Hand Coding

Josh mentions that KMFDM just released a new album last Tuesday, WWIII. I was surprised to hear this at first, since supposedly frontman Sascha Konietzko had disbanded the band back in 1999 (hence the title of that year’s album, Adios).

Then, as if to say “ha-ha, fooled you!”, Sascha reformed a new band, MDFMK (yes, that’s “KMFDM” backwards). Now, it’s not as if MDFMK was just a wolf in KMFDM’s clothing; it actually had a slightly different — yet distinct — sound from KMFDM. And, I still really enjoyed MDFMK’s sound.

So, apparently Sascha reformed KMFDM. And, I was most curious about how their new album would sound — whether it would resemble the KMFDM of old, or whether it would continue along the progression of MDFMK. Fortunately, there’re some album reviews on KMFDM’s WWIII page. And, though not actually a review, this interview in Rhino Magazine was especially helpful (the interview is on page 14/16 of the PDF).

I expected the interview to be mostly fluff, but it was surprisingly informative. Early in the interview, the interviewer asks “KMFDM’s sound has evolved with each album. How would you compare the sound of WWIII with previous work?” Aha, that’s just the question for which I wanted an answer! However, I was a bit dismayed as I started to read Sascha’s response:

Well I would say it’s definitely a departure from the techno influence in the Symbols and Adios times. […]

Uh-oh… I really liked the direction they were going with Symbols and Adios, so that bit made me a little uneasy. But, Sacha continued:

[…] If anything, it’s more connecting to the sound of Nihil — the aggressive, drum-heavy, guitar-heavy other stuff with less of the techno programming in it.

Ah, no worries! So maybe it’s not quite like their recent albums, but Nihil is still one of my favorites (if I recall, that’s the album which introduced me to the band). It looks like I’ll have to add WWIII to my list of CDs-to-buy (and I’ll keep a lookout for it at the local used CD stores, though I don't expect to really find it there).

I’ve come to the conclusion that my pepper mill (or is it “pepper grinder”?) just isn’t cutting it: to get even dusting of pepper on my omelettes, I need to grind for what seems to be ten seconds or more. On top of that, the only size-setting appears to be “medium”, and there isn’t a means of adjusting that.

So, I had my mind made up to go shopping for a new pepper mill. I was about to trek off to Bed Bath & Beyond one afternoon to check out their wares, but I decided to check Cook’s Illustrated’s opinion first. For those not aware, Cook’s Illustrated is an advertising-free cooking magazine that prides itself on finding the best possible recipe for a dish (they’ll often go through dozens of variations before accepting the final version). And, in addition to recipes, they also test kitchen tools (they’re a bit like Consumer Reports that way).

Though watching their tv show, America’s Test Kitchen (on PBS), I’ve seen them test items such as oven thermometers and bread pans. So, I had a hunch that they may have tested pepper mills as well. A quick search on Google showed that to be the case. In episode 253 of their show, they indeed tested pepper mills.

Their tests were surprisingly thorough, including tests of capacity, grind quality, grind speed, ease of filling, and ease of use. And, though America’s Test Kitchen often finds that the more inexpensive components can perform as well as some of the more expensive versions, that wasn’t the case this time.

Reading over the show’s summary, they really loved the Unicorn Magnum Plus:

More than half of the mills tested did their jobs well, but the Unicorn Magnum Plus was the superstar. Its grind quality is exemplary, its output astounding, and its capacity huge. If that weren’t enough, it’s also easy to fill and comfortable to use. At $45, however, this mill was one of the two most expensive in the test (the second-place EHI Peppermate was $40). […]

I wasn’t expecting to see a $40-mill at the top. And, though I was hoping to find it for less online, it was consistently around that price when I checked at Froogle. Luckily, America’s Test Kitchen also commented on some more moderately priced mills: “If your budget is a bit more restricted, we recommend both the Oxo Grind It ($19.99) and the Zyliss Large Pepper Mill ($27.50).”

So, I’ve already decided on buying a new mill. But, I need to figure out just how much properly-ground pepper is worth to me. It has crossed my mind that I could save 50% on the mill by going for the Oxo over the Unicorn Magnum. On the other hand, maybe $40 isn’t that bad for a pepper mill if it’s the last mill I need to buy.

Update / 10-9-2003: I’ve ordered the Magnum Plus Pepper Mill from Cooking.com. Not only do they have one of the lowest prices on the web ($41.95), but I also found a 20% off coupon for Cooking.com at Dealcoupon.com which didn’t hurt either (that coupon expires 10-31-2003). I’ve also ordered a 2 lb bag of tellicherry black peppercorns from Penzys.

