My Wushu Blog

Tools

• 2 cookie sheets
• 1 large mixing bowl
• 1 medium mixing bowl
• parchment paper

The Ingredients

The Dry Stuff

• 4 cups of AP flour
• 1 cup of Vegetable Shortening (original recipe called for lard, Michele winced at the mention of that though )
• 3 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of kosher salt

The Wet Stuff

• 1 package of dry yeast
• 1/2 cup of lukewarm water
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 cup of lukewarm milk

The Icing

• 1 tablespoon of water
• 1 cup of powdered sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Fillings

Fruits can be used, like { raisins, dates, prunes, apricots, cherries}, I use a brown sugar and chopped walnuts filling, with some small butter chunks. This was how my Grandma Mary made it, and that is how I like it.

Directions:

Dissolve the dry yeast in 1 cup of lukewarm water. It will take a few minutes for the yeast to “wake up”, so set it off to the side.

In a large bowl, mix the Dry Stuff (flour, shortening, sugar and salt). Mix it well enough so it will clump together, and break apart. Like a pie crust.

Now for the Wet Stuff. In another bowl, separate the 3 egg yolks. Beat them together, and add in 1 cup of lukewarm milk and the yeast.

Combine the Wet Stuff into the Dry Stuff, mix well.

Cover the bowl with saran wrap, and place in the refrigerator over night.

Sleep…

Day Two

Prepare a surface area to roll the dough out on. Sprinkle with flour.

Prepare the cookie sheets by covering them with the parchment paper.

Split the dough into 4 equal parts.

Roll each one out, make them as long as your cookie sheet and 9 inches wide.

When you roll one out, transfer it to a cookie sheet. Sprinkle your filling, in this case, brown sugar+chopped walnuts+a little bit of butter down the middle.

Fold both sides, one over the other. Repeat for the next three. You should be able to fit two on one cookie sheet.

Let them rise for 2-3 hours. This may vary, I let mine rise for 4 hours in a colder environment. My Dad told me that they were originally left out for 2 – 3 hours next to their stove.

Two Hours later…

Bake in the oven for 20 – 30 minutes at 350F

Mix your icing ingredients together, and while the Kringle is still warm, coat generously

You may also sprinkle some crushed walnuts on top as well.

EAT!

I totally ripped off Alton Brown for this format While I was making the dough, Caralyne said I looked like “the Good Eats guy…”. She said it in a tone that meant she wasn’t complimenting me, but I’m going to take it as one anyway.

This recipe was from my Grandma Mary, and she made a bunch of them every year around Christmas. She taught my sister and Michele how to make it, and last year I helped Michele, but this year I want to do as much of it as I could myself. I feel very proud that I can continue this tradition.

My Grandparents were originally from Wisconsin, where there is more of a Dutch and Swedish community. It is also, as was explained to me by my Grandma, extremely cold. When my Grandpa Hap was stationed at Camp Stoneman, Pittsburg CA, my Grandma moved out here with him. My Grandma liked the warm California weather, and when it came time to go back home she demanded they stay. My Grandpa was a little resistant, so my Grandma asked,

What does Wisconsin have that California doesn’t?!

to which my Grandpa simply said,

Danish Kringle.

So, the deal was made, my Grandma would make Kringle, and they would stay in Sunny California.

That is the Carlson legend anyway.

My Dad also said that he only knows of one other place in California that makes Kringle, and that is in Solvang, CA.

mike Cooking Cooking, Good Eats, Kringle

!!!
I came home with Owen last night, it was dark in the house. I was going to Owen’s room to get him ready for bed, and I went to the corner of the room to turn the light on. What I forgot, and didn’t see, was my guitar that I left of the floor. I normally lean it up against my computer, or the wall, but sometimes I’ll leave it on the floor to encourage Owen to play with it. I guess that wasn’t such a good habit to get into.

