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  • britg 7:41 pm on October 5, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: time   

    Steve Jobs 1955-2011 

    I saw this photo of Steve Jobs today, while reading the tweet stream after the announcement of his passing:

    I’m not afraid to say I found myself getting a little emotional… but emotional in the same way I got when I first saw Steve’s Stanford graduation speech. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.

     
  • britg 8:54 pm on June 15, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Cilantro Lime Butter Tilapia with Sweet Baked Masa 

    I’ve moved my food postings to a new location: Chew Your Own Adventure.

    Over the past few years, I’ve constantly had this amazing side dish at Tex-Mex restaurants: Sweet baked masa, or Sweet Baked Corn. Think of it as corn bread, but ever-so-slightly-sweeter, and in more of a side-of-rice texture.

    To pair with the sweet baked masa, I went with a Baked Parmesan Tilapia recipe I heavily modified to fit the Tex-mex theme.

    Tilapia Recipe:

    • 4 fillets of fresh tilapia
    • 1/2 cup butter
    • Fresh cilantro, chopped
    • 1/2 lime, squeezed
    • 1 oz cheese of your choice (I used a pepper-jack, cheddar mix)
    • paprika to taste
    • cumin to taste
    • salt & pepper to taste

    Place the tilapia in the oven at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the rest of the ingredients in a small mixing bowl. Remove the tilapia from the oven after 25 minutes, and spread the mix over each fillet. Turn your oven to broil, and move the topmost rack to the to highest position possible. Broil the tilapia for 2 minutes. Voila, you have a moist, buttery, cilantro-lime Tilapia.

    For the sides, I made the Sweet Corn Cake recipe I mentioned earlier, along with a mexican rice and guac.

    Set the sides on a corn husk for maximum plating points, and enjoy!

     
  • britg 6:29 pm on May 13, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Cream Braised Brussels Sprouts 

    I’ve moved my food postings to a new location: Chew Your Own Adventure.

    A while back @mrgan tweeted the following:


    After making cream-braised Brussels sprouts for the first time, I look back in disgust on a life of braising things in – ugh – *water*.less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Neven Mrgan
    mrgan

    When half of the duo responsible for Salt & Fat mentions food, listen.

    Hmm, cream braising… Interesting. I filed this away for later exploration after first seeing it, but I found myself thinking about it more and more. Reading alone in a quiet room I’d hear a soft whisper, creeeam braaaising. I would wake in the middle of the night, feverishly yelling CREAM BRAISING. One or both of those stories are not true.

    I finally got around to trying it the other day, the results were surprisingly good! The cream takes a bit of the bite off the sprouts, and gives them a rich, decadent texture. But, the earthiness and distinctive flavor of Brussels sprouts is still there and makes its way into the cream sauce. Oh yeah, that’s a bonus of making this dish: simmer the cream to thicken and it makes an amazing sauce.

    I paired the sprouts with some fried chicken, and the result was the best down-home meal I’ve had in a while. I highly recommend giving it a try.

    Ingredients

    • 1 bag of Brussels sprouts
    • 1 8-oz carton of Heavy Cream

    I pan-seared the Brussels sprouts in olive oil until there was noticeable browning, seasoning it liberally with salt, pepper, and paprika. I then added the cream and stirred, digging into the bottom of the pan gently to get any tasty bits off the bottom. Finally, I covered and let simmer on low heat for about 35 minutes.

    Be sure to use the excess cream sauce to dip whatever protein or baked flour product you’re going with that night — you won’t regret it!

     
  • britg 8:26 pm on May 11, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    The Ratings Solicitation 

    Recently Marco Arment wrote a post and a comment on Twitter about his feelings on the seemingly ubiquitous ratings solicitation in iOS apps:


    If I ever added a rating solicitation in Instapaper, it’d be buried in the Settings screen somewhere. But I still probably wouldn’t.less than a minute ago via Twitter for Mac

    Believe me, I understand his reluctancy because I felt it too. If you had asked me two months ago what I thought users think about these, I’d say they thought it was spammy, obtrusive, and just plain shady. But then I found myself implementing it in Key Ring in our latest update. Oh, how my feelings have changed.

    The Vocal Minority

    I’ve heard that review systems tend to expose the vocal minority, and I believe this. It doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or iTunes, the vast majority of people who are satisfied, or heaven forbid happy, with a product will never take the time to write a review or leave a rating.

    But, there’s a small and extremely motivated group of people that are willing, nay eager, to sling around 1-star reviews at the slightest hint of inconvenience. They have a forum, and by God they will use it. This affects the sleep patterns of app developers in ways I never fathomed until I became one.

