Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 15 of 27)

Recipe: braided cinnamon wreath

December 18, 2013 / / 5 Comments

aliens_cinnamon_roll

I am currently enjoying three weeks of Christmas holidays. Today was my first day, and after a successful bake of Waldkorn bread last week, I decided to have a go at a bigger version of the bread. My first attempt, creating a small bread,was met with so much approval that I did not get to eat very much of it myself. For your information, Waldkorn is a type of multi-grain bread which is quite light and very tasty. It the Netherlands, you can buy “Waldkorn mix”, containing several flours like wheat, rye, oats, barley as well as some sunflower and lineseed. You complete the bread mix by adding normal white flour, water, yeast and a bit of butter. Yummy! But my wife nudged me to create something different instead, as a holiday treat. She suggested a cinnamon roll.

What we came up with was a recipe for a braided cinnamon roll. Did not take all that much time to create (most of the time is spent waiting for the proving and baking).

Time required:

15 minutes for mixing and kneading, 1 hour for proving, 10 minutes for rolling and braiding, 35 minutes for baking.
Total: ~ 2 hours.

Ingrediënts:

Dough:

  • 125 ml lukewarm milk
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 7 gr fast-action yeast (one sachet)
  • 250 gr white flour
  • ½ ts salt
  • 30 gr soft butter
  • 1 eggyolk

Filling:

  • 50 gr molten butter
  • 4-5 tbsp sugar
  • 3 ts cinnamon powder

Preparation:

  • Mix the yeast with the sugar and the warm milk, Allow some time to let the yeast activate and create bubbles and foam.
  • Add the egg-yolk, softened butter, flour and salt. Stick the fingers of your hand in there, it’s fun! Mix the ingredients until the dry components have been absorbed and a dough has been formed. Dump the dough onto your work surface and knead it firmly for 10 minutes until it forms a smooth ball. You’ll feel the transformation in texture when the gluten start to develop.
  • Place the ball of dough into a large, lightly oiled, bowl. Cover with cling film or a tea-towel and place the bowl in a warm environment (room temperature is warm enough, do not put it directly over your central heating!). Leave the dough to prove until it has doubled in size (should take roughly 1 hour).
  • Pre-heat your oven to 200 centigrade.
  • Lightly cover your workspace with some flour, take the dough out of the bowl and use a rolling pin to flatten the dough to a rough rectangle of 1 mm thickness.
  • Spread the largest part of the molten butter over the dough and sprinkle generously with the sugar/cinnamon mix (keep a bit of both butter and sugar/cinnamon for the finishing).
  • Roll up the dough. Using a sharp knife, cut the roll in two halves length-wise.
  • Braid the two halves and make sure to keep the open layered side pointing up and outward (see picture). Place the braid on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and bend it into a circular shape. Tuck one end under the other.
  • Apply the remaining molten butter and sugar/cinnamon mix to the top which gives the finished bread a nice color.

Baking:

  • Bake for 30 to 35 minutes until the top is golden brown. Lower the oven temperature to 180 degrees centigrade after 5-10 minutes of baking.

 

Well folks… apparently there is nothing more attractive than a bake straight out of the oven. I think that about 10 centimeter of bread is left at the moment. This is the result of all family members sneaking into the kitchen in the evening and pinching pieces of the cinnamon bread. It tastes absolutely delightful! The picture on top is my own produce.

gevlochten_kaneelbrood_2

Original recipe found at: http://totallyloveit.com/braided-cinnamon-rolls/
Photo Credit:Ana Maria Ciolacu from Just Love Cooking

Memories of Doom

December 12, 2013 / / 7 Comments

doom_boxcoverYesterday was the 20th birthday of DOOM, the computer game which meant a paradigm shift to me way back when I got my hands on it.

It was 1993 and I worked at a CAD/CAM company with a Novell network (IPX protocolled, this was before the time of TCP/IP even). A collegue of mine had downloaded the shareware version of DOOM from a bulletin board and found out that it had multiplayer capabilities and could be played on an IPX network – like our company network. One-on-one play was also possible using direct modem connection (yes, this was before the advent of the public Internet) but IPX network setup meant 4-player deatchmatch. Nobody had ever played a 3D game on a network (Multi User Dungeons and the like are quite different) so this was exciting stuff.

I was the local sysadmin, and so they asked me if they could put up a copy of the game on the server so that people could install it and have a go at network play. Sure thing! I wanted to try this out myself of course. Early version of a BOFH 🙂

I wish I had gone ehard doing that… even though playing deathmatch was an ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC experience. What happened? The first version of shareware DOOM had a serious flaw in the IPX network play, it used broadcast packets to communicate among the players of the game. Once we got a couple of foursomes playing the game, the network came to a complete standstill because of all the broadcast traffic.

