p.s. get involved here

It turns out that the data that Yahoo! Maps uses for Beijing is not very rich, so it would seem that Flickr looked to Open Street Map to improve their offering. The funny thing is, according to Flickr’s blog post on the subject, the process actually happened the other way around. Regardless, the point is that since Open Street Map data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, Flickr was able to integrate Open Street Map tiles to replace a section of the Yahoo! Maps data.

I recommend checking out Flickr’s blog post for more details and some good before and after shots where you can see the city transform from a grey mass into a network of streets and other features.

I have been contributing to Open Street Map for the past few months so it’s nice to see the work being put to use like this.

Seen on Webware

Update:

Flickr is also using OSM for:

Buenos Aires
Rio de Janeiro
Mexico City
Melbourne
Sydney
Tokyo
…and probably a bunch more places too.

I decided to go with Barbara Streisand’s favorite, which is apparently, chocolate blackout cake. It’s worth noting that there are only two references on the entire internets that link Barbara Streisand to blackout cake. One being the page where we found the original, non-vegan recipe, and another page that mentions that Rosie O’Donnell once sent her a “genuine” Ebingers Blackout Cake. The word “genuine” is in quotes because there is some debate as to whether the Ebingers brand baked goods that resurfaced in the early ’90s were the real thing, or not. The original Ebingers went bust in the ’70s.

Anyway, enough about the validity of my choice. It clearly doesn’t matter since Eva decided to push the definition of the actual word celebrity. She made Garfield’s lasagne. Does that count? At least no one is contesting that lasagne isn’t Garfield’s favorite food.

The point is, that I made blackout cake from Vegan With A Vegeance and it turned out to be totally awesome. The cake was super moist and had really nice structure! The raspberry goes really well with the chocolate and the ganache frosting is super velvety but not too sweet (which is my common gripe with frosting). If you don’t have the book you can find the recipe online, but I suggest you buy it anyway because it’s awesome.

I don’t think that those guides are necessarily bad, just that if your boot is really slow, jumping straight into disabling processes isn’t always the most effective first step to take. In general, you may be disabling some processes which

1. May not even take much time to load anyway
2. May be useful at somepoint in the future when you forget you disabled them

Most importantly, there may be some underlying problem that is causing much more of the slowness. With that said, I think that a better methodology is to check if there are any serious issues first, then concentrate on the details second.

To get a general impression of what was going on at boot time I installed the bootchart package. In Debian based distros, e.g. Ubuntu type:

sudo apt-get install bootchart

This app makes a graph of your boot by representing each process as a bar, the length of each showing the load time.

This is useful because you can actually see what is responsible for large chunks of the boot time. Then you can either decide whether you need the slow loading processes, or whether, shock, the reason for the hang is because of some kind of problem.

Here is my chart before I made any changes.

At 45 seconds, it’s not terribly bad but could definitely be improved. As you can see there is about a 12 second period where cupsd stalls before anything else starts loading.

With that information, I checked out /var/log/cups/error_log which contained one line:

Unable to find IP address for server name "..."

Turns out I had changed the hostname without updating the hosts file. So with that information I updated my /etc/hosts and cut 20 seconds off my boot time!

I think that I could probably shave a few more seconds by disabling certain unnecessary processes and if your boot time is already 30 seconds or less feel free to go for it. But, as a quick first step, it was nice to only spend a few minutes to save a huge chunk of time.

I’ve been using the pancake recipe from the Joy of Cooking for some time now. The recipe is veganized by replacing the non vegan ingredients with their vegan counterparts. Besides the obvious, eggs are replaced with Ener-G egg replacer. I’ve been fairly happy with the results but it could definitely be better.

About a month ago, Paul told me about a guy, Erik Pukinskis, who had spent a day testing a number of different recipes and blogged about the results. Paul made the ones that were determined to be “the best” and they were really good. Definitely better than the Joy of Cooking ones I had been making.

I decided I wanted to make them too and checked out his blog. It seemed that the two key differences were the amount of baking powder and the method used to mix the fat into the batter.

Baking soda.

More baking soda = fluffier pancakes. Apparently it really is that simple, as long as you don’t add so much you can taste it.

Fat mixing method.

