Pasta with savoy cabbage

My mom pointed out that I haven’t posted a recipe for a while, so here’s what I made for dinner tonight. This recipe is liberally borrowed from Mark Bittman and slightly modified.

Ingredients

• 1/8 c olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 2 bay leaves
• Pinch red pepper flakes
• 1/2 a small savoy cabbage, cored and shredded
• 1/2 c chicken stock
• Fresh ground pepper to taste
• Spaghettini pasta, cooked al dente
• Fresh grated parmasean cheese

Method

Place oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, and bay leaves in a saute pan and heat to medium. Cook until garlic is just starting to brown. Remove bay leaves. Add cabbage and cook on high until cabbage is wilted. Add stock and pepper, then continue to cook at medium-high for 8-10 mins.

While waiting for the cabbage to finish, cook the pasta, drain, and return to the pot. Add cabbage mixture, toss, and serve. Top with grated parmasean and some more pepper.

Serve with whatever wine you like. We had a light pinot noir that didn’t quite stand up to the garlic, so you might want something a little more robust.

Yummy.

MBP, harddrive noise, and the strangest “fix” ever

So last week I upgrade to a MacBook Pro. It’s a nice fast machine with all the OS Xy goodness I know and love, and a few strange quirks. First off, the sound in iChat just vanishes at times. This is moderately inconvenient but not a deal breaker by any means. More troubling were the occasional clicks and pingpong sounds coming from the harddrive. Harddrive noises tend to be on the “very bad” side of the spectrum, so I did some searching and found this post.

A comment on that post suggests that installing “Mirror”, a completely unrelated Dashboard widget, would somehow magically make the noises stop. I gave it a shot.

It worked.

My question here is: why in the world would that work? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Weird.

I’m still going to make daily backups, deep magic bedamned.

Things that are cool: Videobomb + Democracy

Democracy is a slick, cross-platform application that acts basically like a combo of Internet video guide and video player. Videobomb is, essentially, a Digg for videos. Democracy is nicely integrated with Videobomb. Very slick.

In search of an antisocial social bookmarking system

Much like my recent struggles with photo-sharing systems¹, I find myself currently frustrated (largely by the reliability collapse of Jots.com) with pretty much every social bookmarking service out there. Since the hosted stuff isn’t working out for me, I was thinking that a self-hosted del.icio.us-alike would do the trick. I just have no idea if such a beast currently exists, and my Google-fu is failing me.

Here’s a basic rundown of what I’m looking for: A web-based bookmarking system like del.icio.us only hosted and admin’d by me on my own Linux server. It must also be able to push a day’s-worth of links to my weblog (via xmlrpc, for example). Bookmarklets or a Firefox extension for quickly adding bookmarks would be great but not necessary, and demonstrated integration with WordPress would be ideal.

Is there anything like this out there?

¹ I’m currently playing with Zenphoto, if you were curious. It’s quite neat.

Mozilla Developer Center update – 10/07/2006

XUL Reference

The initial XUL Reference migration has been completed. We do need some help in improving this reference in several ways:

• More examples
• Screenshots of the various widgets (ideally taken in Windows or Mac)
• More cross-linking within the reference and between the reference and the XUL Tutorial
• Links out to the LXR source where appropriate
• Improved and expanded text for any page within the reference

Sheppy will also be working on copy-editing and other improvements when he has time.

Discussion about replacing “Talk” pages

At the Mozilla all-hands meeting it was suggested that we begin exploring possible replacements for the Wiki “Talk” pages, as the existing pages are poorly suited to actual discussion as they lack threading, structure, editorial control, and any sort of guaranteed permanence. After a long discussion Brion Vibber let us know that the Mediawiki group had a Summer of Code project underway that sounds like it will do exactly what we need. You can read more about the LiquidThreads project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki.

Suggested new feedback system

Another suggestion from the all-hands meeting is that MDC create a system that would allow users to quickly and easily send feedback from any given page of the MDC site without having to deal with Talk pages, registering on the wiki, or looking up email/list addresses. The system we’re currently planning to implement is simply a new, open mailing list with a mailto: link on each page of the wiki (either in the footer or sidebar).

Content additions and improvements

• Mscott has added a new article about Thunderbird ISP hooks
• Wtchang has started an NSS reference, and is looking for help doing some migration work
• Jabez and Nickolay have been working diligently to improve our Gecko DOM Reference
• Sevenspace and Nickolay have been working to further improve the JavaScript reference
• XUL Reference

Localizations

As always, the localization teams have been doing a fantastic job, with recent significant activity on the Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese wikis.

If you have any questions about anything here or anything else related to the MDC, please ask on the MDC discussion list, the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org, or mail me directly (deb-at-mozilla-dot-com).

Shared whiteboard

This shared whiteboard system is pretty awesome. It’s flash-based, but is otherwise pretty much everything I can imagine wanting in an online whiteboard system. I haven’t tried the actual “invite a friend” part yet, so I’m not sure how or how well that works, but overall I’m very impressed by this app. Neato.

Embracing failure

[I]ntelligent failures — those that happen early and inexpensively and that contribute new insights about your customers — should be more than just tolerable. They should be encouraged. “Figuring out how to master this process of failing fast and failing cheap and fumbling toward success is probably the most important thing companies have to get good at…

This article is an interesting read.

Looking for a photo-sharing system

I’m looking for the simplest possible way to upload, organize, and share my photos. I’ve tried Gallery2 and it’s OK, but I’m wondering if there’s something better out there. I’ve looked at both Flickr and Smugmug, but their UI and visual design just annoy me enough that I’m not really interested in using them.

General requirements: bulk upload from a Mac (ideally with iPhoto integration), must be Firefox friendly, the less Flash the better, autogeneration of resized photos and customizable thumbnail sizes, no upload limit (either per picture or total), reasonable bandwidth limits are OK, pay-for-service is OK, customizable themes would be ideal, proven reliable service would be nice, solid customer service track record would also be good.

I get the feeling I’m going to just stick with Gallery2.

New toys

Rob and I went to the camera store today, after I did some research on wideangle zoom lenses. Ended up buying a Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 wideangle zoom and a Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 telephoto/macro zoom. And filters. And a camera bag.

I really am a big fan of wideangle shots. This and the 18-70mm will be my standard “walking around” lenses, and the telephoto and my fixed focal-length macro will be for special occassions.