Monthly Archives: May 2009

Tandoori Chicken

We spent most of yesterday afternoon making dinner – tandoori chicken, chapatis, and aloo gobi. Although we usually make tandoori chicken with a mix, yesterday we made it from scratch, which is always better, and a lot more fun.

There are lots of recipes online for tandoori chicken, but none of them are quite what I remember from a cookbook I used to have, but seem to have misplaced in some dark corner.

So we took several of the recipes as inspiration, and came up with something all our own. Like all good recipes, I’m not entirely sure what I put in it. Yoghurt, fresh-pressed garlic, grated fresh ginger, cumin, cardamon, coriander, black pepper, cloves, cayenne, garam masala that we already had, and lots of chopped cilantro. As to the quantities of each, I really couldn’t say. Which is a shame, because it was some of the best I’ve ever made.

We’ll have to try that again some day. Maybe that time I’ll write down the amounts. But, realistically, I doubt that I will.

The aloo gobi recipe is the one that’s at the end of the “Bend it like Beckham” DVD.

The chapatis are my own interpretation of the technique that my brother taught me.

Maybe we’ll make it for you next time you visit.

Nancy’s Kitchen

We just came back from breakfast at Nancy’s Kitchen. We walked down there and back – about a mile each way – so not nearly enough to work off the effects of an epic breakfast. Two eggs, sausage, home fries and sausage gravy, toast, and coffee, all for the low, low price of $6.

Amazing.

In fact, we drove over 200 miles for this breakfast, because Skippy told us that they are closing next month, after being open for 20 or 30 years, and serving hearty, inexpensive food to millions of customers. So, naturally, we had to come, to have one last meal there before it is gone forever.

We told the chef, as we were checking out, that we had driven 200 miles for breakfast, and he thanked us, and said that there is some hope – not much – that they’ll stay open. Hope is still alive.

If you’re anywhere in the Columbus Ohio area, you owe it to yourself to go to Nancy’s for breakfast before they’re gone. It’s on High Street, in the Clintonville area.

iPhone ToDo Apps – Things

By the way, I did try Things. It is indeed very slick, but the $60 price tags – $50 for the service and $10 for the iPhone app – seems a little steep. In fact, Things looks like almost exactly what I’m looking for. The UI is great, and it looks like it does exactly what I want it to do. But I’m not really willing to spend $60 to find out if it does what I want.

What I really need is a gig where people pay me to to comparative reviews of products, so that I can get them for free. You know, like Skippy.

CakePHP Application Development

CakePHP.jpg

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using CakePHP for our development at work. Cake was the first formal MVC framework that I’d worked with, although at Asbury we had developed an MVC framework in house, almost unbeknownst to us. That is to say, we developed a sane web app framework, and weren’t aware that someone had already given a name to the pattern. Shame on us for not doing our research a little better.

Also, the other half of the web team had started working with RoR before I left, but I didn’t really look at it seriously.

CakePHP is one of many PHP MVC frameworks, and, naturally, there are a variety of opinions as to which one is the best. I can’t claim to have done a careful comparison. How did I choose Cake? I like to hire people smarter than myself, and trust their judgement. This was the recommendation that came up from that team of smarter people. And I certainly have to admit that Cake really works with the way I think, and is very much the effect that we were trying to achieve with our framework at Asbury. We didn’t quite get there, but we were headed very much in the right direction.

The CakePHP book from Packt Publishing was very helpful as an overview of what was possible. It has practical examples of what can be done, and has careful explanation of each step. In conjunction with the amazing online documentation, it provides a solid footing for jumping right in to writing Cake apps the first week.

One place the online docs are sorely lacking is the V part of MVC. The online docs are for programmers, not for designers – or perhaps “written by” is the better thing to say there. Either way, the section about views and layouts is still rather weak, although it’s being worked on. The Packt book is a good supplement to this, although it makes more sense on second reading, after a little hands-on experience with the Views stuff.

In short, recommended. 4-out-of-5-stars. Anupom and Ahsanul have done a good job of giving an introduction to Cake app dev in this book, and I’d recommend this as a desk-side reference as you start developing in Cake.