The usual method for mixing margarine into pancake batter is to melt the margarine and mix it in with the other liquids. It makes logical sense. However, Erik decided to try cutting/rubbing the solid margarine into the dry ingredients the same way you would make biscuit dough. I really think that this is a big factor in the final texture of the pancakes.

To try and keep the number of variables low (yeah, I know 2 is already too many to draw any scientific conclusions) I decided to apply the previous two alterations to the JoC recipe. There are also a few things that I like about my usual recipe that I wasn’t so into about Erik’s. I like to use egg replacer instead of banana since the taste is neutral. I also don’t know whether I can believe that he “tried both soy and oat milk, and it didn’t seem to matter. Water was just as tasty.” Really?

This is the final recipe that I used:

Makes 5 six inch pancakes.

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp Earth Balance
1 cup minus 2 Tbsp soy milk
1 1/3 eggs via egg replacer (2 tsp egg replacer, 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp warm water)
1/2 tsp vanilla

Method:

Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Cut in earth balance until a crumb structure is formed. Whisk egg replacer and water using an electric whisk. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix with a whisk until relatively smooth.

Erik should definitely take the credit for putting in all the America’s Test Kitchen-esque hard work . I think, if anything, my test serves to reinforce some of the techniques that Erik used in his recipe.

The only kind of annoying thing, which is the iPods fault rather than Amarok’s, is that the iPod history only records the number of times a track has been played and the timestamp it was *last* played. What is missing is the timestamp for every time it was played. Without this information, the scrobbler has to make up a time which is kind of silly but it’s something I can live with.

For those that are curious, to set this up you click the ‘Configure device’ button on the ‘Devices’ tab. Then check ’syncronise with amarok statistics’. Of course, as well as scrobbling the data, this also updates the stats within amarok too.

edit: I recently switched to Gnome and started using Rhythmbox as my music manager/player. Rhythmbox does indeed send the correct timestamp data to last.fm for each track so it appears that the problem was with Amarok and not the ipod. I haven’t used amarok for a few months so I don’t know if the problem has been fixed there.

#6 (more on this later) is about to finish primary fermentation.

So I think this is technically our 5th attempt (we brewed the 4th batch since the last brew related post) but will be the first recorded brew. After sticking with some variation on a fairly typical West Coast Pale Ale up to this point, we decided to go with something lighter, more summery, with more of a European influence, but with a twist to keep it very West Coast and, in fact, even more geographically specific than that. You’ll see.

So Jesse wanted to make some kind of a pale lager, maybe a Pilsener. The problem being that San Francisco in the summer doesn’t really provide a suitably low temperature for that to quite work. So what could we do? Well luckily that had already been thought of well over a hundred years ago and we decided to make a Steam, or California Common, beer. That is, using lager yeast at a temperature one would normally ferment an ale at.

The Recipe (for 5 gallons)

4lbs Organic pale liquid malt extract
2lbs Organic corn sugar
2oz Organic Saaz hops
11g Safelager S-23 dry lager yeast

1 hour boil with 1oz of hops at the beginning and 1oz at the end.

After pitching, the yeast got to work very quickly and by the following morning the C02 was leaving the blow off tube very rapidly. At this point I was wondering whether, due to the increased temperature, the fermentation would happen so quickly that it might by done in a 2 or 3 day period. But as I write this 5 days later, the bubbles are still at about 8 second intervals so we have a little way to do yet. The last thing to figure out is how to tackle the conditioning process. I imagine that to be a true steam beer, it must also be conditioned at 65degrees. Maybe a little more research is called for.

Jesse, Kellen and I brewed a batch of beer yesterday. This one is a pale ale (although, as you can see in the video, it’s coming out pretty dark) brewed with cascade hops for bittering and finishing and american ale yeast is providing the fermentation. As you can see it is getting busy. It should be in bottles next weekend.

Also the slightly strange setup (lots of cardboard, and the carboy sat in the brew kettle with an aluminum foil hat on top) is due to me being slightly paranoid about being in a newly rented apartment and having a particularly explosive fermentation process last time. I don’t really want beer spraying out of the airlock and the resulting mess again.

Update:

I have posted videos for day 2 and 3 on my viddler account.