Thursday, August 11, 2005
What's for dinner tonight? 
Spaghetti with garlic and olive oil. I fancy myself a bit of a cook. Here's my rendition of a very simple, but delicious classic
Ingredients
| 4 cloves garlic peel and slightly crushed |
| 1/2 box spaghetti |
| 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil |
| 1/2 tspn crushed red pepper flakes (peperoncino) |
| 1/4 cup grated parmesan or pecorino romano |
| 2 tbspns finely chopped fresh parsley |
| Salt & Pepper to taste |
Put a large pot of boiling water on the stove on high heat, covered. While the pasta water is heating up to a boil, get the above ingredients ready to go.
When the water begins to boil, add 2 teaspoons of salt into the water and add the pasta being sure to stir initially and then every couple of minutes.
Place a large saute pan on the stove on medium-high heat. Add the crushed garlic, being sure not to brown too much, although a little toastiness isn't bad.
Once the garlic has browned, add a little of the pasta water to the saute pan. Add the red pepper flakes to the pan as well at this point.
When the pasta is al dente, drain and add to the saute pan while still on the heat. Allow pasta to cook with the garlic and oil for appr. 1 minute. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Turn off heat and add the cheese and parsley and stir through. Serve on a warm plate or pasta bowl.
Enjoy.
Anyone else seeing this on my blog? This from Tibor in my comments...
Welcome to the club John! Figuring it all out was indeed the nicest part
Is it on purpose, that all the body text of your page gets underlined (as if it all was one big link) on mouse over?
AJAX and XML-RPC
Steve Livingstone: Ajax - am i missing something?
Steve, I think you are. XML-RPC and AJAX are not the same thing.
It's all about the post back to the web server. With AJAX, there is no post back. The page you're currently viewing is updated without a post back being performed. So, a portion of the page can be updated without refreshing the entire page from the server.
It's asynchronous too, meaning you can choose an action on a certain part of the page, and while it is reaching out to get the data, you can continue to work on other parts of the page. It makes the whole experience so much more usable.
For a really good example, check out Google Suggest and type in a search term. Those results are being fed back to you in real-time. No need to click a button and have the server refresh the entire page. By the way, the technology to do that HAS been around since 1999 I believe, so nothing new. It's just that Google has made it an acceptable technology by embracing it...and that's a good thing regardless of whether it should have been acceptable a while back. BTW, this is nothing to say that XML-RPC couldn't be part of an AJAX solution.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Tablet PC's at the NJ DMV
For anyone who lives and drives in New Jersey, you know how aweful it can be when you visit the Division of Motor Vehicles to renew your license, registration. You're looking at losing at least 2 hours of your life waiting in line.
Well, people, things are changing. I went to get a new photo driver's license yesterday and amazingly was out of there in about 1/2 an hour. And they're using technology. When I filled out my form, I went up to the clerk and she filled out my information on a Tablet PC running Windows. And there must have been a wireless connection to transmit the data because about 3 minutes later someone came from the back and called my name to take my photo.
I asked the woman what she thought of the tablet PC and she said it was "good". Clearly not a geek, but you can be sure she would have told me it was horrible if there was anything bad to say about it. Anyway, I thought it was cool that a government bureacracy was finally using technology in an effective manner. I even heard another person waiting next to me mention how much faster things seemed to be working.
Comments Now Enabled
Thanks to Tibor, I now have comments enabled on my fancy schmansy OPML blog.
A couple of things about how this is all configured. Tibor has some great instructions here. If you're adventurous, try it out. This whole thing is like a puzzle. Figuring it all out is almost all of the fun.
I got everything set up as described, but couldn't figure out why the comments weren't working. Thanks to Tibor's help, it turns out you have to register at Haloscan for this to work. Another tip, after you register there, log in and choose Radio Userland as your blogging tool. Then make sure you edit your Template.opml file found in the /OPML/www/blog/decorations folder (found in My Documents on Windows) and insert the first script into the HEAD element of your template. Seems Tibor has taken care of the rest, so that's all you need to do.
Thanks Tibor!!
Getting the Kubrik Template to Work
So I wanted to fancy up the look of the OPML blog a bit and I found a classic Blog template called Kubric that's been modified for OPML blogs. Get it here.
One key thing I had trouble with was the links to the CSS files. In step 3.2 of his instructions, be sure to format the links as so...
http://hosting.opml.org/yourblogname/blog/decorations/...
My problem was that I wasn't including the /blog/ part in the path. Once I figured it out, worked like a charm.
Oh yeah, be sure to follow the instructions to a T.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Grokking the OPML Editor
Ok, I'm now beginning to grok the whole OPML Editor stuff. I'm a software dev and know a bit about OPML, having used it primarily as an import/export format for RSS aggregators. Thanks to its creator, Dave, I also have understood it as an XML format for creating lists and outlines.
I guess the thing that I have been a little confused about is it's relation to blogging. Now I see that it's not really so related to blogging per se (wincing as people begin flaming me), although the instant outliner in the tool definitely makes managing and editing a blog very nice. The really important piece I now see is the ability to created shared outlines, allowing for multiple people to edit/update the information. An equally important thing, I think is the ability to include links to other outlines within an outline. These outlines can be out there in the cloud, on the net, making it a relatively seemless experience to the users. It's like working on something within your work environment's corporate network with shared documents, except now it's not bound by the walls of the corporate network.
I really need to get a few other people I know testing it with me so I can see how it all really works.
Some Security-related Questions
| Who can edit a shared outline? Is it everyone that is included in my Instant Outliner Buddy list? |
| Of course, since this is an early list, I expect that may be the case now, but how about later? |
| Will we be able to set it up so that certain outlines can only be edited by certain people? I could be misunderstanding a lot here, BTW. |
Monday, August 08, 2005
Ok, been a while, but testing again now. 
Starting to understand a little bit
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
An OPML blog...what does it mean
