Tao Of Foo

I’ve been asked for this recipe several times this week so I thought I’d post for all to enjoy.  It’s a pain to make but oh so yummy.

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

I’ve always prided myself in being an omnivore.  There’s pretty much no food I patently dislike and I’ll try just about anything.  Amy always tells me that if we signed up for the Amazing Race I’d be the one who’d rock all the food challenges.

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

Yesterday Ben decided he wanted his training wheels off. I think he’s been ready for this for quite some time now but every time I asked he would always say no. Yesterday was the day though. He had already bent one of the training wheels up a bit and it wasn’t going to repair easily. I asked him as I’ve asked him dozens of times, “Ben, should I just take them off completely?” I was a bit surprised when he said “Sure!!!”

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.

The other day Ben disappeared into his room for a while before finding me and presenting me with a note he wrote all by himself. He’s getting really good at de-constructing words and sounding them out but he usually needs a little prompting to do something like this. This was the first time he had ever done this all by himself.

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.

Evan Christopher Anderson was born on at 1:47pm on June 10th.  He weighed in at 9lb 5oz and measured out at 20.75 inches.  Everyone is happy, healthy and recovering.  I’ll update with some pictures once I have caught up on some email.

Things have been pretty crazy around the Anderson household lately.

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!!!

My lovely wife recently asked me publicly about the things I love. Here’s a quick list.

• 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.

Last weekend we picked up a new member of the family. Sophie Sky Anderson is a 7 week old Pembroke Welsh Corgi. She’s utterly adorable and Ben is about as happy as you could imagine a 4 (but almost 5) year old little boy could be.

And, as usual, we have lots of pictures.

Lots of techies are out there right now thinking ahead to 2008 and what might be. Here’s a few random thoughts. Hopefully the tongue-in-cheek entries will be self evident.

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.

A few weeks ago Steve Yegge posted an article about code base size and it’s negative effect on projects.  While I agree that his example of a 500k LOC project is horrid I’d have split some hairs here and say that lines of code (or bloat as he refers to it) isn’t the problem.  The problem is a horrible application architecture and lines of code is just one of the symptoms.  Other symptoms may include execution speed, memory consumption, lack of encapsulation, security vulnerabilities or a host of other issues.  I’m curious as to what political/managerial/architectural situation arose that allowed a single application code base to grow so large.

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.