As to the other frameworks – yes, I’ve heard that there’s others that are better. One thing that is obvious, looking at the various frameworks, is that all of them are crazy active – they are all improving by leaps and bounds, and pretty much every feature comparison I’ve looked at is way out of date, and inundated by comments saying “yeah, that’s how it was 6 weeks ago, but you should take a look now!” So I’m pretty sure that the jury is still out on this, and that there will be still several years to watch these things before one emerges as a clear leader – if, indeed, that ever happens. It hasn’t in any other language (with the exception of Ruby) so I don’t know why we’d expect it with PHP.

iPhone ToDo Apps

My biggest disappointment with the iPod Touch has been the lack of a usable ToDo application. The main thing that I used my Palm for was always to keep track of tasks, as well as shopping lists, lists of books I wanted to read, and other things that fit the general category of ToDo lists.

It’s pretty simple to write a ToDo list application, and it seems very strange to me that Apple has never done a decent job of this. There’s a tasks thingy built into iCal, but it is almost worthless, and I’ve never been able to figure out how to use it as an actual task manager. And it doesn’t sync usefully with the iPhone/iPod software.

Over the last week I’ve been evaluating some of the available ToDo applications for the iPhone. My requirements are simple:

1) Synchronizes with the iPhone
2) Has a desktop component (web application is fine, too)
3) Allows me to share a list of tasks with someone else

#3 is less important – more of a nice-to-have than a requirement. The other two are essential.

Surprisingly, the pool is very shallow. I quickly narrowed it down to just two candidates – Remember The Milk and ReQall.

I tried RTM for about a half day, and found the process of marking a task completed was just too darned hard. It was 3 or 4 steps. I want to check a box. I had to select the item, click edit, scroll down, mark it completed, and save it. Way too much work if I’m just trying to mark off a shopping list while I push the cart.

ReQall looks like it might be the one I end up with, but rather than being hard to mark a task done, it make it hard to create the task in the first place. It’s got clever syntax interpretation, so that I can say “buy coke” and it knows from the word “buy” that it’s supposed to go on my shopping list. But that means that I have to type “buy” 48 times when I’m making the grocery list, rather than just selecting the grocery list and adding items.

I’m not sure why this has to be so difficult, when Palm did such a good job of this more than ten years ago.

Item 3 – the ability to share a list with someone else – I’ve had no luck with at all. I thought it would be a simple requirement, but apparently it’s hard. I just wanted a way for my wife and me to build a shopping list collaboratively, and then either one of us would have that list whenever we went to the store. Perhaps someone from one of those two companies can implement this before my 90 day trial runs out – or however long it is.

Anyways, for the moment, I’ll be sticking with ReQall, just because it’s so much easier to check off the shopping list. Marking something complete is the most satisfying part of having a list, and so that action needs to be simple. This is fundamental ToDo list UI dogma. If you don’t get that point, I’m not sure I want to use your application.

Hearing

Last night we went to a party. A friend of ours graduated from nursing school.

For the first time in more than 20 years, I felt completely comfortable at a party. I could hear conversations. I could choose what conversation to participate in based on the topic, rather than on what I could manage to strain and catch snippets of – or not, at the case often was. I could actually hear everything that was said, rather than trying to interpolate from context. It was a truly amazing experience.

I have a large number of learned behaviors stemming from being deaf on one side – everything from positioning myself so that my cone of hearing encompasses the conversation I want to hear, to fading into the background when it’s just too frustrating to try to pick out what’s being said.

For the last week, I have very intentionally sat in places where people are on my left. Turns out my cyborg ear is actually significantly better than my “good” ear, with this new device, and I have even had to turn it off in order to focus on what’s happening on my right side. Bizarre.

I keep wondering what this new hearing is going to do to my habits – how quickly I can overcome 25 years of conditioning, or if it can be overcome. I’ve hated social situations for years – not so much because I’m not a social creature, but because of how embarrassing it is to be unable to hear, to have to ask for things to be repeated again and again, to feel like I’m missing at least half of the conversation.

I wonder how much of it is habit now, and how much of it is just a reaction to the situation as it happens. Last night, I was able to carry on conversations, but I was acutely aware the whole time of how amazing it was to be able to hear. I wonder if when the novelty wears off, I’ll be able to just participate normally, and not revert to my habits.

Time will tell.