Favourite Recipe Book

A review of my cur­rent favour­ite recipe book, Deborah Madis­on’s “Veget­ari­an Cook­ing for Everyone”.

I don’t usu­ally wax lyr­ic­al about recipe books, although I do have a few, but I was brows­ing through my favour­ite the oth­er day look­ing for some­thing to make and figured it’s well worth a recommendation.

Deborah Madis­on’s Veget­ari­an Cook­ing for Every­one fea­tures this quote on the front cover: 

The 1,400 recipes in this book are those that I like to cook. If you’re a com­mit­ted veget­ari­an, you can pre­pare every recipe in this book. If you are a vegan, you can cook most of them. If you don’t attach a title to your eat­ing style, you can cook everything in this book and serve it with meat, fish, or fowl.

The focus of this book is enjoy­ing cook­ing and enjoy­ing the food that is pro­duced. There are no lec­tures on being a veget­ari­an; there is inform­a­tion on basic cook­ing tech­niques and what vari­ous ingredi­ents are and how they work. The wide range of recipes cov­ers almost everything I’ve ever wanted to cook (except for meat-based meals, of course). And the recipes work. They’re not neces­sar­ily quick, but the clear explan­a­tions ensure that the res­ults are worth eat­ing. I was look­ing through the book while writ­ing this review, and found myself temp­ted to make things on every page (cot­tage cheese and nut­meg pan­cakes, any­one?). Hmmm, I think it’s time for lunch.

Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There”

Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s Being There was a reas­on­ably pop­u­lar book­club book, at least in part because it’s short and thus most people could read it in full (and some even read it twice!). Sev­er­al of us had also seen the film (screen­play also by Jerzy Kos­in­ski). Reac­tions to the book at book­club var­ied, from those who found it deeply pro­found to those (includ­ing me) who did­n’t quite get it and wer­en’t sure what they were meant to “get” either.

A brief syn­op­sis: Chance is a sim­pleton who works as a garden­er for an old man (rela­tion­ship unspe­cified) and spends his spare time watch­ing tele­vi­sion. His exist­ence is com­pletely unknown out­side of the house and garden where he lives and works (no birth cer­ti­fic­ate, no record of exist­ence any­where), and when the Old Man dies, the law­yers who take pos­ses­sion of the prop­erty evict him. Through luck, Chance is taken into the house of a rich, influ­en­tial couple, who assume he is someone of know­ledge and power because of his calmness and the high qual­ity of the hand-me-down clothes from the Old Man. His state­ments about life in the garden are assumed to be deeply mean­ing­ful alleg­or­ies; his know­ledge of human beha­viour as shown on tele­vi­sion meshes with the expect­a­tions of those around him, and he is feted by both report­ers and politicians.

Reviews on Amazon talk about the bit­ing satire evid­enced in the book; the book­club mem­bers spent more time talk­ing about the meta­phors. Chance goes from being lit­er­ally nobody, with no iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and no real name, to some­body import­ant simply due to luck — an exag­ger­ated ver­sion of Andy War­hol’s 15 minutes of fame. People see in him what they wish to see — the wife of the busi­ness­man invents a romantic past for him, the Soviet Ambas­sad­or thinks he speaks Rus­si­an and under­stands Krylov, the US Pres­id­ent con­siders him as the next can­did­ate for Vice-Pres­id­ent — des­pite there being no actu­al basis for any of these assumptions. 

I found the book rather too over the top for my taste; the film was bet­ter and more detailed. Peter Sellers made Chance believ­able where the book shows the holes in the fable. Oth­er book­club mem­bers loved the book though and enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the meta­phors and won­der­ing which bits of the book were inspired by which parts of Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s life. We spent a bit of time dis­cuss­ing what changes would have been required in the book were it writ­ten today, rather than in 1971. Tele­vi­sion is a lot less coy now and Chance’s reac­tions to the attemp­ted seduc­tions might be dif­fer­ent. All in all, I’d rather see the film again than read the book again.

Keeping America Strong

Betcha did­n’t know that small one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pan­ies in Canada play a vital role in keep­ing the US strong, didja? Makes you won­der why I moved to a big US-based com­pany, but I digress. 

I found out just how vital these small com­pan­ies are when an asso­ci­ate pro­du­cer from a TV pro­duc­tion com­pany cold called a few months ago to see wheth­er I’d be inter­ested in tak­ing part in their series called, yup, Keep­ing Amer­ica Strong. When I poin­ted out that I was in Canada and a one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pany, he respon­ded that keep­ing Canada strong would help the US bor­ders and that small com­pan­ies also play a vital role. And that the series was hos­ted by Wil­li­am Shat­ner, sup­por­ted by tele­vi­sion news anchors and a Navy Admiral.

