Archive for December, 2005

Momentum

Thursday, December 15th, 2005

M=m*v

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Parboiling

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

I tried parboiling broccoli for the first time today after having been introduced to the technique by Jeremy. Jeremy is studying to become a chef and probably picked up this technique at school. The broccoli comes out done perfectly (to my taste anyway) and with a much better color than by other methods. I’d even say it’s better than steaming.

Basically the technique is to bring water to a rolling boil and then drop in the vegetables for just long enough (maybe a minute?). The idea is to cook it just barely enough and quickly. It’s very similar to blanching except that you don’t drop the food in cold water afterword. This is a great way to cook broccoli, carrots, or other dense or thick vegetables. It’s also a good way to avoid adding too much water to a stir-fry.

We had a discussion with Dad a while back about the etymology of the word. Jeremy had assumed that “par” was the same as the word “par” as used in golf, for instance. Dad objected that if that were the case it would mean thoroughly boiled. As luck would have it they were both right! By some odd twist of fate parboil (which means to boil partly) used to mean to boil thoroughly. Perhaps boiling any longer than absolutely neccessary was considered too much, more than thorough.

Posted in Family, Food | Comments Closed

Cygwin OpenSSH

Friday, December 9th, 2005

Setting up OpenSSH on a windows machine used to be difficult (a few years ago), but it’s really not too hard now. We did run into some trouble that appeared to be caused by a FAT32 filesystem, but more on that later.

Installation

  1. Download and run Cygwin’s setup.exe.
  2. Follow the wizard until you get to the package selection dialog. (Defaults are good.)
  3. Select openssh (it’s under “Net”) and any other software you need, rsync for instance. Don’t deselect anything, the default selection set is pretty much just the base installation.
  4. Tell it to install, and finish the wizard.

SSH Service Setup

  1. Open a Cygwin bash prompt from the icon on the desktop or the “start” menu.
  2. Run ssh-host-config.
    • When asked what to set the CYGWIN variable to ntsec tty. More info about this variable here.
    • Accept the defaults and say “yes” to everything, unless you know better. Yes, you want to use privilege separation, yes, you want to create a user for the service, etc.
  3. Warning: On some hosts (probably those using FAT32) you need an extra step!
    • cygrunsrv --stop sshd
    • cygrunsrv --remove sshd
    • cygrunsrv --install sshd --disp "CYGWIN sshd" --path /usr/sbin/sshd --args "-D" --env "CYGWIN=ntsec tty"
    • cygrunsrv --start sshd
    • This extra step solves the cygcrypt-0.dll not found problem.

Thanks to Thomas Hennemann for finding the solution despite a lot of disinterest in the problem.

Posted in Technology | Comments Closed

Perl Daemons

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

It turns out that writing daemons in perl is as easy as

exit if fork();

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