djm's scribble

Last week my uncle Michael passed away after a battle with cancer, and we attended his funeral on Tuesday. If I was asked to describe him in a single phrase, I would choose “big hearted”. Michael was a kind, well-read and thoughtful man who passionately loved life and made friends wherever he went (evidenced by the packed funeral service and wake). His passing will leave a hole in our lives, but more so those of his wife, three children, mother and six siblings. Bye big fella - I’ll think of you whenever I open a bottle of shiraz.

Today I learned of the passing of Jun-ichiro “Itojun” Hagino. I had only met Itojun on an handful of occasions in person but had worked with him on the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects for some years, leading me to become a great admirer of his expertise, intellect and hard work. Most of the impact of his great efforts on IPv6 lie in the future and it is a deep shame that he will not be around to see his life’s work used by everyone. So long, Itojun - you will be missed.

This is a nice artichoke pasta sauce that I have been cooking recently. It serves 4 hungry people. I use a wok to sauté the mix, but a deep frypan would do.

Ingredients

• 2 large brown onions
• ~350g jar of marinated artichoke hearts
• ~1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 sprig garlic
• 4 small chilli peppers
• 2 cans diced organic tomatoes
• 2 teaspoons pepper
• 1 cup finely chopped Italian (flat leaf) parsley
• 2/3rds cup finely grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

1. Separately chop garlic and onions finely
2. Finely chop chillis, remove seeds
3. Add oil to wok and heat
4. Add garlic and chilli and cook until the garlic starts to turn golden (don’t let it brown!)
5. Add onions and pepper, sauté until the onions go soft (maybe add a splash more oil here)
6. Chop artichoke hearts into ~1.5cm chunks and add once the onions are soft, cooking until they soften too
7. Add diced tomatoes and bring to boil
8. Cook for 10-15 minutes (now is a good time to start to cook the pasta)
9. Add parsely and parmesan
10. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring thoroughly

This is pretty heavy on the garlic. If you don’t like it so much, you can use 1/2 a sprig or fry it longer at the start. This sauce is fairly thick so it goes well with farfale, fusilli or campanelle pasta.

Update [2007/11/25]: I have since found it better to sauté the artichoke hearts rather than boiling them.

I have been trying to improve my (terrible) cooking skills recently, by cooking some very basic recipes until I get them right. So far the only one that has worked first time is the following recipe for red lentil soup. My attempts at making carrot cake have turned out tasty, but rather too dense, and it took a couple of attempts and lots of wasted eggs before I could reliably make Hollandaise sauce (tip: use a very low heat when adding the egg yolks to the butter).

This recipe makes enough lentil soup to feed a small army, but I prefer to make bulk soup because it freezes so well. The recipe does scale very well, so you might want to simply divide by 4 or 5 if you are only cooking for a few people. It is quite a hearty soup - very good for this cold winter.

Ingredients

• 4 large brown onions
• 1Kg carrots
• 5 cups red lentils
• 1.5 tablespoons turmeric
• 1/3rd cup olive oil
• 4 litres vegetable stock
• 1 litre water

Instructions

1. Chop onions finely, add to pan with olive oil and cook until soft
2. Add tumeric and stir through
3. Place the water and stock in a large pot, add the cooked onions and place on a high heat
4. Chop carrots finely
5. If you have any random vegetables lying at the bottom of the fridge, this is a good time to get rid of them - chop them up
6. Wash the lentils (wait until you are ready to add them to the stock, otherwise they will become sticky and clump at the bottom of the pot)
7. Once stock is gently boiling, add carrots, washed lentils and whatever you found at in your fridge
8. Boil until carrots are soft and the soup has thickened
9. Add salt to taste
10. Serve with natural yoghurt and Italian parsley

More shark-jumping from the Department of Homeland Stupidity: since they have obviously run out of absurd threats (I thought liquids on a plane was the nadir, but no…) - they have stuck upon the genius idea of tapping science fiction authors for still crazier ones. Note that at least one of these authors (Pournelle) has a track record in beating up crazy threats and responese, having campaigned for the failed “Star Wars” missile defence system with Reagan. The late, great Isaac Asimov’s take on that matter is just as relevant now as it was 22 years ago: “I have as my theme that violence is the last resort of the incompetent.”. Hear hear.