Luckily the fix came fast, and the next update to the shareware version used unicast packets. That settled things 🙂

But by then I was hooked. I had never played a (semi-) 3D graphical game before at that time, the best I had done was Leisure Suit Larry and that was a different league altogether. I liked the Colossal Cave Adventure a lot better actually. You know that you can type “adventure” on your Slackware command prompt? You’ll probably not experience what I felt in 1983 when I first started it on the University’s mainframe computer… the first ever computer game I played. IT was right after we switched from teletypes and punch cards to VT100 terminals…

DOOM was so much different, it caused an adrenaline rush and we all got hooked at work. We had to declare our lunch breaks as exclusive frag time so that we could still get some work done in the remaining hours. DOOM’s IPX based network play was limited to isolated LANs because John Carmack was new to IPX, but we actually managed to battle our collegues in another office 100 kilometers away after I learnt enough of the IPX protocol to modify the ipxsetup source code and add routing capabilities (even then, idsoftware was ahead of everyone else in the field, not just by being the first company to give away parts of their game for free as “shareware” but also by making the source code of their network setup program available). Yes, those are some of my first USENET posts way back in 1995 and 1996 when we had finally had our own Internet subscription at work (connecting through a 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodem).

Not just the concept of network play, 3D gaming and freely sharing game data and source code was an eye opener to me, but also the concept of multimedia in computing. At the time, I did not even have a “real” DOS computer. I owned an Atari TT  which I bought because Atari had promised to release a real UNIX OS for that machine. Unlike the Arari ST which was primarily meant for playing games, I was interested in programming, furthermore I had been a UNIX support person before I switched to Novell networks. It took Atari so long to deliver that I never actually got to install their brand of UNIX but got hooked on their TOS/GEM operating system instead, and actually wrote a couple of games (game clones to be precise) and utilities for the TT-GEM platform. But then DOOM came, and my girlfriend (now wife) had bought a computer to write her thesis. Of course I installed DOOM on it (my own Atari was useless) and she got hooked to the game  as well  🙂

But, we kept getting stuck at a particular spot in the game and we did not know how to advance. There was no Internet remember… no Google to search for walkthroughs. So I decided to upgrade the computer with extra RAM and a soud card.

Man…

The first time I started DOOM after the sound card was installed, somewhere late at night in a darkened room, and some IMPs raised their gruesome voices, the hair on my head stood on end and I had goosebumps all over. This was scary stuff, o wow! It was my first truely immersive experience in computer gaming – 3D and sound. It defined my taste for computer games, and I still care for “idgames” style of shooters more than anything else.

And having the sounds meant we finally could progress in the game, because we heard a distant door open and close again, and we knew than that we had to run for that door. Something which we would not have discovered without a sound card.

At that time, I knew the computer industry was going to change. It was a game which made me decide to buy new hardware… that was a first for me. At work where I was the sysadmin I upgraded or replaced computers because the programmers would buy a new compiler or wrote more complex code. Games were not considered as relevant to computing. Hah!

A nice read, also called “Memories of Doom” (why did they nick my title!) is up on Kotaku where John Carmack and John Romero (former friends, now bitter rivals) reminisce about their creation. Oh, the good times.

Am I an old guy? Yes, that should be obvious by now. But I still play games. On Slackware Linux.

Recipe: foccaccia

November 3, 2013 / / 5 Comments

I have enjoyed the BBC’s Great Brithsh Bake Off series a lot. My wife has been watching these episodes longer than I have – she is the real cook – but I got increasingly interested because of the sympathetic presentation by Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. Always amazing what these amateur bakers can come up with…way out of my league.

In the second series, which aired in 2011, Paul Hollywood set a technical challenge to the contesters: to make an Italian Focaccia bread. Ever since I went to Italy with my girl friend (now wife) and ate a real freshly baked focaccia bread, I have been spoiled by that event. I never got an appetite for the factory-baked ones you can buy in the local supermarket. I remember that the original bread tasted great because it was almost soaking with olive oil and was full of mediterranean flavours.

So I promised myself to bake a focaccia one day. However, I was discouraged by the fact that making a good focaccia dough seems to be quite difficult to make. Also, I wanted to use my hands, not a kneading robot to make the dough.

That is why I carefully watched the Brithsh Bake Off Masterclass session where Paul Hollywood showed how he makes his focaccia, and I used the recipe as outlined in his book “How to Bake“. I split the amounts in half because I wanted to end up with a single bread for a 2-3 persons side-dish.