Repairing a neck like that would cost about as much as I bought that guitar for, so I’ll pull down Michele’s old acoustic guitar.

mike Music guitar

I recently had a little problem with a new FreeBSD install, and it is one of those times were I sort of appreciate how FreeBSD assigns device handles, yet at the same time hate it

The setup is this:
The OS was installed on a mirrored hardware raid device (using the mpt(4) driver), and then I had a large RAID6 array attached via a FC controller (using the isp(4) driver). When I installed the OS, the mpt device was showing up as da0. So I went ahead with the install and rebooted the system, so far so good.

What I didn’t realize was the FC device was not seen yet, so after some fiddling, Jenny and I got the large RAID6 array to show up… unfortunately, the isp card was before the mpt card on the PCI bus:

isp0@pci0:2:1:0: class=0x0c0400 card=0x01321077 chip=0x63221077 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'QLogic Corporation'
device = 'QLA6322 Fibre Channel Adapter'
class = serial bus
subclass = Fibre Channel
mpt0@pci0:2:3:0: class=0x010000 card=0x30601000 chip=0x00501000 rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
device = 'SAS 3000 series, 4-port with 1064 -StorPort'
class = mass storage
subclass = SCSI

and the RAID6 now became da0, and the OS device now became da1.

Doh!

The system prompted for the / drive, so I had to call out the correct device at the mount> prompt:

mount> ufs:/dev/da1s1a

After that, the system continue to boot into mult-user mode, which cause some very strange console behavior (it acted like the return key was being held down), and my only option was to SSH in as local user, su to root, and then fix /etc/fstab.

This was not devastating, however, it show the importance of using disk labels instead of device handles in certain use cases. I haven’t fixed the / mount, but to get a comfort level with using GEOM labels I added another drive to the system and called it EXPORT.

You can assign a permanent label in two ways (that I know of). When you newfs the device, you can specify the L flag (BTW, -O2 means to use UFS2, and -U will use Soft-Updates):
[root@paper ~]> newfs -O2 -U -L EXPORT /dev/da2s1a
OR using glabel (which is what you would have to do for a non UFS filesystem.
[root@paper ~]> glabel create EXPORT da2s1a
Now we can see our newly labeled device in action:
[root@paper ~]> ls /dev/label
. .. EXPORT
[root@paper ~]> glabel status
Name Status Components
label/EXPORT N/A da2s1a

To add it to /etc/fstab, you can either edit the file, or append the correctly tab-delimited line like so:

[root@paper ~]> echo "/dev/label/EXPORT\t/export\tufs\trw\t2\t2" >> /etc/fstab
[root@paper ~]> mkdir /export
[root@paper ~]> mount export

Hurray!

[root@paper ~]> df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da1s1a 60931274 4754540 51302234 8% /
devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev
tank 10569645824 107237376 10462408448 1% /tank
/dev/label/EXPORT 132022788 4 121460962 0% /export

[root@paper ~]> mount
/dev/da1s1a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, multilabel)
tank on /tank (zfs, NFS exported, local)
/dev/label/EXPORT on /export (ufs, local)


This is now a persistent label. To be safe, I’ll have to boot off of a CD/USB drive and modify the root device.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, GEOM, Jenny, Labels

A few weeks ago, I was snapping some pictures of Owen in the back yard

And I brought the camera focus on my long time yard nemesis:

No one was home (beside Owen), which means I didn’t have any adult supervision, and I wanted to see how difficult it would be to cut the tree down. I grabbed my small hand saw and cut down one of the trees. It was pretty easy, and felling that tree felt pretty good. With that, I started cutting away with my hand saw.

