So tonight for dinner we had some friends over, and I was trying to think of what to cook. Clare suggested some of the bread I made yesterday with some olive tapenade her parents had given us. That sounded like a great starter. So I started thinking of other dishes to go along with it. I thought of a risotto, but Clare was not too excited about that. I also considered pasta, but we had just had pasta. Then I […] (Read more)

Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) has the neat Spotlight feature which allows you to find all sorts of files very quickly and easily. It even allows you to search the contents of many files, including e-mail messages, pdf documents and Microsoft office documents. There is one flaw however. To do this it creates a database, which it updates periodically. That is all fine and dandy. But if you use an external hard drive from time to time, say for backups, it […] (Read more)

While I was at the Acoustical Society of America meeting (see prior post for highlights), I roomed with an Italian guy, Gianluca. I did the work booking the room (which wasn’t that much work really), but apparently he thought I should be rewarded, so he bought me a cookbook. He definitely went out of his way to get the cookbook, since he first wanted to get me an Italian (i.e. written in Italian) cookbook, but since I don’t know Italian, […] (Read more)

Supposedly it is good luck to eat Black-eyed peas on New Year’s. I am not the superstitious type, but I like black-eyed peas, and because of their supposed luck, they were on sale at the grocery store, so I decided to make some. Our friend Wendy is a very good cook, and she has a nice black-eyed peas recipe on her website, so I decided to try it out. She had made it for me before, so I knew it […] (Read more)

I recently downloaded the vimcolor plugin for wordpress so my code samples could look nice and spiffy, with the syntax highlighting I am accustomed to seeing. There were of course a few problems. The most notable was some path problems. It was trying to use these values: < ?php $in_file = tempnam($GLOBALS['conf']['file_directory_temp'], 'pl'); $out_file = tempnam($GLOBALS['conf']['file_directory_temp'], 'htm'); > I never saw any of these set in any of the configuration files for wordpress, so I just hardcoded in some values […] (Read more)