Time required:

2.5 hours for preparation, 30 minutes for baking.

Ingredients:

  • 250 grams of strong white flour
  • 1 sachet dried fast action yeast
  • 1 teaspoon of salt
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 200ml cold water (straight from the tap)
  • olive oil, for drizzling
  • coarse sea salt
  • fresh (preferred) or dried rosemary for sprinkling on top

Preparation:

  • Prepare a bowl for proving the dough, by oiling its inside generously. Put aside for later.
  • Use a kitchen scale to measure the flour and tip it into into a large mixing bowl. Empty the sachet of dried yeast on one side of the bowl and add the salt on the opposite side of the bowl. They need to be separated because the salt will kill the yeast if the two come into direct contact too soon. Then, add the olive oil, and three quarters of the water. Cold water is better than warm water according to Paul Hollywood. Cold water will activate the yeast more slowly and that will have a positive effect on the flavours that will develop in the bread.
  • Stir the ingredients into a dough with a wooden spoon. Instead of using a spoon, you can also use the fingers of one hand to pull the flour into the mix gradually.
  • When the water is absorbed you can gradually add the remaining water bit by bit. Knead until all the water has been absorbed before adding more. Focaccia dough is very wet: the ratio flour to water is almost one to one. The more water, the lighter the bread’s inside will be!
  • Rub your hands with a bit of olive oil and start kneading the dough in the bowl for around 5 minutes. It will be annoyingly sticky. If needed, you can wash your hands, rub them in olive oil and continue kneading.
  • Spread some olive oil on your work surface and dump the dough from the bowl onto the work surface. Continue kneading for another 10 minutes.
  • At this point I was getting quite depressed and despairing… because the dough did not turn into a silky non-stick substance (which is what usually happens after kneading a bread dough for a period of time). Focaccia dough will keep sticking to your hands no matter how long you knead it. Just accept that and move on.
  • Scrape the dough off the work surface and off your hands, and place it into the oiled bowl you had set aside earlier. Cover the bowl with a tea towel or clingfilm and leave it in a warm place to prove for at least an hour, or until the dough has doubled in size.
  • Line a rectangular baking tray (roughly 20 cm by 30 cm in size ) with parchment paper and rub the inside with oil. Gently slide the dough into the tray. Use your fingers to gently stretch and push the dough into the corners of the tray. You do not want to push all the air out!
  • Cover the baking tray with clingfilm or a tea towel and leave it to prove for another hour.
  • Just before the hour is over, pre-heat your oven to 220 degrees centigrade.
  • Remove the towel or cling film. Dip one of your fingers into some flour so that it will not stick, and then firmly push it into the dough, all the way to the bottom of the tray. Repeat this until the focaccia dough has a nice outline of dimples all over its surface.

Baking:

  • Sprinkle the focaccia generously with sea salt and rosemary. Sprinkle a few tablespoons of olive oil on top (or hold your thumb to the aperture of the olive oil bottle and drizzle the oil through the narrow gap you leave open).
  • Bake the focaccia at 220 degrees centigrade, middle of the oven, for about 20 minutes. It should turn an even brown colour.
  • Lift the bread out of the tray using the parchment paper as a handle, and put it on a wire rack. Remove the paper from beneath the bread. Sprinkle with some more olive oil which will get soaked into the bread. Use a high-quality green olive oil if you have that – it will greatly enhance the flavour.
2013-11-03 17.05.20

I almost ate all of it before thinking of taking a picture.

The result is a flat bread with a lovely crispy brown crust, and yet light on the inside. The focaccia has lots of air pockets or various sizes- the sign of a good bake. It tasted great! A real mediterranean treat.

The focaccia should be eaten right out of the oven, or while it is still warm, for the best experience.

Eric.

Education and Open Source

October 18, 2013 / / 29 Comments

I really need to rant and fume a bit about the dutch education system – and I will end with some free promotion for an Open Source centered conference in my own city.

I have a son, he is in Secondary School now. But even in Primary School, he was exposed to a Microsoft-dominated IT infrastructure. He would work on texts in MS Word, and create presentations in MS PowerPoint or even MS Visio.

The problems for parents would inevitably start when the kids were sent home with instructions to finish their school assignments at home, effectively forcing the parents to buy copies of MS Office Professional or “go illegal”. The LibreOffice suite did not exist back then, and OpenOffice was not able to cope with Visio files (and quite honesly, could not cope well with complex Word documents either). at the time, I used a web-based MS Office conversion tool to create PDF files of the stuff my son brought home for printing (because colour printing at school would cost money).

