- Phil Agre: Commentaries on Cheap Pens. Holy cats, this guy really enjoys pens.
- Bruce Eckel (who has an RSS feed now): Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing.
If strong static type checking is so important, why are people able to build big, complex Python programs (with much shorter time and effort than the strong static counterparts) without the disaster that I was so sure would ensue?
- Jakob Nielsen: Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?
- Steven Canfield: CSS: Where art thou? (Height: Auto). I have absolutely no idea if it’s possible to replicate
<table height="100%">in CSS, but I’d be very interested to find out. - Tim Bray: On CSS.
- Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters. [via Tim]
- Dan Cederholm: Simplified CSS tabs. [via Phil]
- Evan Goer: The XHTML 100. [via Phil]
- Jacques Distler: Yummy yummy Tag Soup. [via Phil]
- Jacques Distler: Validating Comments. [via ... oh you get the idea, everybody just go read Phil's post on Real XHTML]
- Alexei Kosut: MT-Validate.
- Simon Willison: Living on a knife edge.
- PC Magazine: Spyware Removers.
-
We got a new bread machine, the Breadman Ultimate, as an early wedding present. I got one of the original Breadmans (Breadmen?) years ago. To say that it was well-loved would be an understatement. That bread machine outlasted four relationships, three apartments, two states, and a cat. It is with no small amount of reluctance that I give it up.
Despite the obvious name inflation, the technology of automated breadmaking appears to have evolved significantly while I wasn’t looking, and I get the sense that the entire field has coalesced and matured. For example, our new Breadman Ultimate has a separate fruits-and-nuts dispenser. I have no idea what that is, but it sounds very exciting. It has separate white and wheat settings, a pizza dough setting, and a French bread setting (surely to be renamed Freedom bread in the Breadman Titanium 2010). It also sports
a fully randomizing pause feature
. Sounds like a bug to me, but what do I know?One of the first things you do when you get a new bread machine — despite having had an older but mostly functioning bread machine for years — is take stock of your bread mix collection. Like taking stock of your condom collection after a long dry spell, this can be somewhat depressing. One mix turned out to have a hole in the inside packaging and had to be thrown out immediately. Another contained a packet of yeast that expired in 2001. Yeast! I didn’t know yeast ever expired. I thought it was like Twinkies, and fruitcake. I’ve found expired condoms before too, and let me tell you, this is worse.
Anyway, other than skimming through the instruction manual and reading the enclosed marketing literature, I have no opinion yet about whether my new bread machine rocks. It’s making its first loaf now; I’ll keep you apprised.
Update: mmm, sourdough.
Just don’t go around carrying the bread mix in your wallet.
Comment by Ryan — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 10:21 pm
I dunno, Ryan. I think there are much worse ways to confuse condoms and a bread machine. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.
Comment by Adam — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 10:24 pm
Oh. My. $DEITY. There I was not expecting commenters to go.
Anyway, yes, yeast spoils; it’s a bunch of leetle tiny living critters, and like most living critters they aren’t over-pleasant when they become ex-living critters.
Keeping it in the fridge extends its life somewhat. FYI.
Comment by Dorothea Salo — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 10:37 pm
I’ve been told by a friend that if I’m going to get serious about auto-bread, I should invest in a jar of Fleischmann’s Bread Yeast and keep it in the refrigerator.
Comment by Mark — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 11:12 pm
My grandmother was telling me about this. She said that when she was little, people’s mothers would have yeast populations. You’d have a bowl of yeast sitting on the counter, and use a little bit of it to make bread. Yeast is alive so it would reproduce. You’d always have yeast for bread AND not have to invest in yeast.
Apparently there were like, really good yeast populations that made better bread.
Comment by Steven Canfield — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 11:19 pm
Yeah, the yeast for bread can get to be pretty hardcore. Especially sourdough bread. The Silverbow bakery up here in Juneau, AK has sourdough yeast populations that have been around since the AK gold rush. That’s 100+ years.
Blows ones mind a little bit, eh?
Comment by d chalmers — Monday, May 5, 2003 @ 11:38 pm
But does the machine have a SOAP interface?
I invented sourdough, you know.
