectural trade offs as a karma based system.  In other words for every shortcut you take now you make things harder on yourself later.  For example: I can add your feature in 10 days with 40% code duplication (+ 20 days of cleanup later and every other coding task has to slow down to work around this ugliness) or I can add it in 20 days with 0% code duplication (and little to none of the other slowdowns).  It’s acceptable to tell the business that the feature, if done properly, will take 20 days to implement.  In fact it’s your duty to recommend the slower approach.  If you have a boss who doesn’t understand those trade-offs you need to start looking for another job.

I’ve seen (and worked at) both kinds of mistakes and they all contribute to code bloat but that isn’t their biggest problem.  Bringing new talented developers up to speed on the whole system is a monstrous adventure.  No single developer understands enough of the entire codebase to affect significant change.  The systems become so brittle over time that making small changes involves enormous regression testing challenges.

You are a developer.  It’s your duty to protect the integrity of the code base you are working on.  That’s part if what your company is paying you to do.  Yes there will be pressures to deliver faster.  Yes there will be pressures to do things that violate your developer principals.  That’s part of life.  Accept it.  Now that you can take a deep breath what are you doing to protect your code base?  Do you have a solid architectural plan that you can show to your PHB that lets him know how this feature fits into the greater system?  Do you have at least some high-level design documents that allow you to justify your position?  Are you prepared to defend your position to your stakeholders.  “While it’s technically possible to add feature X in 10 days that will have a negative net impact on the whole project and here’s why…”.
Also, don’t think that merely switching to/from a waterfall, agile etc shop will magically fix these issues.  It won’t I’ve seen both kinds of development shops make all of these mistakes.

In October we learned that Amy was pregnant. Shortly thereafter her morning sickness started in earnest. At one point it was bad enough for us to spend an evening in an emergency care facility. Another time her doctor admitted her to the hospital for a few days. Thankfully is has been subsiding though lately for us to enjoy a wonderful Christmas. With some help we pulled off a spectacular feast complete with smoked turkey, cornbread and shrimp stuffed acorn squash and roasted french green beans.

In the last few months Ben has answered answered every Christmas present query with a puppy. Amy and I weren’t quite sure how to answer that request other than to say that Santa makes toys, not puppies. Then we took Daisy (our 8 year old Golden Retriever) to the vet to have a lump on her back looked at. They removed a handful of cancerous tumors from inside her back, neck and leg. X-Rays showed that the cancer has spread to her lungs and lymphatic system. Bottom line, she has roughly 6 months to live. Now we are thinking that a puppy sounds like the perfect companion to help him through losing his best friend. Santa brought (among many other cool things) a dog Encyclopedia so he and Amy have spent several days pouring through it to search for the perfect puppy. Looks like we’ll be looking for a Corgi in a few months. For now though Daisy is fine and has recovered from her surgery with flying colors.

Here’s to a strong finish to 2007 and a wonderful 2008. It may have a few rough spots but we’re looking forward to a new puppy and new baby.

Her morning sickness is not at all limited to the mornings but it not nearly as bad as it was with Ben. We’ve already been to an emergency clinic for an IV and she’s been on several different medications. A particular combination of them seems to be mostly doing the trick lately but she’s still having a pretty rough time of it all. It’s been bad enough that she has decided to put the business on hold until she can offer the quality photography and customer service she is committed to deliver.

Anyway, we are all happy and excited. Ben is hoping for a little brother and is already picking out names. Bob and Santa Claus are his top picks at the moment.

If you call us and we don’t answer or we don’t return your call right away, please bare with us.  It’s not that we don’t want to hear from you, it’s just not easy for Amy to talk on the phone when she feels so bad.

• No client-side database transactions.
• Database partitioning and sharding.
• 100% stateless application tier.
• No 2 phase commits. Don’t worry about the order or failures, clean them up later.
• Only use stored procedures for ETL-like routines.
• Use lots of small soldiers instead of large soldiers. (commodity hardware, not expensive branded stuff)
• Virtualize wherever possible so horizontal scaling is more possible.

Dan sat with us at lunch one day and he’s a simple yet captivating speaker. I talked to him for a while after the Thursday night BoF he held on the eBay architecture. We talked about monitoring and I learned a few fascinating things that have really made me think differently (or reaffirm some existing hunches) about some of the architecture decisions I’ve made on many of the applications I have managed or currently manage.

Want a few crazy facts about the eBay architecture?

• 1 Billion photos
• > 1 Billion page views / day
• 26 Billion SQL queries / day
• 100 Million items for sale
• 99.94% availability
• 1 terrabyte of log files generated per day
• around 100 code branches are active at any time
• 15,000 application servers + 300 database servers
• 300 million front-end searches per day (plus tens of millions of internal searches) == more than Google

I also learned a bit more about Continuum, ActiveMQ and Groovy.