I must admit, I was intrigued, although I might have been more temp­ted had it been Leonard Nimoy host­ing rather than Wil­li­am Shat­ner. Still, it was worth spend­ing anoth­er few minutes on the phone, explain­ing what XML does and how it is used by vari­ous US gov­ern­ment depart­ments such as Home­land Secur­ity. XML obvi­ously passed the test of being deemed worthy of the next step, which was to meet the field pro­du­cer who would write up the pro­pos­al for each “ente­pren­eur­i­al com­pany” (their words) that wanted to “move for­ward in these times” (their words). At about this stage I star­ted won­der­ing just how much this was going to cost, although I was enjoy­ing the pol­ished deliv­ery of the bene­fits of being on TV with the “Amer­ic­an icons” (their words). Even­tu­ally I got the answer. The major celebrit­ies were donat­ing their time and energy for this import­ant endeav­our, and the only costs were a con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­duc­tion costs of a mere $US 15,000. A tad pricey for a van­ity kick, I thought. So I declined with thanks, got a nice fol­low-up email, and still have the fax with the details of what I missed out on. Maybe I’ll keep that for pos­ter­ity; after all, paper does­n’t degrade the same way web sites do.

Then yes­ter­day I found an Invit­a­tion for Inter­view for “For­bes Radio” on Amer­ic­an Air­lines in my inbox. Yup, anoth­er invit­a­tion to prove I’m one of these “innov­at­ive industry and busi­ness lead­ers, who through effect­ive col­lab­or­a­tion, pro­gress­ive strategies, improved pro­ductiv­ity, and increased agil­ity, provide com­pan­ies and indi­vidu­als a com­pet­it­ive advant­age and bet­ter qual­ity of work and life”. This oppor­tun­ity is to take part in a 3‑minute inter­view to be played on Amer­ic­an Air­lines inf­light pro­gram, which has a “cap­tive audi­ence of 3.4 mil­lion exec­ut­ive trav­el­ers per month”, and offered at the dis­coun­ted rate of only $US 4,995! So make sure you remem­ber your iPod next time you fly on Amer­ic­an Airlines. 

Corporate Blogs/Wikis Article

The art­icle I wrote on some of the busi­ness uses for blogs and wikis has been pub­lished, under the title Blogs & Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions?.

I’d like to thank every­one acknow­ledged in the art­icle (Bob DuCh­arme, Lex­is­Nex­is; Chris­ti­an Wat­son, Seattle Children�s Hos­pit­al; Chris­toph­er Mahan, Health Net Inc.; Dave Pawson, RNIB; Derek Miller, Nav­arik; Jordan Franks, Trac­tion Soft­ware; Leigh Dodds, Ingenta; Mal­colm Tredin­nick, CommSe­cure; Norm Walsh, Sun Microsys­tems; Richard Tal­lent, Envir­on­ment­al Resources Man­age­ment; Robert Scoble, Microsoft; Ross May­field, Social­text; Tim Bray, Sun Microsys­tems; and Tony Coates, Lon­don Mar­ket Sys­tems). They all spent time writ­ing com­ments or emails in response to my request or talk­ing to me about what they, their com­pan­ies, or their cus­tom­ers are or aren’t doing with blogs and wikis. The tim­ing of the art­icle also meant I could put stuff in from the North­ern Voice conference.

Before doing my research for the art­icle I had­n’t real­ised just how wide­spread the use of blogs and wikis and hybrid sys­tems is in the busi­ness world. Even if wikis are only used for bursts of activ­ity, like organ­ising a one-off meet­ing, or used by one per­son for research notes, they’re still being used. Blog sys­tems are being used for sites, such as the Seattle Chil­dren’s Hos­pit­al web site which don’t look like blogs in any way; they’re a cheap, easy to use pub­lish­ing sys­tem. Blogs are being used for quick coordin­a­tion of tasks, such as at UBC’s Careers Online Pro­ject Web­log (this one did­n’t make it into the art­icle). There is a lot of blog- or wiki-based coordin­a­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion going on in the busi­ness world, much of it prob­ably unbe­knownst to people high­er up in these com­pan­ies, a bit like the way intranets star­ted. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see where this band­wag­on goes next.

