Moved

Hi all, this has been moved to

http://peeters-noppe.net/alcaic/

Enjoy it there (more stuff might actually appear :-)

No pictures?

Why have my pictures disappeared?

Yummy 2

Culinary writeup trial, you could call it. As stated in the tweet at that time, the menu for Valentine was (add good friends):

• Scallops with Salmon and Saffran
• Leg of Lamb
• Lemon Pie.

Starting with champagne and hibiscus flowers. Ending with Connemara. And you know what: I'll give away the ending: it was great. Satisfied? (so were we) So: on to the courses.

Setting the scene

One import aspect of any culinary evening is attention to detail. Don't skimp on details, they are the coathangers that will make your evening memorable. All evenings with great friends are great, don't settle for it. In this case, a nice themed wine seemed appropriate. miamor is a Malbec grape based wine from the Mendoza region in Argentina, and as often the case for such wines, very highly vinified. Open it up, let it breath and sparkle up front. And make sure your main dish is a match.

Last things first

Another import aspect is the dessert. While icecream will do for most occasions (and have some in the house always - you never know when some experiment will fail), nothing says "I love you" like homemade pie. Italian lemon pie in this case. You will want his made as fresh as possible, so start as late as possible while still allowing it sufficient (say, 4 hours) time to cool. The recipe came from "Il Cucchiaio d'Argento", the Italian Fanny Farmer, if you want. Forget about hotshot kitchen rods publishing X books on their view of the authentic kitchen - just get this one single book and save a ton.

Dead simple to make, the torta al limone consists of a baked shell of pasta frolla ("buttercrust"), filled with eggs (3-4) beaten with sugar (200g), with the rind of two lemons and the juice of half one added. Top with beaten eggwhites (3) mixed with powdered sugar (100g). 30 minutes in the oven and you're done. Don't forget to coat the crust with some beaten eggwhite to seal it before filling.

Loving the tender meat

Leg of lamb is mostly an exercise in patience. It really does not matter if you prefer it with garlic slivers inserted close to the bone (yes!), or peppered and thymed (yes!) or rubbed vigorously with rosemary (yes!), the important thing is to take your time when cooking it. Put your oven at a balmy 170 Celsius, allow for up to two hours for a full leg (no hot air fans, please), and have a timer that reminds you every 15 minutes to take the juices and baste it. Towards the end of the cooking time (last 10 minutes), that's when you go for the crustiness.

(To be continued)

Yummy

We're going to have a great Valentine - first time with a couple of best friends. Dinner will consist of this - and I just realized that I'll try and document the preparation and result. Eyes on this space.

Update 20090309: still in draft - time again much too short.

Clicky tech.

Just installed Apture here. Although I was hesitant at first (I'll do my own linking, thank you) - I'll give it a shot.

So, it can do

• Photo
• Video
• Music
• Documents

Update, main problems today:

• Speed
• AutoUpdates
• Problems with multiple windows
• Document linking to pdfs

Seond update:

• Many problems appear to be related to me using Webkit, in fact
• Linking in the title block does not work
• Inserting media is also possible - but not inside the post, apparently.
• Links get lost
  

Opening up

Problem

Blog posts that actually make it here:

• 2006: 5
• 2007: 5
• 2008: 2

Bad.

Solution

Previously, none. A big part of the problem is the industry I work in (or so I thought until today, but more about that below). As part of a major system integrator, working in an oliogopolistic industry and on research related to what is considered one of its important foundations, [SENTENCE TOO CONVOLUTED - TRY AGAIN]

Ok, we're trying to see how can can further increase the bandwidth over existing copper, and this is important because, you know, the copper is already there, giving it a huge advantage in capex compared to new fiber deployments. Moverover, its a competitive market, so we have a tendency to be paranoid about what we are doing.

Another aspect is the research angle, where as part of Bell Labs, we have an automatic impulse to publish at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals (a kind of long blog post where you get the comments first, and then the permission to post; sometimes a flame war happens, but noone ever sees it).

So I tend to think "ah, something interesting to blog about", but then think twice and it just ends up in the drafts section or as an internal note or idea for part of a paper.

But

I today attended a talk given by Constantin Gonzales, at Sun, talking about the approach they have been taking towards the entire two dot oh thing, which incidentally appears to be important for us as well.

Their approach, other than the extreme focus on open source and open APIs, is to have an immense transparency towards the market, in the form of an immensely active mass of bloggers including their CEO.

And

They apparently have no qualms about

1. IPR
2. Legal issues
3. Mixed Marketing Messages
4. Competitors getting an insight on the stuff you're working on

which quite frankly surprised me. So I asked and it turns out, they have rules. They appear to be rather common sense but after some review don't really help (me), especially on points 3. and 4. My feeling is just that today, the basic assumption at Sun's, "you are encouraged to tell the world about your work", does not hold true here at ALcatel-Lucent.

But maybe I'm wrong. We'll see and I promise I'll be good, Ben.

Update: Our CEO, as well.