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.

Long form:
Depending on humidity and some other factors (maybe about the gluten) the amount of water you should use may vary. But once you figure it out for your gluten source and location, it seems to stay the same.

The more wet the dough is that you make, the fluffier the gluten, which I think tastes bad – shoot for firm seitan for starters.

I usually use some or all of the liquid as soy sauce, but to keep salt down you might experiment. You can add other flavors and spices into the gluten flour before you add water – ginger, hot pepper, cumin or whatever suits your ultimate dish.

The basic process is this:

• Pour 2 cups vital wheat gluten flour into mixing bowl
• Add 7/8 cup water to the bowl
• Mix with a wooden spoon until incorporated
• If the dough is dry (not all the gluten is incorporated into a ball) wet the sides of the bowl with 1/8 cup water and knead the ball around the bowl to pick up the remaining flour
• If the dough is too wet (should feel damp but not wet and should be tough), add some additional gluten flour and knead into ball
• You only have to knead the ball 10-12 times at this point to make sure the dough is fully incorporated
• Bring a sauce pan full of water to a bowl, as if you were cooking pasta (salt as needed)
• Once it boils, you need to add the seitan in small chunks to the water.
• Your options are to tear it or cut it. The dough is tough and sticks very readily back to itself (or should if you made right), so tearing and cutting with a knife is hard. I roll the dough out into a long thin cylinder, hold it over the water and use kitchen shears to cut pieces (they can be irregular) into the water. Once the pieces are in the water even briefly they no longer stick to each other..
• Boil for approximately 5 minutes (a few minutes after all the pieces have floated to the surface) and remove the seitan. It is now finished and ready to put in any meal.

You can preserve the seitan for later by leaving it in the water you boiled it in, and either refrigerating or freezing. You’ll want to add a little more salt to the water at this point or the water will suck the salt from the seitan changing the flavor. Enjoy!

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.

“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

“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

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”

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.

There are some projects out there that permit continuous integration but I wrote my own a while back and was recently tuning it up, so I thought I’d publish what I’ve got. I’ve also got a solution for testing a single file or testing a single method inside a file easily.

Installation
Basically take the code below and paste it into your AppTasks.rake file under “lib/tasks” in your Rails application folder.

Usage
You get two rake tasks:

rake app:test:file

rake app:test:monitor

To test a single file type this in on the console while in your Rails app folder structure (“sample_test” is the name of the test you want to run):

rake app:test:file file=sample_test

If you want to run multiple tests, do this:

rake app:test:file file=sample_test,other_test,third_test,etc_test

If you don’t want to type out the full name of the test, and just type out enough to distinguish it from tests you don’t want to run. In this example we will run all tests whose filenames match the pattern “sample”

rake app:test:file file=sample

If you want to run a specific method inside a test, do this:

rake app:test:file file=sample name=method_to_test

Finally, if you want to use the test monitor, run this command:

rake app:test:monitor

The test monitor will boot up and continuously monitor your test folder for file changes. When it detects a change in your tests, it will re-run the test which was modified. Nothing fancy but it works for the Scientific Method. Feedback welcome!

Below is the code you need to paste into AppTasks.rake (or any Rails rake file)

namespace :app do
  namespace :test do
    # accepts ARGV[1] as parameter for test file patterns. Format:
    # ARGV[1] = "file=[pattern]" (pattern can be a comma list of multiple files)
    # ARGV[2] = "name=[method]"  name of method to run in test file
    desc "Run a single test without preparing database first. Smart about finding the test file.\n  Syntax: rake app:test file=[basename] where basename matches (globbed) test(s).\n  Will accept multiple comma delimted file patterns. "
    task :file do
      STDOUT.sync = true
      if ARGV[1] && ARGV[1].match(%r{^file=})
        # take the first parameter and grab everything right of '=' sign, ignore _test.rb if it exists in parameter
        file_patterns = ARGV[1].match(%r{file=(.*)})[1]
      end
      # get name of method to run (if any)
      if !ARGV[2].blank?
        test_method = ARGV[2].match(%r{name=(.*)})[1]
      end
      if !file_patterns.blank?
        test_files = file_patterns.split(',')
        search_files = Array.new
        test_files.each do |file_pattern|
          if file_pattern.match(%r{_test.rb$|_test$}i)
            file_pattern.gsub!(%r{_test$}i, '_test.rb')
            search_files << "test/**/#{file_pattern}"
          else
            search_files << "test/**/*#{file_pattern}*_test.rb"
          end
        end # test_files.each do |test_file_pattern|
        filelist = FileList[*search_files]
        puts "Testing #{filelist.inspect}"
        filelist.each do |test_file|
          cmd = "ruby #{test_file} "
          cmd += "--name #{test_method}" if !test_method.blank?
          # run the test
          system(cmd)
        end
      end # if !file_patterns.blank?
    end # :file

    desc "Monitor files for changes and run a single test when a change is detected"
    task :monitor do
      keep_running = true
      while keep_running do
        # Loop until interrupted by ctrl-c
        trap("INT") { puts "\nExiting"; keep_running = false; }
        test_list = FileList['test/**/*_test.rb']
        orig_dates = {}
        test_list.each do |file|
          orig_dates[file] = File.stat(file).mtime
          sleep 0.05
        end
        # loop through test_list looking for date changes
        test_file = ""
        keep_searching = true
        while keep_searching && keep_running do
          print "\r**** Waiting for test file changes. (#{Time::now.strftime('%b %d %I:%M:%S %p')}), ctrl-c exits"
          Kernel::sleep(0.3) # wait 3/10 second between searches for changed files
          test_list.each do |file|
            Kernel::sleep(0.05) # keep the cpu from maxing out
            if orig_dates[file] != File.stat(file).mtime
              puts "\n  File change detected: #{file}"
              puts "  Time is: #{Time::now}"
              keep_searching = false
              test_file = file
            end
          end
          if !test_file.blank? && keep_running
            # invoke the test b/c the file has changed
            puts "Running test suite..."
            system("ruby #{test_file}")
          end
        end # while keep_searching... -- change detection loop
      end # while keep_running do -- main loop
    end # task :monitor
  end # :test
end # :app

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

This is a great example of what will happen more broadly when hundreds of millions of rural Chinese farmers start finding more economic opportunities. Poverty isn’t such a great thing, but rural farming poverty has the potential to insulate you from the forces of economic collapse. And the chances of these hundreds of millions of Chinese actually precipitating a real global economic collapse is worrying. Quite a dilemma: hundreds of millions stuck in poverty vs the attempt to liberate them causing wide spread global economic failure (not to mention the carbon footprint). Then again maybe global economic collapse is just what we need right now to prevent a global environmental collapse. Either scenario seems to imply that I’d better learn more about living with a lower standard of life.