Shortly after cutting down a few other branches, things got complicated:

the branch that fell in the neighbors yard caused a little dilemma. I didn’t see anyone home, and the branch was crushing the fence, and, the heaviest part was hovering over their pool pump. I’ve never met them, but I felt it was best if I hopped the fence with my primitive tools to cut it up, and then clean it up, hopefully before they got back ( I didn’t know how they would feel about a stranger in their yard). After deducing that they didn’t own a dog, I hopped over and go busy. It took maybe 30 minutes to cut it all up and heave it over to my yard. When I was almost done, I heard a voice behind me…

You can put the rest in my yard waste bin on the side of the house… and thank you for cutting that down.

I was pretty happy that he wasn’t upset with the situation (and its a good thing he only saw the small stuff, and not the entire branch ), and it was even nice to feel like he appreciated getting rid of that eye-sore of a tree.

The next day I was able to tackle the main trunk. It had a few off-shoots, and I got as many as I could, however, I ended up making the tree back-heavy by taking off a large cluster on the front. That meant that all the weight was hovering other the other neighbors yard, and if this tree fell improperly, it would cause a lot of damage.

So the next day, Michele called her Dad, and then my Step Dad (Big Mike), and they had it down in 5 minutes. This was while I was at work, and I felt a little robbed, but it was a little hazardous to leave that tree up in its partially hacked away state. And hey, at least they left the clean-up duty for me

It took me 3 weekends, each weekend I took a full truckload to the wood recycle center on Loveridge in Pittsburg, to get the majority of it. I spread it out over 3 weekends because I cringed every time I had to pay $22 for a truckload.

This weekend I was able to get almost the rest of the debris in our yard waste bin:

I had a lot of fun doing it… that seems odd for me to say. As much as I hated doing this same sort of thing with my Step Dad for YEARS, I’m actually starting to appreciate this sort of activity. I was on such a roll that I decided to put up our lights the same weekend I did the tree:

mike General yard work

I’ve always had a vested interest in the entire nvidia display driver for FreeBSD project, and I’ve pretty attached to the project. So much, that back in 2001 I started a little petition, got enough attention (and more importantly, a large list of people who signed my petition), and ever since 2002 FreeBSD users have been able to use high quality nvidia drivers. It wasn’t all me, whoever ran nvidia.netexplorer.org asked me to combine efforts, and I gave them my list, and they continued to market it and work with some folks at nvidia.

It is really nice to see that both the FreeBSD team and nvidia have worked together to do the necessary kernel development and get a 64bit driver. I used to use FreeBSD as my primary desktop at work, and it was great to use the hardware drivers for my displays. What is also nice is people in the nvidia forums are also asking for CUDA drivers on FreeBSD, that would be slick as well.

Digg the story if you want too:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Official_64bit_NVIDIA_drivers_for_FreeBSD

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, nvidia

So, it looks like FreeBSD 8.0 has been pre-released; the official date is going to be 11/25, as noted in src/UPDATING:

Updating Information for FreeBSD current users

This file is maintained and copyrighted by M. Warner Losh
.  See end of file for further details.  For commonly
done items, please see the COMMON ITEMS: section later in the file.

Items affecting the ports and packages system can be found in
/usr/ports/UPDATING.  Please read that file before running
portupgrade.

NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 8.x IS SLOW ON IA64 OR SUN4V:
        For ia64 the INVARIANTS and INVARIANT_SUPPORT kernel options
        were left in the GENERIC kernel because the kernel does not
        work properly without them.  For sun4v all of the normal kernel
        debugging tools present in HEAD were left in place because
        sun4v support still needs work to become production ready.

20091125:
        8.0-RELEASE.
...

Thanks for the warning, and I don’t feel that 8.0 is slow in any way

You can now update to FreeBSD 8.0 with either syncing your source with csup:

*default host=cvsup.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all release=cvs tag=RELENG_8_0

Or with freebsd-update(8):

# freebsd-update -r 8.0-RELEASE upgrade

then

# freebsd-update install

and after the reboot, possibly another round of ‘freebsd-update install” to finish things up. You can actually upgrade from 7.2 to 8.0, which is pretty impressive since they are considered major releases (and minor release upgrades work just fine as well).