Matt Raible (as usual) gave a couple of great talks about Java web application frameworks. During Scott Davis’s talk on ATOM and REST, Bruce Snyder made a comment that he used JMS as a SOAP transport. Fascinating. Why don’t more people do that? All the message reliability you’d expect out of a message broker (guaranteed delivery, indemnity etc) with the contract of SOAP. Great idea. AMQP also seems like a great idea for message bus architectures. If you’re at all having to deal with bus interoperability, bus vendor lock-in or anything similar, give AMQP a shot.
I went to another Scott Davis talk on Grails. Grails is a new web application framework using Groovy that has borrowed a lot of rapid development techniques from Rails. The awesome thing about Grails is that is uses all of the leading Java tools like Spring and Hibernate. I have been playing around with it on and off for the last few months and I really like it so far. I’m really interested in seeing is mature more though.

Speaking of ATOM and REST, I like the philosophy of REST but I like that WSDL has basically standardized contracts for SOAP services. I’m not saying that I think WSDL is perfect by any means, but it works. I don’t usually need to read it because it’s automatically generated and automatically consumed by most implementations I manage. REST offers no such standard right now for contracts. In order to integrate with a RESTful service I either have to read the spec documents (assuming they exist) or I have to guess as to the contract. Should I ask for “/San_Antonio” or “/San+Antonio”. Read the GData spec. It’s ATOM but it still prints out to dozens of pages. Then what data type is returned? I’d have to make a request, inspect the returned XML and build a parser. Hopefully it’s supplied a schema. What a pain. And this is supposed to be better than SOAP. If a SOAP service provides a WSDL I just point my wsdl2java client to it (or equivalent in whatever language or toolkit I’m using) and I’m literally integrating against that interface within a few seconds. The WSDL provides all the contract I need to work.

I also went to a talk by Gregor Hophe of Google (and author os the awesome Enterprise Integration Paterns book) where he demonstrated a really cool and simple integration of the Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. I’ve been using Yahoo Pipes for several months and as a few coworkers can attest, I really love it. Think of it as all the fundamental UNIX utilities (pipes, sed/awk, grep, tee, sort, split etc) but for RSS/ATOM feeds. I have it take a handful of very chatty RSS/ATOM feeds, combine them, filter for certain topics and spit them out as a single feed. That mini-app too all of 45 seconds to create. Gragor’s example took a Google Calendar feed, fed it into Yahoo Pipes, did a little massaging of the format, added Geo Location data and spit the result back out to a feed. That feed he sucked into the Google Mashup Editor (new service, I just got my account today) and integrated it with a Google Map so he could see the location of his calendar events. It was a really slick lightweight integration technique.

Speaking of Google, the Google Gears demo was very cool. I know of a few people who are already getting interested in this project.

1. No vendor booths. No pressure, no commercialism, no spin. Just tech.
2. Every session is worth taking notes in. They are very techie focused. I bring my laptop and between sessions find myself playing with the stuff I just learned about.
3. Several of the speakers wrote books that I own or software that I use. Perhaps that speaks to the quality of the presenters or maybe to my taste in books and software.
4. Keystone, Colorado is incredibly beautiful. We received 18 inches of snow during the conference last year.

Last year many of the session topics covered Service Oriented Architectures and various tools often used to facilitate them. Message busses, web services, mashups etc. This year there looks to be a bunch of topics on web frameworks, architecture (SOA, scaling, monitoring, grids etc) and data. Good stuff.

Here’s a few links from last year:

• My photos.
• My blog post.
• One image from the CSS site. (Bryan and me in the background)

Well, technically our whole company is moving into an old mall. I’m doing the same job. It is just a lot more exciting to say that I’m “working at a mall now”. Rackspace is growing so fast and we have outgrown our available space in our current San Antonio offices and after evaluating a few alternative solutions (including building a Dell-like campus from scratch, moving various offices out of state etc) we have decided to take over the old (abandoned) Windsor Park Mall as our corporate headquarters.

Here’s a few interesting links related to Windsor Park Mall:

• http://deadmalls.com/malls/windsor_park_mall.html
• http://mallsofamerica.blogspot.com/2006/03/windsor-park-mall-final-call.html

Here’s a few articles covering the recent events:

• http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA080207.rackspace.EN.d699cdf1.html
• http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/neighbors/northeast/stories/MYSA081507.ne15mallimpact.135885f.html
• http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/pressreleases/PressRelease.2007-08-02.3728
• http://digdeepertexas.com/?p=582
• http://t1ra.multiply.com/links/item/186/MySAcom_State_kicking_in_22_million_for_Rackspace_move

Many people have asked me how bad my drive from Boerne will be. After driving it during the same morning hours that I normally commute it wonlt be much worse than the drive was when we were downtown. If you are ever presented with an opportunity to tour an empty mall I highly recommend it. There’s a certain eerie quality to it that I can only liken to feeling as if zombies were right around the corner.