    The Lazy, Content Majority

    The ratings solicitation is the app developers’ last bastion of defense against the Vocal Minority. Key Ring was a meh-inducing 3 stars for the first year of its existence, and our reviews were pretty evenly dispersed between 1 star and 5 stars. After implementing a very unobtrusive, one-time, opt-in ratings solicitation, magically Key Ring is now a sturdy 4.5 stars! The 5 star ratings are through the roof.

    Oh how I wish I could attribute the dramatic change to the new UI, speed improvements, or something else I could brag about. Nope, if you look at the written reviews for Key Ring it becomes obvious that the users who are content with the app (who would never give a second thought to rating or reviewing it) are blurting a few words of praise and tapping that last star on the far right just because the app happened to remind them, in a moment of whimsical curiousity and boredom, that iTunes has this rating system and using it might be slightly less boring than whatever they are doing.

    The surprising thing is, we have not once had a single complaint or mention about the ratings solicitation. Hell, we get notified by users when we mispell words in our Terms of Service!

    The Bottom Line

    There are people out there who are completely satisfied with whatever you’re producing, but you’ve probably never heard from them. In an ecosystem that values the coveted “rating” so very dearly, a tactful solicitation for a review is a great way to expose your fans and let potential users of your app know that it is worthwhile. Don’t be afraid to implement one, and don’t think less of apps that do.

     
  • britg 12:29 pm on December 3, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: dns,   

    Google Public DNS 

    Google announces their DNS initiative: Google Public DNS.

    I always thought it was kinda inconvenient that there’s a “DNS propagation” downtime. Looks like one of the things Google is doing is making DNS propagation fast and asynchronous to requests.

    Google Public DNS independently resolves domain names and keeps the resolutions in the cache until their time-to-live (TTL) expires, at which point they are automatically refreshed. The cycle of caching and refreshing is performed offline, asynchronously with user requests, so that responses are almost always available directly from cache.

     
  • britg 12:00 am on June 4, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Weekly Digest for June 4th 

    googlereader (feed #4)
    Shared 2 links.
    2:25pm via Google Reader
    twitter (feed #3)
    Interesting that Github:FI is a compiled JRuby app, does that mean no tweaking the source? – http://fi.github.com [#]
    3:14pm via Twitter
    twitter (feed #3)
    also would be nice to have the gist.github app inside a private network – I’m assuming github:fi does not include gist? [#]
    3:16pm via Twitter
    delicious (feed #2)
    5:38pm via Delicious
    delicious (feed #2)
    6:45pm via Delicious
    blog (feed #1)
    10:35pm via britg.com
    twitter (feed #3)
    Pan Seared Salmon with Mushroom Risotto and Baby Spinach Salad http://britg.com/?p=942 [#]
    10:37pm via Twitter
    delicious (feed #2)
    10:46pm via Delicious
    twitter (feed #3)
    HAML in CakePHP – http://bit.ly/155oDX [#]
    3:02am via Twitter
    delicious (feed #2)
    6:15pm via Delicious
    twitter (feed #3)
    I absolutely love the wordpress theme http://mixcss.com is using. Need to find a project to use it on. Theme is: http://bit.ly/vpQJ9 [#]
    6:19pm via Twitter
    delicious (feed #2)
    8:22pm via Delicious
    twitter (feed #3)
    APE Project looks like Comet-made-easy – Ajax Push pluggable into Apache http://www.ape-project.org/en/about.html [#]
    8:53pm via Twitter
     
  • britg 9:26 am on May 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , supervisor   

    Erlang Supervisor Behavior Gotcha – Worker Init Params 

    When starting up a behavior like supervisor, the start_link func looks something like:

    start_link() ->
      supervisor:start_link({local, ?MODULE}, ?MODULE, []).
    

    Which in turn calls the initialization callback:

    init(_Args) ->
      %% do some stuff.
    

    Notice that the initialization callback takes 1 argument event though the params list (the third parameter) is empty in your start_link func.

    So, naturally (am I alone in this?) I assumed that when defining a Child Spec for a Supervisor, the {M, F, A} definition would follow the same pattern:

    Childspec = {child1,
                {child1, start, []},
                permanent, brutal_kill, worker, dynamic},
    %% ...
    

    But the above definition does not call child1:start/1, where the one parameter is the emtpy list. Instead, the list items are extracted as individual parameters. So {child1, start, [p1, p2, p3]} would call child1:start/3, and {child1, start, []} calls child1:start/0. Just something to look out for if you’re new to erlang and the supervisor behavior like me.

     
  • britg 5:56 am on May 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    • “When a man runs from fatherhood, he’s not really running from responsibility, he’s running from the guilt of a mediocre life”http://bit.ly/ #
    • last tweet’s link: http://bit.ly/gU6y4 #

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  • britg 5:56 am on May 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    • Voxtrot: Blood Red Blood http://dora.fm/Xu #dora #
    • when my commit messages turn into grunts, it’s time to take a break. latest commit message: “blah” #

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  • britg 5:56 am on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

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