This might be slightly old news but this paper is essential reading: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6., pp. 1121-1134

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities

It is pretty depressing too, once the reader starts to consider the fields of endeavour they are blissfully incompetent in.

Finally! At last my insatiable need to find out my IP address, while shopping for shoes can be met.

I’m so relieved.

Did you know that the Chupa Chups’ logo was designed by Salvador Dalí? (I didn’t).

I have been playing with a new toy that was given to me in Japan: an IO-DATA USL 5P. These are a tiny computer, between the size of a deck of cards and a small paperback, which has a Hitachi SH-4 processor and 64MB of RAM. It boots off compact flash and has an Ethernet and five USB ports to talk to the outside world. They ship with a customised Linux distribution, but it is now possible to install OpenBSD on them.

Unfortunately, the installation process is a little fiddly. These devices don’t expose an RS-232 serial port for a console, only some TTL pins on their circuit board that use the wrong voltage to attach to normal serial devices. Nevermind, a $5 MAX3232 chip from Maxim, another $1 worth of capacitors and some breadboard (ok, and some swearing) had me a level converter that allowed me to attach the device to a standard serial port. OpenBSD booted fine, but my first attempts to install were thwarted due to a loose link on my breadboard. Once I fixed that, OpenBSD installed fine (via USB 802.11 no less) and I have a miniscule computer running Unix!

I have just returned from AsiaBSDCon 2007 where I presented (PDF slides) a paper on the security measures we have implemented in OpenSSH.

The conference was held in Tokyo, at Tokyo University. The venue was great and the conference was well organised, except that the single track made for very long days (9am to 7:30pm). There were some good papers and presentations at the conference; apart from the OpenBSD ones, I particularly liked Antti Kantee’s “pass to userspace framework filesystem” work, prof. Murai’s wide ranging talk on BSD, the Internet and pervasive networking and the three IPv6 mobility papers from the researchers at IIJ and Keio university.

Tokyo was great fun, as was catching up some some fellow OpenBSD hackers and appreciators (I’ll post some photos once I have sorted them). After the conference I spent a day and a half pounding the streets of Ginza, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Asakusabashi and Akihabara looking for gifts for my wife and son (ok, ok, Akihabara was for me) - this turned out more difficult than I expected, so I ended up covering a lot of ground and getting very sore feet. I didn’t buy much for myself, though Mark from OpenBSD support Japan kindly gave me an IO Data USL-5P to hack on (only slightly larger than a deck of cards!)

I also got to fulfill my childhood dream of visiting a Japanese amusement arcade, but I think I was at least 10 years too late: most of them seem to have been subsumed by Pachinko. Pachinko parlours are mind-altering - if you have ever experienced sensory overload on visiting a casino slot-machine room, start by squaring that level of din and flashing lights then add thick cigarette smoke, the tinkling rattle of hundreds of thousands little balls and epileptic flashing graphics on each machine. msf@ theorised that Pachinko parlours are the reason behind Japan’s fecund production of avant-garde noise artists. (I can’t imagine how Hunter S. Thompson’s masterwork would have turned out had he been given access to Pachinko.) It was too much for me - I didn’t play, sticking instead to the new versions of Virtua Cop, Time Crisis and watching Japanese schoolgirls mow down zombies with submachine guns (a new version of House of the Dead).

I’m already looking forward to going back to Japan again, even though my 日本語 has atropied substantially. One thing I’ll have to do is pick up a W-CDMA phone before I leave as I don’t think I could cope without having my telephony cortex lobotomised out again.