Misuse

Science makes his own seitan. It’s a great meat substitute for vegetarians so long as you aren’t on a gluten free diet b/c seitan is almost pure gluten. But for the rest of us, this is a delicious, vegetarian, low cost and high quality protein for use in almost any savory recipe that calls for meat.

A good seitan receipe that I’ve had luck with:

Short form:
2 cups vital wheat gluten to 1 cup salty liquid, kneaded, shreaded, boiled for 5 minutes and served.

Read on for the long form recipe.
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Science goes to Brisbane Australia. Our friends Dave and Jaquel have opened a stylish, modern cafe in the heart of South Brisbane. Their previous restaurants have been great but this one is a revelation! They offer a wonderful selection of traditional Spanish tapas and mains, with a few clever, tasty Mexican infusions. Their Sangria is delightful, light with lovely spices. They have a great selection of Spanish wines with a few aussie ones in there too. I had not seen their Spanish beers sold anywhere else in Brisbane – the Moritz was great. As a vegetarian, they had a great set of options including a black bean and salsa taco, goat cheese and pumpkin croquettes, spanish tortilla and a beautifully simple garbonzo bean and spinich dish.

For the meatier, definitely check out their Spanish ham – thinly sliced and as good as you’ll find in spain. Their steak plate comes with corn torillas that they make on the premises and traditional guacamole. The custard dessert finished off the night for us, leaving everyone satisfied. All in all I found this restaurant to be priced reasonably with excellent quality and great service.

They’re located at 154 Melbourne St in South Brisbane. Hours are M-F 12n-11pm, Sa 5:30pm-11pm. Granada website is here.

Read this book. All of you. It’s the most accessible and enlightening expression of a personal philosophy I’ve ever read, and good words to live by. The more people who read this book, the nicer place we’ll all live in. A wonder on two wheels. I like D Byrne even more now.

Science has been working with the Federal government for the last six months, which has been an education in itself. I ran across the following quote recently which I think is worth sharing. There’s a lot of talk in DC about a “high quality education” but often those comments are ill-informed as to what a student looks like after they have gone through such an experience. The following quotation is as good a description as I’ve seen as to what a quality education can offer:

“At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism… You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.”

– William Johnson Cory, 19th Century Headmaster at Eton

The Speakeasy in El Cerrito is now facing the same fate as the now closed Parkway. From Kyle and Catherine:

“As many of you know, Speakeasy Theaters has been experiencing extreme financial difficulty since opening the Cerrito Theater.  We learned much from the closing of the Parkway.  Of most importance, we learned that our patrons would have preferred more warning of its impending closure.  The El Cerrito City Council is meeting on Monday, May 18th to discuss the fate of the Cerrito Theater.  Speakeasy Theaters has already agreed to leave as operators and we have offered to locate and train a new operator.

If any of this is of interest to you, I suggest that you attend the meeting.“

Sometimes you just read a blog post that’s so good, there’s no need to clarify it or anything. I just suggest that you read Witold Rugowski’s post on how to force classes to reload in development in Rails. At the very least you’ll learn something about how Rails works:

Reloading plug-ins in development mode

I found a nice article recently which lets you remove the batch files from Ruby when running on Windows, so you don’t get those annoying, redundant cmd messages “Terminate Batch Job (y/n)” whenever you press ctrl-c within Ruby. My version (1.8.6) exits cleanly now – thanks Ruby Rambler!

http://rubyrambler.blogspot.com/2007/10/terminate-batch-job-yn-y.html

My specific steps for fixing Rake are:

1. rename “rake.bat” to “rake.bat.orig” (or whatever)
2. rename “rake” to “rake.rb”

Testing in Rails is crucial to effective development. Many people have opted for rspec over Test::Unit for this, but I find that Test::Unit meets all my needs. It’s simple and reliable, which is all I want in a test framework.

I do want two pretty simple features for Rails tests though. I want to manually run a single test easily, and sometimes even just run a single method inside a test. I also want to automatically re-run a test, whenever that test file is edited.

I’ve written some rake tasks to accomplish these basic activities – hopefully you’ll find them as useful as I do.
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Science is simply the process of approximating observed complexity.

These data just in from Netcraft, Chinese site qq.com goes from 3 sites to the third largest webserver provider in a month simply by enabling blogging for its users. Bigger than Goggle’s blogger, bigger than Microsoft’s Live Spaces and bigger than MySpace. In a month.

Source: Netcraft Web Survey Survery Feb 2009
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