Why would you upgrade to 8.0 over 7.2? Well, Ivan Voras already has a very nice page on the notable features in 8:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html
In case you want my short list version of that, here are the big highlights for me:

• Kernel Stuff
  • Kernel limit on amd64 increased (this greatly benefits ZFS)
  • Superpages
  • Network stack virtualization, equal cost multipath routing and other really cool network improvements
  • NGROUPS has been increased from 16 to 1024
  • Other kernel improvements like light weight threads, the new ULE 3.0 Scheduler
  • NFS Locking
  • Qlogic 8GB HBA support
  • New AHCI driver
• Userland Stuff
  • Parallel port builds
  • Jails v2
  • Dtrace
  • CLANG/LLVM Compiler

One of the cool things about FreeBSD is its focus on improving what is there. There have been some really big additions to FreeBSD from time to time, but overall, the goal has been to constantly refine and improve the performance. That is what I’m mostly excited about, the continual refinement of an already robust OS.

There are other features, like CLANG and LLVM or Dtrace, where I’m excited about them, but only because I can’t wait to see how others use them. I myself cannot obtain a lot of useful information from Dtrace, however, a kernel developer who knows what they are doing probably can, and that helps them out (which sometimes helps me out).

I’ve used the BETA and RC versions of 8.0, so not only was I pleased with the experience, I’m also excited to see its adoption with the new improvements. I’ve seen some PostgreSQL and MySQL benchmarks and there was a clear performance gain between 7 and 8.

Now is also a good time to mention that the FreeBSD Foundation is rounding up this years donations.

It’s pretty amazing that FreeBSD is a non-profit group; they do not have a CEO, a marketing department, or a horde of full-time developers… and yet they put out a extremely well engineered OS ( that is the boon of not having a marketing department all decisions are driven by the community demand and the developers, and not buzz-words like “the cloud”) with a killer network stack, and over 22,000 available ports.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD

My parents had my nephews this weekend, so my Step Dad called me around 10 this morning to ask if Caralyne and I wanted to go fishing with him and the boys. Caralyne seemed really excited about the idea of going on a boat and fishing, so we got ready and met them at their house.

We launched out of Big Break, which is familiar territory. My Dad owned a bait shop here, Hook Line & Sinker, and he also lived in the house right behind the shop for a while. My Sister and I spent a lot of time down here at the marina.

It is also the same marina that Big Mike used to drag me out to in the wee hours of a Saturday morning to fish with him in a tournament. He told the kids today that I was once a “Tournament Fisherman”, with some pride. It is safer to say that I was the official catcher for his grand catches, and I was also the one who would eat their share of the food within the first 20 minutes of the tournament

So, just like me, with in 10 minutes of being on the water, all the kids said that they were hungry, bored and thirsty. Mike and I kind of laughed at each other since we seemed to be enjoying the outing, also laughing at the fact that we were the only ones fishing.

After a few hours to re-baiting worms

Un-snagging tangled lines, and explaining to 3 kids why this was fun; Big Mike decided to head in, and stop by Jack in the Box. If we had to live off of the land, we would have either had to eat worms, or starve

Big Mike wasn’t done though, he had another idea which involved on of his ranch hand duties. He has to regularly smooth out the large riding arena, and he does this with a tractor pulling a large wooden fence post. He decided to nail a piece of plywood to that post, and let the kids sit on it while he re-paved the arena:

I’m pretty exhausted now from corralling kids all day, and I inhaled a lot of dusty sand taking pictures on The Implement. More photos are on my main site’s photo gallery.

mike Family

Step 1: The Question

Background:
I was watching a new episode of Good Eats (Season 13, Episode 7) and Alton Brown was going over a good coffee recipe he called “Man Coffee”. It had a decent ratio of grounds to water, a coarse grind, and he employed the use of a French Press. Then, to my surprise, he added a bit of Kosher Salt.