Now at Sun

As of today (Feb­ru­ary 28, 2005), I work for Sun Microsys­tems. And no, it’s not what you think. It’s actu­ally all Eve Maler’s fault. She and I have enjoyed work­ing togeth­er on the XML Con­fer­ence and the CSW XML Sum­mer School for a couple of years, so when an open­ing came up in her group at Sun that she thought I was suited for, it was too good an oppor­tun­ity to pass up. I filled in the applic­a­tion, Eve made sure the right people saw it, and everything worked out! We did try to keep it secret from Tim for a while, but that ended up not being prac­tic­al. After all, he had already figured out the issues with liv­ing in Canada and work­ing for a U.S.-based group and knew the right people to talk to.

My title is Seni­or Tech­nic­al Pro­gram Man­ager; like Eve I will be work­ing on inter­op­er­ab­il­ity and tech­no­logy part­ner­ships. I’m look­ing for­ward to it, although since I’ve nev­er worked for a big com­pany before, I’m not quite sure what to expect in many ways. I do know that blog­ging is encouraged!

And then there are my oth­er activ­ites. Since the W3C Pro­cess Doc­u­ment does not allow two mem­bers of the W3C Advis­ory Board to come from the same com­pany, and Eduardo Gutentag was recently elec­ted, I am resign­ing from the AB after almost three years. I’ve learned a lot from the AB mem­bers and the W3C Team and I thank them. 

I will chair the XML Con­fer­ence again this year, but Eve won’t be on the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee. And I’ll be in Oxford in July for the XML Sum­mer School as well.

Upgrading MySQL on Debian

I’ve been wait­ing patiently for the updated Word­Press to come out. Once it did, I decided I should really update MySQL as well, so that I could finally serve pages prop­erly as UTF‑8. I’d been run­ning MySQL 3.23, and so I needed to upgrade to 4.0 to get real UTF‑8 sup­port. I also con­tem­plated upgrad­ing to MySQL 4.1.

The pro­cess was just com­plic­ated enough that I figured I should do the backup brain thing and dump the pro­ced­ure here; it might help someone else to have the gory details doc­u­mented, and it will cer­tainly help me when I come to upgrade!

I haven’t really used a Unix sys­tem since I had to move to Win­dows in 1996; for­tu­nately Debi­an makes upgrad­ing and installing really easy (who­ever came up with the apt-get sys­tem deserves lots of praise). I run the stable ver­sion of Debi­an because it was set up on stable in the first place and I’ve nev­er really needed to change that and I’d rather have the secur­ity patches be applied auto­mat­ic­ally. Except for, the Debi­an stable ver­sion of MySQL is, of course, 3.23 and not 4.0. The best solu­tion to this seemed to be to install the back­port of MySQL 4.0 from backports.org. In the­ory this is really easy, of course in prac­tice it does take a cer­tain know­ledge of how Debi­an works. This is because Debi­an Does Everything Dif­fer­ently (DDED). I’m sure there is lots of logic in how Debi­an does things, I just have nev­er quite taken the time to fig­ure it out. And up till now, I did­n’t need to. I did have one big advant­age though, Edd Dum­bill was online and was able to help me fig­ure out those little details that make the dif­fer­ence between frus­tra­tion and success.

So here’s the step-by-step upgrade details I needed. Debi­an experts have no need to read any further…

  1. Add the line deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable mysql-dfsg into your /etc/apt/sources.list file (I don’t know why it’s called dfsg and I’m not sure I want to know).
  2. Run apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade, or apt-get dist-upgrade.
  3. Find that although the pack­age list gets updated, noth­ing hap­pens and the mes­sage is “0 to install”
  4. Edd sug­gests check­ing the policy with apt-cache policy mysql-server.
  5. This shows that Sur­prise! the upgrade isn’t being installed.
  6. To increase the pri­or­ity, we need to pin the back­port. Edd tells me the magic incant­a­tion, which is to cre­ate a /etc/apt/preferences file with the contents
    Package: *
    Pin: release a=backports.org
    Pin-Priority: 995
  7. apt-get upgrade now works! Hurrah!
  8. Next to run mysql_fix_privilege_tables to fix the GRANT tables etc. Except for, the MySQL data­base root account has spaces in the pass­word and this script does­n’t like that. Even hard­cod­ing the pass­word in the script does­n’t work.
  9. Use mysqladmin to change the root pass­word so it no longer has spaces in it (BTW, does any­one else find it annoy­ing that some MySQL things use executable u=username and oth­ers use executable u username? For­tu­nately PHPMy­Ad­min makes most of my MySQL admin duties much easier).
  10. Suc­cess! The blog still works, the tables appear to have been fixed, and life goes back to nor­mal. I decide to not upgrade to MySQL 4.1 just yet, since I don’t really need to. This box in the base­ment acts as my fire­wall, DSL con­nec­tion, and web­site host; stick­ing with a stable con­fig­ur­a­tion strikes me as being a good idea most of the time.