Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

As I've mentioned before, reading newspapers intermittently allows one to discern certain patterns which may not be obvious to those who get twitches if they don't update their RSS reader at least twice a minute.

Today I discovered that Belgium seems to be reducing the number of cannabis farms by one a week. At this rate, we'll run out of them in no time, and customers will need to import their herbs from ... oh, the Netherlands?

• 23 June: Cannabisplantage ontmanteld in Oplinter
• 23 June: Cannabisplantage ontmanteld in Balen
• 14 June: Cannabisplantage ontdekt in bedrijf in Beernem
• 6 June: Enorme cannabisplantage ontdekt bij Ieperse boer

Interesting, interesting...

Before: hungry hacker After: sated hacker, evidence of much creative goings-on in the kitchen

Has anyone else ever compared the proces of coding to cooking? You start out hungry in a relatively clean kitchen with empty pots and a single fork. Before you know it, there are mushrooms in one pot, bacon in another, and you think 'mmm, tomatoes' and there they go. Some pasta soon joins the party and then herbs and cream come along too.

I have no idea what I'm eating could be called, but while cooking it up, it felt a lot like coding. Empty file, soon filled with many interesting functions, then some data happens or perhaps a piece of hardware comes along. More files start happening. You forget what you're working on from a macroscopic perspective but you're having so much fun it doesn't really matter.

And soon it will be time to refactor. Take a step back. And do the dishes.

Yum yum. The food. Not the code.

What to do when the fridge greets you with an empty stare, the freezer feels like way too much trouble and you can't be bothered to go out for professionally-cooked food? A possible solution: trivial spaghetti.

Recipe:

• Boil 2L of H2O
• Add about a handfull of freeze-dried spagetti (strands of roughly 2mm diametre and 25cm length worked for me)
• Leave boiling for 12min

Serving tips:

• Add cheese (mould optional)
• Add pesto-sauce (idem)

The simple life has its charms, but I think I'll consider shopping one of these days. :-)

It's been a while, but I'm on my diet again. Like always, it's driving me nuts. I always wonder what horrible sadistic tendencies drive people to studying nutrition.

The stuff I got to eat today, probably cost more energy to chew and digest than it provided. "Breakfast" provides an entirely new dimension to hating Monday morning -- one half grapefruit, one toast with peanut butter, coffee without pollution.

And that has to keep you going until noon, when you get to resupply on masses of tuna (60g!) and an entire piece of toast. Again with unpolluted coffee.

Good thing you have dinner to look forward to. Huge quantities of green beans and red beets (120g each) and a half cow (95g lean meat). Dessert softens the blow with 120g ice cream and a small apple.

Aaargh!

Who thinks up these things? Good thing I know it works (tried it) and that it gets more tolerable as the weeks go by. It's a nightmare the first weeks though.

Now where did I put my little sign "don't feed the trolls"? :-)

Like last week, I had a craving for cake that could only be remedied by actually baking one. This time, I went for a chocolate cake, and I decided to determine the amounts of the ingredients mathematically rather than by following the Diktat.

4 eggs, 140g butter, 200g flour, 200g sugar, 2 bags vanilla sugar

The instructions for a chocolate cake were surprisingly similar to those for a lemon cake. Instead of adding lemon juice, I had to put half of the batter into my mould, put cacao-powder in the other half and then put it in the mould too.

This is what the cake looked like before I ate it:

Given that the taste of a chocolate cake and a lemon cake are, by definition, quite different, I can't tell if the mathematical approach has any significant advantages over the Diktat approach. The sizes of the cake were roughly the same, and both taste good.

The cake I baked earlier this evening was very yummy indeed! It appears that the ambiguities and conflicts in the instructions didn't matter too much. Guess what I'll be having for breakfast in the morning?

Good, my craving has now been satisfied. It's reassuring to know that I can deal with these cravings too. No, you can't have any. It's mine! All mine! :-)

I had a craving for lemon cake today. I have no idea why, but while I was encoding some CDs this evening, I suddenly thought: "wouldn't it be nice to have some lemoncake?". Being an uncurable hyperactive, of course, I set out to make a cake immediately.

In the cookbook I once borrowed from my mother and forgot to give back (sorry!), I looked for 'lemon cake' in the index. Lucky for me, it had an entry, so it seemed likely that my craving would be satisfied.

Good thing I am no stranger to cross-referencing. The ingredients for a lemon cake were, apparantly, batter for a cake, and juice of a lemon. That sounded incredibly logical! Making a lemon cake, I learned, involves making the batter for a non-specific cake, described on the previous page, and adding the juice of the lemon mentioned in the ingredients before putting the batter into the mould, which is a procedure described as part of the instructions for baking a non-specific cake.

So I set out following the instructions for a non-specific cake. This cooking business is very much like debugging software: you get sent in all directions at once.

Then the trouble began!

Ingredients for a non-specific cake:

Per egg: 35g butter, 50g flour and sugar, 1-2 bags of vanilla sugar.

There are some problems with this: they don't mention how many eggs you need, only that you need certain quantities of other stuff per egg. They also make no mention of how you'd go about calculating the number of eggs you might need. Additionally, they mention 'bags' as a unit of vanilla sugar, they don't tell you how much of this sugar should be in those bags. Given that I only found bags of 10g of this substance, I hope that that's the amount they mean. Otherwise, I have a problem.

The procedure for baking a non-specific cake, then, is like the procedure for baking a '4x4 pastry' (whatever that is), only you put the batter into a rectangular mould, smeared with butter and sprinkled with flour, rather than into a round mould, similarly adorned.

Looking at the ingredients for a '4x4 pastry', I was faced with a resource conflict. A '4x4 pastry' is made with:

4 eggs, 160g butter, 250g flour, 250g sugar, 2 bags of vanilla sugar.

Aha! I now know how many eggs I need, though there's no mention about how this number was calculated. The 250g of flour and sugar also don't fit with the quantities for non-specific cake (4 * 50g != 250g). We have conflicting quantities for the butter and the vanilla sugar too. In the ingredients for the non-specific cake, the butter is a variable calculated from the number of eggs times a constant 35g. The '4x4 pastry' instructions tell me to use a constant 160g. Which do I use? I went for the 160g, because that would empty my container of butter. The vanilla sugar is another conflict. I went for two bags because the stuff is fairly expensive and there's probably a reason they put it in such small bags too. Using 4-8 bags seemed a bit excessive.

Anyway. I now have a cake in the oven, which I hope is going to turn out alright, despite the conflicting instructions for manufacturing the batter. I intend to send a letter to the publisher of the cookbook asking them to be a bit more clear in their instructions. There is no mention in the introduction of the book -- or anywhere else for that matter -- about which set of instructions should apply when there are conflicts. I imagine that seasoned cooks would know this from experience, but I don't. I use a cookbook because I'm not an experienced cook, and I need all the help I can get.

In another twenty minutes, I'll know how good the instructions were...