So, being the unapologetic AB fan that I am, I decided to see how the addition of salt would taste. I had it on my coffee over the last two weeks, off and on, and I decided that I liked the additional flavor. Michele was skeptical, and didn’t think I could actually tell the difference and it was all in my fan-boy head. I admitted this was a likely scenario, and as a good scientist I have to be honest with the data; and that is the Placebo Effect does have a measurable outcome. So, I told her that I would do a blind taste test and see if there was any noticeable flavor in salted coffee.

So, the question is: Can I taste the difference between regular coffee, and coffee brewed with kosher salt.

Step 2: Research

I did a little google-ing about why people put salt in their coffee. The consensus seemed to be that it can help take away the bitterness, however, if you use enough coffee grounds you should not taste any of the acidic bitterness. Coffee becomes bitter for two reasons:

• the essential oils are washed away during the extraction process, leaving the acidic compounds (those coffee compounds are volatile, so you also have to grind the beans and brew them quickly!)
• the coffee is left on a burner longer than it should

Okay, there are more than two, but I’m not a barista or a chemist so that is all I can cover

I normally grind and brew immediately, and I use about 6 tablespoons for 4 cups of coffee which is “a lot”. I think I avoid the common bitterness pitfalls, and adding salt (to me) just seemed to add more body to the coffee.

The test is only to answer the question about detection, and not if it enhances the coffee’s flavor. That would have to be another trial, and I would need more voulenteers and cups…

Step 3: Propose a Hypothesis

I hypothesize that a pinch of salt to the coffee grounds does add a noticeable effect.

That is pretty straight-forward

Step 4: Test with an Experiment

I decided on a regular blind taste test. I wanted to do a double blind test, however, since I was the subject and Caralyne can’t make coffee, Michele had to brew and pour the samples. I also had to settle for 4 cups (those were the only clean and similar cups we had), I wanted a dozen at least so I would have a large enough sample size.

The problem with this test is that both Michele and I are biased; she knew which cup had what, and I knew what the test was about and what I was looking for in the coffee.

The test is simple, I ground up about 12 tablespoon’s worth of Kirkland Coffee.

I put 6 in a cup with a pinch of salt, and 6 all alone. Each one was brewed with the same coffee maker, with 4 “cups” of water and poured into identical plastic pitchers.

Michele labeled the tasting cups, and I sat down to have a taste of each one, marking which ones I liked more than the others.

Step 5: Analyze Results, Draw a Conclusion

After my 4 samples, Michele and I both decided that there was a difference in taste, and I did prefer the one with salt. She didn’t like either, but that is normal since she doesn’t like the strong coffee I make anyway (she calls it “Cat Pee coffee”, which makes me think of Tiger Brand Coffee:

Tiger Brand Coffee is a real treat, even tigers prefer a cup of it to real meat

).

Conclusion

The salt does add flavor, so this is almost like me drinking a Holiday Spice or Hazelnut coffee. It’s not real untampered coffee, but it is a nice treat. I also tend to drink more water in the morning when I have it, so thats not a bad thing since coffee is a diuretic.

I’d like to acknowledge

• Alton Brown and his excellent show Good Eats
• Science Buddies dot org for their excellent page on The Scientific Method
• Wikipedia for their articles on Blind and Double Blind Testing
• My good friend and co-worker, Jenny, for giving me some great ideas on how to help narrow the test down to get useful results.
• Mr Swarm, my 7th grade science teacher at Park Jr. High, who introduced an entire class to the Scientific Method and let us perform real experiments with fire and food.
• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, a great science podcast that teaches me the difference between “theory” and “hypothesis”

Have a Scien-tastic day!

