D15c0v3r3d L05T

It was a rushed morning and as i attempted to fly out the front door to work I was hoping… praying that my lunch would be available via leftovers. As I opened the refrigerator door to see what might be available for lunch dining i found a container of beef stew. “Perfect!” I thought to myself. As I transferred the contents of a Serving Saver into the baggie that would become a disposable transport to work, I encountered my first setback. The volume of stew was not nearly enough to make a meaningful lunch fair. Again I opened the refrigerator to find something to add and found some spaghetti noodles. “Soup for lunch” I commented to myself and the noodles joined stew in the baggie. A handfull of smoked almonds in a baggie and a couple ginger snaps in another, I was ready. When lunchtime came around and i mixed the stew/noodle combination into a bowl, added some water, and nuked it for 3 minutes. As I carried the “soup” to my desk I realized the water would have diluted the taste a bit, a suspicion that was qualified during a taste test. Never fear… this is why saving packages of salt, pepper, parmisian cheese, crushed pepper, mayonaise, deli mustard, and such is ever so important. I added a dusting of crushed red pepper and some grated parmesan to the stew and found that the flavor enhancement was wonderful… but the dish’s coloring needed some help. I couldn’t get past the fact that the water (gravy) needed to be a little creamier, so I added a packet of mayonnaise which made my creation’s base very appetizing in appearance. The mayonnaise didn’t really add any flavor, but I’m a texture kind of guy. The steaming hot dish smelled wonderful, looked appealing, and after cutting up the noodles I took that first bite with anticipation. My expectations were fully met and I did enjoy the dish.

That’s my sort of cooking. You make something out of what sounds good right then with what you have. But this sort of cooking is not for everyone. The minute I mixed spaghetti noodles with a thick beef stew (with white hominy in it no less) I probably lost many of you. Nuking it and adding top drawer ingredients to it lost another bunch of you. And actually feeling like the final product was truly enjoyable and actually to a certain degree desirable probably checked most of my remaining readers out.

I hope those who have left will drive safely and have a nice day… for the rest of you…

A parallel.

Comandeering a Saturday and dedicating it to personal geekiness I sauntered down to my basement dungeon of discarded gadgets, pushing my 70 pound dogs to the side so I could gain access to the inner lair I call “the office”. I wanted to set up a DNS server that would direct my internal computers at home to my internal streaming server and my internal web server instead of looping out to the internet and coming back in. I also wanted to cache address requests to give a little better performance since bellsouth’s dns server response can get very slow at times. I don’t have any more windows licenses, so the OS of choice was linux… really a no brainer since it has dns server services built in. (I really like the openSuSE distribution)

My first setback lay in the fact that my scrap machine pile is a few Dell slimlines that were trashed because of overheating. I began to gather additional fans and templating the case for holes that would hold additional fans/vents when I realized the power supply was only 160 watts and had NO additional power cables. The PC had been built to run only the items installed at the factory. No expansion capability, no way to add fans. I would have to run the PC with the case cracked open to allow ventilation… not a problem for me, this is a basement dwelling device anyway.

I popped the SuSE install disk into the drive and the computer didn’t boot off my DVD… bummer. I restarted and entered bios to reorder my boot devices, sure enough it was floppy then hdd. I killed the floppy and selected CD drive and saved the bios settings, upon restarting the SuSE DVD still didn’t boot. “I must have burned a bad disk” I thought to myself as I removed and inspected the SuSE disk. No big deal… i have plenty of media at the house and my Thinkpad still held the 11.0 image. As I watched the progress bar creep along on my new SuSE DVD media I suddenly sank in my seat and glanced at the front of my “new” dns server… “CD ROM” was forged across the front of the drive. I left the SuSE DVD to continue burning alone. I sifted through a pile of junk in a box and what do you know… I found a DVD ROM drive that would work. The SuSE install went smoothly as expected and once complete I Googled and downloaded and Googled and downloaded until I had Shoutcast and DNS and DHCP all running with properly configured startup scripts and the whole nine yards.

Stretching and smiling at the sweet success of my efforts and anticipating the joy of streaming media throughout the house I called it a day. I picked up a little of my mess and negotiated an exit from the office. Within a couple hours of doing this and that around the house I heard my wife’s frustration from the kitchen computer. She was trying to do some research for work and wasn’t getting very far. I had no idea what could be her problem since I try to stay out of the way until I am told that my services are required.

“The Internet is not working today” she mumbled during one of my trips through the kitchen.

“Funny” I mused… “It was working fine all day for me.”

She informed me that it really slowed down late in the afternoon and periodically she gets no response. I asked if I could run a couple tests and she abandoned the captains chair to allow me a chance at resolving her issues. First stop was dslspeedtest. I watched the speed test crawl along at near modem speeds and abandoned the speedtest immediately. I trudged down to the office, and looked at the router traffic light blinking furiously. With a heavy sigh I consoled into the dns server and killed shoutcast… the traffic light slowed down to occasional blinks.

I stomped back up to the kitchen, closed my windows and told my wife it was fixed.

“Thank You” she offered, “What was the problem?”

“Virus” I mumbled and glided away.

Where am i going with all of this? Good Question.

I was purging some old books and found an O’Reilly Java Cookbook and started pondering on how coding is much like cooking. Some places create grand products using recipes and packages that are bought, borrowed, or even stolen. I allowed the mental distraction to drift into how some people live by recipes, while others enjoy playing with their food and inventing unique and elegant creations. Then my thoughts drifted into how some of those creations are really horrible and deserving only of the trash can… like Flour Tortillas wrapped around steamed broccoli and cottage cheese then covered with strawberry preserves. But I digress.

To tell you the truth, I forgot where I was going… but it’s been nice walking along with you as I effectively got lost in it all.

No, really where it all went inside my noggin was to be creative. Selfishly I am finding myself learning a whole bunch of stuff new and have been going to the “code fridge” and finding I can pepper some of those old solutions with a new technology and come up with a great re-hash of the old stuff. Sometimes the invention of something really good doesn’t come from scratch, but more from the sum of parts. So on your way to making something today just pop open the fridge (or freezer) and see if there’s something in there that will inspire creativity… you just might discover something paramount to colonizing mars. (or maybe even a better PB&J)