Monthly Archives: January 2006

Pancakes

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I’ve been working on perfecting my pancaking technique. The secret, in short, is to treat them like cake. Here are a few tips that I’ve found helpful:

  • Use butter (softened, not melted)
  • Beat the butter, then beat in the sugar, then beat in the egg
  • Alternate mixing in milk and flour / baking powder mixture

I just like butter because it tastes better and isn’t soy-based. The order of butter-sugar-egg is important, the pancakes turn out much lighter if you do this (though the batter may look less appealing until it’s cooked). The odd bit about alternating milk and flour must have to do with mixing the flour with the butter-sugar-egg stuff rather than with the milk. The really crazy thing is that Dad’s pancakes usually come out better than mine, no matter how I try. I guess there’s no substitute for experience.

I’ve thought about using a non-aluminum baking powder, but I haven’t tried it yet. The non-aluminum kinds are supposed to be liquid activated only (that’s why the aluminum kind are called double-acting, both liquid and heat). Sometimes I think I can taste the aluminum.

I also make a point of placing the most recently cooked side of the pancake down when I pull them off the griddle. If you don’t do that then one side of the cake will be crispy and the other soft (Rebecca doesn’t like that). The appearance is also better on the first cooked side (which then is the side that’s up).

Another thing to try is Egg Nog Pancakes. Just use egg nog instead of milk (you may need more milk for this to work). These come out a little heavier than they do with milk, but they taste great.

Jeremy was the one who discovered for us that the best way to make a choco-pancake is to use chocolate milk. Just adding cocoa won’t do it.

Mom once made us pancakes with creamed corn in them. She said she had opened the wrong can. Pancakes don’t use any canned ingredients… we are all still confused. The creamed-corn-cakes weren’t all that bad.

Greylisting

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I finally got around to setting up greylisting on my mail server using postgrey. I first heard about the technique from Filtering Spam with Postfix by Kirk Strauser. The article also talks about enforcing proper use of the HELO command in SMTP. Anyway greylisting causes your mailserver to reject a first attempt at sending mail to you with a 450 response code, which basically means, “I’m busy now, could you come back later?” A second attempt is accepted without question. I’m simplifying a little, but this is essentially how it works. The benefit is that most custom spam server software and worms will not make the second attempt at all. According to the article this cuts out a big chunk of spam.

Probably this will not be a long term solution. Spammers will be more careful about following the SMTP spec if a lot of servers do this kind of thing, but for now it’s great. Looking at my own logs it looks like the HELO restrictions are making a bigger impact for me.

If only I could convince my backup MX to do the same thing! My brother was kind enough to serve as my backup MX. He set up a special POP account on his server that will hold any mail it gets for me until I pick it up using fetchmail. Much of my spam comes through my backup MX, which has looser restrictions than mine does. Since fetchmail is all that my machine sees it gets in without question.

Update: It’s been a week and I haven’t had any spam at all except through my backup MX! The saddest part is that spam levels are back up to where they were before I implemented the restrictions.

Flumotion

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For Christmas I set up a video stream for family members in Chicago to watch Christmas morning our parents house. I tried several options including VLC (which did very well) but settled on Flumotion for this year.

Flumotion is definitely worth looking at if you’re interested in streaming your own live video. It’s built on the GStreamer framework, Python, and Twisted. It uses a model of a manager process and one or more worker processes to get the actual work done. The worker processes need not be on the same machine, which really came in handy in my situation (or would have… more on that later).

With Flumotion I was able to easily grab video and audio off of a DV camera (over Firewire) convert it to Theora and Vorbis, mux it into an Ogg container and serve it up live over HTTP.

The big win here was that I was able to set up a worker process on a host other than the one capturing video and assign that worker to serve HTTP. This was important because I had been led to believe that my parents home was not reachable from outside. This turned out not to be the case, so in the end the stream was served directly, but the distributed approach worked fine and could prove very useful, especially considering the huge amount of processor power Theora requires.

Another sweet feature of this year’s ChristmasCam was Cortado. Cortado is a java applet that plays the stream in your web browser.

Eventually you’ll be able to use Flumotion to stream in virtually any format supported by GStreamer and serve it with HTTP or RTP. For now go check out the demo site.