Comment by Definitely Not Dave Winer — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 1:05 am
As a home beer and wine brewer, I can be one to tell you that yeast is utterly important. Yeast should be thought of like any other creature that we rely on to survive. Give it what it needs, and it will reward you with the goodness of fermentation. When I brew, I start with a tube of live liquid yeast, not just a packet of dessicated yeast that can barely pull itself out of its languid sleep period. I prepare a liter of nutricious malty fluid for it to feed on. I nuture it for days. Then I add it to my brew, and, pleased with how well it is being treated, it foams up in a vigorous orgy of fermentation, creating delicious beverages for me. I don’t abandon it when the brew is complete. I harvest the yeasties and set them to work on another brew. They live their entire lives in the fermenters, eating, living, having children and families. I keep them well fed, keep them warm and safe.
I love you, Yeasties!
Yeast is one of the most important aspects of any brew or dough! Use the highest quality yeast you can, treat it well, and it will bring you delicious joy.
Oh yeah, and my first sexual experience involved a very old condom. It broke as I was putting it on, to my shock and horror. I suppose I’m lucky it broke then, and not two minutes later. Fortunately, a fresh replacement was found after an embarassing request made to the roommate.
Comment by sam — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 2:51 am
Mmm. Bread.
Re: !Dave, I have to say that the last thing I want in my Bread Machine is soap. Really. Now, an XML-RPC interface that sends SMS when the bread is done…
(Put the hammer down, I’m joking).
But, er, yes. Bread Machines Rock.
Comment by Aquarion — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 4:08 am
> a French bread setting (surely to be renamed Freedom bread in the Breadman Titanium 2010)
You should try Daniel Glazman’s Freedom bookmarklet on your Breadman the day this happens : http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/newarchive/2003_04_20_glazblogarc.html#s93114075
Comment by Tristan Nitot — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 9:41 am
http://www.la-grange.net/2003/05/div-100pc-test.html
I don’t know if it was what needed and I don’t know if it works everywhere
Comment by karl — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 11:34 am
Karl, I think the problem was specifically with elements contained within other elements that had no explicit height defined.
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 11:57 am
For anyone interested, I made my own CSS tabs with inspiration from Dan Cederholm’s Simplified CSS Tabs:
http://unraveled.com/joshua/projects/css_tabs.shtml
Comment by Joshua Kaufman — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 12:21 pm
Does anyone know of an MT plugin which would send an XML-RPC call or something to validator.w3.org so that if I stuff up and forget an end tag, then it would immediately say so, before posting the post? This would allow me to revert (yes, revert) to XHTML 1.1, because then Mozilla wouldn’t stuff up everytime I forgot an end tag because I wouldn’t, because the plugin would warn me.
Comment by snippers — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 1:16 pm
Probably your best bet is to install MT-Validate and do your validation locally. That’s what I plan on doing, to avoid embarassments like this:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you.html#c001814
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 1:33 pm
Machine-baked bread always look so… dull. It’s all square and just non-human, non-baked by hand, which is a good deal of the charm for me in eating a freshly baked baguette. I used to be afraid of my neighbor’s bread machine when I was little.
Remember to only use recent ingredients, yeast we forget. [Bdum schh.]
Comments without moronic puns may now proceed.
Comment by Jesper — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 1:55 pm
For comment validation in MT, be sure to read this post by Jacques Distler:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000155.html
Comment by Evan — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 2:02 pm
I agree with Jesper. Technophiles and young urban professionals think bread machine bread is “homemade” but it tastes nothing like real homemade bread. Anyone who works from home can learn to get their hands full of flour!
Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 2:26 pm
Actually, I am a bit of a technophile, but there’s always a place to draw the line, and I’m not looking forward to when/if computers control everything.
Comment by Jesper — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 2:31 pm
RE: validation. I’ve had very good luck with an MT plugin called Validable:
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/validable.php
It fixes some of the most common validation errors, but not all of them. The rest of them, I take care of by defining what HTML is allowed in my sanitize spec in Configuration > Preferences.
Comment by Joshua Kaufman — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 2:48 pm
Isn’t Paul Graham the author of “Hackers and Painters”? Or Paul Hammond and Paul Graham are really the same person, and I somehow missed that fact?
Comment by Giulio Piancastelli — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 4:04 pm
Re: Paul Graham. Fixed! Good catch.
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, May 6, 2003 @ 4:33 pm
Yes, but can you hook it up to your blog? The bread machine that is.
Comment by Mean Dean — Wednesday, May 7, 2003 @ 12:53 am
Nice to see “yummy yummmy” without being prefaced with “Fruit Salad”.
Comment by Dan Isaacs — Thursday, May 8, 2003 @ 11:51 pm