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Bad User Interface
Almost every time I get into my Mom’s car, I find that the radio is coming from the front-right speaker only. You see, she has an Acura TL which has a stereo that features two main knobs. Pushing the left knob turns it on or off and turning it adjusts the volume. The right knob is used for tuning the radio but can also adjust output characteristics (bass, treble, fade and balance) which are cycled through by pushing the knob. It seems that when attempting to tune the radio she may accidentally push in the knob causing any further turning of said knob to adjust the bass and treble to full and shift the sound all the way to the right side, front most speaker. This isn’t her fault; she’s driving and ought to be able to easily fumble with the radio to make adjustments without looking down. This is a case of bad user interface design.
Day 2: Austria
On our second day in Europe, the first destination was Neuschwanstein, the castle which served as the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland. First, though, we had to get some breakfast. Upon greeting the inkeeper, we were told of the breakfast options, “Hungry? Ja, you will have muesli.” In addition to muesli atop some very good yogurt there was a spread of meats and cheeses that would become standard over the next few days.
After breakfast and a short walk around the monastery, the first of many churches, we hopped into the 5 and headed toward Austria which we would skip through on our way to the castle. After a fairly uneventful drive along some motoroways and a stop in at a tourist info center, we came upon the road that, from looking at the map, seemed to be the best route to Neuschwanstein. Though it meandered through a valley next to a beautiful blue-green Plansee, this road turned out to be a somewhat undesirable avenue to the schloß. Most Americans are aware that smaller cars rule in Europe and being there only reinforces this fact. A 5 series is a sizable vehicle, but certainly not “large” by US standards; in Europe, however, I couldn’t imagine having to drive anything larger. The road that we had chosen was two car widths wide, but only barely. With my right wheels centimeters from the edge of the road (and wooden posts only a decimeter or so from said edge), the wing mirrors of cars passing in the other direction were no more than a hand-width from my own. In a brand-new car, this is not a relaxing time. In time, though, I became accustomed to this because of the much greater skill of European drivers. Generally, you don’t have to drive as though everyone around you is incompetent, unlike here in America.
We got to the castle and had to take a vigorous hike up a few kilometers of mountain to reach the castle. Such a tourist attraction wouldn’t survive in the US; Americans won’t walk up a hill, they would demand motorized transport. It was a good walk and lead to some wonderful views from the castle and impressive works within.
After leaving Neuschwanstein, we had to make our way to France for the Formula 1 race the next day. We hopped in the car and headed West, stopping at a supermarket in Austria to pick up some bottled water. I mention the water because after studying the numerous varieties we bought two six packs, one marked “Naturel” and the other “Stille.” Turns out the latter has bubbles and the former doesn’t, which was opposite our expectations.
When we arrive at our bed and breakfast in Puligny-Montrachet the innkeeper informed us that the nice restaurant would be full since we were there so late, but if we didn’t mind something “not so fancy,” there was a place just a kilometer walk down the road. Upon arriving at the restaurant we found that it was not far from fancy at all and served a wonderful meal including a final cheese course. Very French and very, very good.
Vim Tip: Show Hidden Characters
Vim can show you non-printing characters simply by issuing the command :set invlist which works just like the old reveal codes in WordPerfect or Word’s show ¶.
Cooking With Ska Part 2
Five Iron Frenzy has a very good song entitled Rhubarb Pie, though it fails to give a recipe for the desert.
Well lately I've been thinkin' about some good home cookin', just like that I haven't eaten' in the longest time. Now I like potato chips, please don't get me wrong. But I haven't tasted mama's rhubarb pie in so very long. Rhubarb pie, in the summer. Rhubarb pie, made by my mother. Nothing better in the winter, than rhurbarb pie after dinner. Twinkes may be better, than a hole in the sweater, and a hole in the sweater, beats a poke in the eye. If I had my choice, I'd leave this gas station store. And then I'd travel back in time, and I'd sit down and have some more. Rhubarb pie, in the summer. Rhubarb pie, made by my mother. Nothing better in the winter, than rhurbarb pie after dinner. Looking at the picture, in the Sunday paper, of the politician, he's talkn' to the press. He looks like he's been eating lemons all his life. Well I think mama's rhubarb pie could save solve more problems overnight.
Cooking With Ska Part 1
There are a number of Ska songs that mention foods or, in this case, a recipe. The following is from Greenhouse’s Palabras, which I have on the album Skarmageddon 3 but, as I just found on Amazon, is on their own album, Tomorrow The World.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | Now in a cup dissolve two bags of yeast Let it stand and then proof and diffuse Get a cup of sugar, of flour 4 Mix it up and let it stand some more Get the greasy pan, oil top the dough Let it rise and when... Give it 25 minutes, 400 degrees Some times I cut it up and eat blue cheese |
Day 1: Picking Up the Car
After my mom had decided that her new car would be a BMW 535i, I proposed to my parents that they might like to check out BMW’s European Delivery program. Through ED, you work with a US dealer to buy the car and get a 7% price break having to do with taxes and legal mumbo jumbo; it works out to be a good way to subsidize a vacation to Europe. My parents asked if I’d be interested in coming along and so we planned a trip centered, in my mind, around the Formula 1 race in Magny-Cours and visiting the Nurburgring.