mike Geekyness blind taste test, coffee, Good Eats, the scientific method

I've been a "PC" user since I was in grade school. Well, technically, the first computer I owned was a hand-me-down Atari ST that had a broken printer and a flight simulator. That almost makes me a "Mac" user since it was based on the same hardware (Motorola 68K cpu). All of my (3) friends had computers, all PC's running DOS, and their primary motivation was to play all of the cool adventure games from Sierra Entertainment. So, when I had a very unsuccessful time getting Conquests of Camelot to run on my Atari ST I was pretty motivated to join my geeky buddies. Oh the months of begging and pleading that followed, fun times indeed. Nostalgia aside, I've been using a computer primarily for games (only around 98 did I start running other OS's) for a large portion of my life. I started with MS-DOS 5.0 on a Packard Bell 386SX 20Mhz with 1MB shared memory: All the while, I've never actually paid for an operating system. I bought a copy of SuSE Linux once, and a copy of FreeBSD at CompUSA years ago. Those were only $10 - $20 at most. Commercial OS's have always been pretty pricey from my point of view, and they have only gotten more expensive over the years. What typically happens is I find a way to get the OS for free:

• Vista - Free, I took a survey and ran some monitoring software for 3 months
• XP - Free, I got an academic license from DVC
• Windows 2000 Pro - Free, I got a copy when I worked at Great Entertaining.com. So I could "work from home"...
• Windows 98SE - "Free"... a friend of a friend brought a few copies back from Taiwan.

Every OS before that was either OEM (like from a Packard Bell), or a friend let me copy it... there, I admit it. I used my friends copy of MS-DOS 6.20, Windows 3.11 as well. To be fair, it was so un-usable on my 486 that I had to remove it. It also took up a large portion of my 100MB Dae Woo hard drive. So what has changed? Why did I actually BUY a copy??? It is not because of features or my love for Microsoft. It is for three reasons:

• I have a copy of Vista Ultimate (64bit) that I got for FREE by taking a survey and running software for 3 months.
• I have a Directx10 GFX card and a decent catalog of DX10 games now.
• Getting a free and legitimate copy has become very difficult now.

With that, I was able to purchase the Upgrade edition which revoked my Vista product ID. I never used Vista because I disliked it, and it wouldn't boot after its first round of updates. The install of Windows 7 was much nicer, and a lot quicker. I do enjoy its substantially faster boot times, even compared to XP, and it is really nice not to have to fetch drivers for all my hardware. Even the all-in-one canon printer we just got, it worked right off the bat which is normally unheard of in the Windows world. There are a few things I wish Windows would do; mostly things that I enjoy from other coolers OS's like FreeBSD and Linux:

• Virtual CD/DVD devices - I still have to use a 3rd party tool to mount ISO's
• Mount Points - I HATE referring to device handles like 'C:' and 'D:', it reminds me of VMS
• Support for the mouse wheel in everything. The Gnome environment excels at this. It is such a simple concept that I'm really amazed other OS's don't do it
• Built-in SSH client - This is knit-picking, but it would be awesome to have
• Cool GNU tools like md5sum, gunzip, tar, lynx, etc...

I can still accomplish all of the above with toolsets like gnuwin32, putty, etc.. it would have been nice not to rely on that. Nice trip down memory lane, and how about that timeline huh? That took me a while to figure out, it is called SIMILE Timeline, and they had a nice example in their documentation. It's fun to find new ways to represent information.

mike Geekyness Packard Bell, timeline, Windows 7

I saw one of my Wushu Buddies picture on facebook (James). The picture is him as an angst filled teenager, with a closely shaved head and a goatee, playing an electric guitar. I sported a similar look, and I play as well, so that prompted me to dig through some old photos. I only have one picture of me during that time (I never owned a camera until 2000): Then I realized, its not just James and I that look alike, we ALL looked alike. What a bunch of white boys In that photo box I found a bunch of other pictures I have. I'm not sure why I have a lot of them, they seem like the kind of pictures my Parents should have. Not that I'm going to give them up, I will do one better though and put them online for everyone to enjoy. The originals will be on my main website's photo gallery.

You know where to find the rest, hope everyone enjoys these!

mike Family