• My pictures from our visit
• other Rackers pictures:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottsimpson/sets/72157600457390248/

Reasons not to buy an iPhone (bare with me, I’m trying to talk myself out of buying one):

1. AT&T? Yikes, Amy and I left AT&T because of how bad the coverage is out here. I’m not going back any time soon.
2. No syncing from Linux. How hard would it have been to fix this? And the OSX syncing only works with the latest and greatest version of OSX. And forget about it under 64bit Vista. Too many limitations here for me.
3. Lack of useful apps. IM? Java? Flash? SSH? Encrypted notes?  I’m not saying that these kinds of apps are used by everyone but I’m so spoiled by my Treo and the sheer number of downloadable applications.
4. No insurance? AT&T isn’t offering any for the iPhone from what I’ve heard. Is that a $500 wad of uninsured breakable cash in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
5. Phone locking up? Reports of lockups after 24 hours of use are starting to come in. These kinds of issues are typical for first generation devices and I’m sure Apple will issue a firmware update. Rev 2 and beyone will only get better in this regard.
6. No memory card support? The only reason I can think of is that Apple REALLY wants to control what and how things get loaded to this device. iTunes is the only way to sync anything to it. (see #2)

That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll find more as time goes on. I’d love to play with one though to see if the screen is as beautiful as I hear. If some of these issues get resolved I’d seriously consider dropping some cash but until then I’ll just be jealous the iPhone hater.

She took 4 prints with her yesterday and all of them scored very well for a first time entrant. This morning she checked on her scores and all of her prints did very well with one earning Honor of Exhibition (a very coveted placement especially for first time entrants).

Congratulations sweetheart. I’m very proud of you.

Update: It turns out that 3 of her 4 entries won the Honor of Exhibition status!

We might even make it to Balmorhea State Park on our way home. Ben has never been out there and it’s going to feel so nice after a couple of days of working hard up in the mountains.

As Ben was getting dressed for bed this evening he made me the following offer while standing in his bedroom completely naked:

Ben: “Daddy, smell my finger.”

Me: “Why? What does it smell like?”

Ben: “Like hot peppers, fresh tomatoes and yummy milk.”

Me: “Um, no thanks.”

I remember back in the summer of 1995 when my college roommate (Lamont Lucas, where art thou?) and I got ahold of some free ARCNET network cards and a hub we decided that we needed a seriously professional network capable operating system … to play games. We embarked on a mission to acquire Windows NT 3.51 for free (we were REALLY poor college students) to no avail. Windows 3.1 for Workgroups was rather dull and painful. We heard some rumors from some obscure newsgroups about this seemingly unknown OS called Linux. A dozen 3.5″ floppies loaded with Slackware, one solid weekend and a lot of guts later we both had working systems (my 60MHz Pentium and his 486DX2 66MHz) with no GUI. Configuring XFree86 was another matter. That took lots of trips back to the computer lab to read all about the wonderful ways that misconfigured modelines could literally turn your monitor into a smoking brick. Eventually we both had working X setups and were happily tweaking away at fvwm to get everything just right. I can still remember the first moments of having a working Linux machine at my feet and again when I had X working. It smelled like victory.

I then spent the next several years tweaking my X desktop. I tried several distributions but mostly settled on Slackware. I ran SUSE for a bit but felt more somfortable with Slackware. I also tried every window manager under the sun. Remember fvwm95? It looked just like Windows 95, only worse. Using Linux at that point wasn’t a matter of productivity, it was more a matter of pride. Another roommate of mine later told me not to waste my time on that crappy little OS because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

So my primary desktop has been Linux for the last 6.5 years (just about every version of RedHat since 6.2) and roughly 50% of the servers under management at work (Rackspace) are Linux based. It’s not going away anytime soon. I am on my 3rd laptop that has run absolutely nothing but Linux. I get the usual sneers at work when I have some obscure issue when I undock my dual-headed HP nx9420, close the lid, walk to a conference room, open the lid, connect to a projector and something doesn’t work quite right. I’m sort of used to things needing a little tweaking here and there to get working. I have to say that Fedora Core 6 on this nx9240 has been rather nice yet not trouble free. The usual Linux stumbling blocks like APM, wireless and video (crazy 1680×1050 resolution) have all worked out of the box. I did struggle with the dual headed setup though, the media card reader isn’t supported yet and the thumbprint scanner isn’t really useable. I hear these things are almost all fixed in Ubuntu so I’m thinking of switching.

Keep in mind that I’m probably the atypical Linux geek here. I don’t mind tweaking things to get them functional but I really don’t want to be required to do so. I have a job to do. I have lots of code to sling and not much time to do it. I don’t want to be wasting my time dealing jacking around with yum repository settings just to keep gstreamer from killing itself. Ideally I’d prefer my OS not get in the way.

It all comes down to this. To any of my Linux listeners: What distro do you recommend? Is Ubuntu where it’s at these days? Is Gentoo worth a shot? Should I give SuSE another shot? Is Fedora 7 going to be the shiznit? What are your thoughts?