We arrived in Munich in the morning and went outside to get a taxi to the BMW European Delivery center. Outside was a lineup of cream-colored cars, mostly Mercedes E-class wagons and R-class MPVs. A 220d E-class pulled up, we loaded our bags and proceeded towards Munich. The drive along the motorway was fun because, in addition to reaching upwards of 160 Km/h, I saw numerous cars that I had previously only heard about on Top Gear. At the European Delivery center, we were told that the car would take about 45 minutes to prepare. We walked upstairs to the cafe and had some coffee and German snacks. This will be the only time that the word “snacks” will be what Americans understand to be a small or partial meal; throughout the rest of the trip, it seemed that what Germans call a snack most others would call a good lunch. Also, in Germany, what looks to be a croissant probably has eggs and ham inside. These items are tasty.
After waiting a spell, we walked around the lot outside checking out the numerous diesel and 1-series cars that never make it to the US. We headed back inside to wait a bit more and after about an hour and a half someone approached with the papers to sign over the car. He explained to us the insurance that came with it (which is all the coverage you need, it seems) and go over other paperwork. We then headed to the garage to get a quick rundown of the car’s features. After hearing about how many horsepowers [sic] the car has, we loaded our luggage into the 5er’s trunk, which is significantly larger than that of either of my parents’ current cars, a Volvo S80 and Acura TL. Once loaded, we bid “auf wiedersehen” to the friendly Germans and my dad makes his way through the unnecessarily small garage door and we are on our way to driving the car, which had only 1 mile on the odometer, through Europe.
We headed towards the Bavarian Alps where we would spend our first night in a small town named Ettal, home to a magnificent monastery which, of course, brews the local beer. After sitting down for a late lunch with a half-liter of the aforementioned beer we walked to the far end of town, which took all of 5 minutes. We hopped back into the car at that point and took a short drive to neighboring towns to explore a few churches and pick up some bottled water.
Peanut Butter Ice Cream
I got an automatic ice cream machine as a graduation gift recently and, because it’s so easy, I’ve been making tons of the stuff. All thats involved is whipping together a mix, tossing it into the bucket and turning the dial; no need to fool with ice and because it’s compressor-driven, you can create one batch right after the other without needing multiple frozen cores. This allows me to easily create a number of slightly different mixes in order to find the best possible recipe for a superb ice cream. Everyone loved a peanut butter flavored masterpiece I made a few weeks ago, so I figured that’d be a good thing to start with.
I made three batches as follows; each batch contained a couple of tablespoons of vanilla in addition to that listed below:
| Peanut butter | Sugar | Light cream | Skim milk | Skim milk Powder |
| ½ cup | ¼ cup | ½ cup | ½ cup | - |
| ½ cup | ¼ cup | ¾ cup | ¾ cup | - |
| ½ cup | ¼ cup | ¾ cup | ¾ cup | ¼ cup |
All of these were very good. The one with equal amounts of peanut butter and the two milk products was perhaps a little bit too much like eating gobs of peanut butter; the other two were much more like actual ice cream. Skim milk powder, often an ingredient in ice cream recipes, is the only difference between the two with more milk and it had a small but beneficial effect. I think it would work best to have a 2:1 ratio of total liquid milk (cream & milk) to milk powder; ¾ cup would be better than the ¼ cup I used, in this case. All of the ice creams were sweet enough, in my opinion, and perfectly creamy, due in large part to the fat of the peanut butter. I tend to make fairly lean ice creams, so if you want something even more luscious, which seems to be how most ice cream recipes are written, go with whole milk instead of skim or use a heavier cream.
Apache2 ProxyPass
If you’re trying to setup a proxy on Apache2 in Ubuntu Feisty, by default it disallows all access to any proxy URLs, which is good. What isn’t good, however, is that nowhere I could find mentioned that this could be found in the proxy.conf file located in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled. I spent some time wondering why my Allow and Deny orders were being ignored until I looked at this file and found that it has the final say. To allow access to your proxy, you must edit this file adding ‘Allow’ orders within the <proxy *> block. Simply use hostnames, IP addresses or CIDR notation:
Allow from foo.com
Allow from 192.168.1.52
Allow from 10.1.0
Allow from 10.1.0.0/255.255.0.0
Allow from 192.168.0.0/16
For more detail, see the mod_access documentation.
Oracle Repository GPG/PGP Key
If you’re using the Oracle apt repository (deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian/ unstable main non-free) with Ubuntu or a recent version of Debian and don’t have their GPG key, you’ll get the following error when running apt-get update:
W: GPG error: http://oss.oracle.com unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2E2BCDBCB38A8516
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
To fix this, you need to add Oracle’s key to apt, which is straightforward, if you can find the key. After some searching, I found it at http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle; to import this, run the following:
sudo wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | sudo apt-key add -
Ubuntu: It Just Gets Better
Everyone has used Windows and at some point in time has tried to open up a file for which they didn’t have a reader installed and got that dialog that offers to find a suitable program to view the file. This dialog is worthless and has never lead anyone to finding the program that they need.
I created a spreadsheet on my office using Gnumeric the other day and brought it home to look at. When I went to open it on my Feisty machine at home, I was greeted by the “Add/Remove Applications” application which offered to install Gnumeric Spreadsheet in order to open the file. Very automatic, easy and very cool. These are the sorts of things that really make Linux a great option for desktop users.