Asking the local IT guy about Linux based education possibilities or even opportunities (my own expertise counts for something, you’d think) would only return blank stares. Apparently Microsoft has invested serious money in SURFMarket (joint venture with KennisNet and SURF) to ensure that dutch educational institutes are being supplied with Microsoft software at bargain prices, so that there is no incentive to look for alternatives. Which is detrimental to the development of the children, because they are not learning about Information Technology… they are learning how to operate MS Office.

In comparison, look at the initiatives in the UK, where the government-funded BBC sparked the development of the Acorn computer (Acorn developed the ARM CPU -originally an acronym for Acorn Risc Machine), and a few years ago this concept was rebooted by a couple of awesome guys from the University of Cambridge in the form of the Raspberry Pi, an ideal target for Computer Education in primary school. I can only look at the British in envy, and seriously think that the dutch have made fatal errors in long-term strategic decisions regarding the education of new geneations.

Fast forward to Secondary School.

Every pupil in my son’s school is required to have access to a Windows computer at home. The only software used at school is Microsoft based. Luckily the Document Foundation has spent a tremendous effort at making the LibeOffice suite more interoperable with the Microsoft counterpart, so there are ways around the Windows office requirements at school.

However there is still one major stumbling block. An by major, I mean stupid policy-makers are apparently being bought. Our Secondary school, one of many similar schools, has moved its Student Registration and Management system to Magister. Magister is built on Microsoft’s Silverlight content creation sofrtware, which is of course not cross-platform.

On Linux, an open-source Silverlight implementation called Moonlight (part of Mono) has been available for a while but its development has ceased. Petitions (from school teachers even) to provide alternatives that would work on Linux and Mac computers have not been honoured. A lot of links prove how bad the situation is and I could easily produce a lot more (most are in dutch by the way).

I am forced to use Silverlight. That is bad, when you consider that the dutch government has pledged to promote the use of Open Software and Open Standards – first through ICTU‘s OSOSS program, and later through the NOIV program. When that program ended, the message was that the government would not divert from this strategy in future. Ha ha ha.

I have been using a Chrome plugin that renders Silverlight pages on-line but the company which ran the service has closed shop last year. I am now looking at Pipelight, which is a cross-browser plugin which uses a patched version of Wine to render Silverlight pages locally. Expect Slackware packages soon, if it impresses me sufficiently. I want to be able to monitor my son’s progress on my Slackware computer dammit!

I am not venting my anger just because I can not bear it any longer. I wanted to take the opportunity and do a bit of PR for an event that will be taking place in Eindhoven, mu home town. There is a lot to learn there about proper and effective use of Open Source and Open Standards in eduction.

t-dose-square If you are interested, consider visiting  T-DOSE in the weekend of 26-27 october. T-DOSE is a free yearly recurring conference to promote the use and development of Open Source Software. I did a talk about the history of Slackware at the 2009 edition (I was so terribly ill and ran on paracetamol… but the talk was OK). This year the conference will run a full “track” consisting of several talks related to education and Open Source – I do not even mention all of them:

And for those who are interested in hands-on experience on top of the talks, an Open Source Class Room demonstration enviroment will be available during the whole event.

It’s free entry people! And if you are planning to go, leave a note here and you may meet me during drinks.

Cheers, Eric

Best FOSS or Linux Blog of 2013

August 26, 2013 / / 24 Comments

The folks at FOSS Force ran a poll during the past four weeks in order to decide who gets to be called the “Best FOSS or Linux Blog of 2013“. I casually mentioned (at the end of one of my own blog posts) that my “Alien Pastures” blog had been added to the list of contenders after the first round, and was rewarded with lots of people voting for Alien Pastures 🙂

FOSS Force Best FOSS or Linux Blog 2013Actually, so many of you voted during the second and third round (obviously stimulated by a LQ post) that I ended on top! The Alien Pastures have been honoured with the winner’s badge.

Thank you all for your appreciation and confidence, and hats off to the other blogs which participated in the poll. They are worth checking out – all of them are written by Free and Open Source Software advocates with a mission – to educate and enthuse you!

I personally gave my vote to Martin Graesslin’s Blog, I think his are the deepest thoughts.

And thank you FOSS Force for giving my blog a new platform and the potential to interest a wider audience for my writings, and for Slackware of course.

 

Cheers, Eric

I would like to dedicate this accomplishment to my dearest cat Sox, who slept on my lap almost every night (with hew paws firmly clutching one of my arms) and therefore has been first witness to most of the blog posts I have written here. She passed away 3 weeks ago at the age of 17.

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