I actually wasn’t even aware of the various varieties of black peppercorns until I read this thread on eGullet about tellicherry black peppercorns — one forum member enthusiastically described them as having a “distinctive black pepper taste, fruity if that is possible, pungent but with flavor, not heat” (ooh!). If you’re shopping for a pepper mill or peppercorns, I also found this thread very informative — it actually links to several related threads on pepper mills and peppercorns.

Josh passes along Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, an electronic music family tree. In this Flash-driven app, Ishkur illustrates the origins and derivations of what appears to be every electronic music sub-genre.

Looking over the genres — which could make for an amusing afternoon in itself — I was surprised to find genres that I didn’t even knew existed (“Psytekk”, anyone?). And, likewise, I wasn’t aware that Eurodance and Eurobeat were separate genres (the former is the parent genre of the latter).

One of the more amusing entries is for the catch-all genre “Not Trance”:

Let it be said that electronic music NEVER learns how to “leave the audience wanting more”. Instead, like a spoiled, immature little child, it shamelessly and greedily exploits any whiff of success it sees, to cartoonish extremes. Somehow, a mutant form of trance evolved from Epic evolved from Anthem drenched itself in the “should’ve been put to rest years ago” one-trick breakdown-build-anthem formula and senselessly driven it to new, insane levels of asinine. […]

I don’t have a PowerBook yet, but I'm already collecting URLs for useful Mac software for when I get one ;). One such utility that looks interesting is the plainly-named Classic Window Management — it’s a freeware app that sets OSX to use OS9-style bring-to-front rules for application windows.

Classic Window Management gives you the option to have windows in Mac OS X behave like they did in Mac OS 9, where all of an application's windows stayed grouped together. So when you click on one window, all windows belonging to that application come to the front. […]

If that still doesn't make sense, just check out the site — the illustrations there should clarify things. Of course, not having a Mac, I can’t say that I’ve tried this app, but it can't be that bad if both Zeldman and Eric Meyer like it ;).

JavaScript rollovers have been around almost as long as JavaScript itself (and they’re still useful, in many ways). However, I’ve recently discovered some CSS-based rollovers with a built-in preloader (via Zeldman.com).

The idea is that the documentation is in the source code, and that the reader figures things out from there. Really, the technique is not too hard to understand, once you see what he’s doing. Basically, each <img> is surrounded with an <a href=“…”> (just like normal). However, each link’s background-image is set to the desired rollover state.

Of course, with the image completely covering the background, the rollover state isn’t seen. But, the author then specified visibility:hidden for the hover-state of the images. So: the user rolls over an image, the image becomes hidden, and the background (the rollover state) is seen.

And, because the rollover-images aren’t hidden elements (but merely covered up), they’re loaded with the rest of the page — and so there’s no lag when they’re swapped-in (or, rather, unveiled). An elegant approach, I think.

It seemed like it was only last week when Mike and I made some Elvis sandwiches. When I went shopping prior to that round of sandwiches, I bought both regular bacon and turkey bacon as well (the “60% Less Fat” tagline intrigued me).

To get the full Elvis-experience, we used the regular bacon that time. But, of course, that meant that we still had the turkey bacon for more sandwiches some other time. And, over the weekend, we decided to make another batch.

When first opening the turkey bacon package, we both noticed that it had an aroma similar to baloney. This was obviously a baconized product not coming from a natural bacon-producing animal as the package noted that the white stripes contained white meat, while the dark stripes contained dark meat (as opposed to the white stripes being just fat).

So, we were a little creeped out by this bacon masquerade, but we decided to push on. The tacon — as we took to calling it — cooked more like meat strips than actual bacon. Because the white strips were actually meat and not fat, the bacon didn’t shink much in its cooking cycle; and there was hardly any liquid fat in the pan afterwards.

Though the tacon may have been baloney-esque at the beginning, it was surprisingly bacon-like after cooking. It had a pleasant crunch (though not as crispy as bacon) and was more-or-less bacony (not bad for 60%-less-fat!). Of course, after we cooked the bacon, we proceeded to assemble and grill the sandwiches themselves.

In all, we made four sandwiches (two each) and I was curious whether they would stand up to the real-bacon versions. They were good sandwiches — surprisingly tasty — but they didn’t quite match up to those first sandwiches that we made with bacon. It wasn’t that the bacon-flavor was that bad, but it just didn't have the intensity of real bacon.

The tacon turned out better than I expected. But, I probably wouldn’t buy it again. Sure, it had less fat, but an Elvis sandwich is something that I wouldn’t eat very often anyway. And, if I’m going to have a bad-for-me sandwich, it may as well taste great :).

As part of this recent freelance gig, one of the browser requirements was IE5.0 (yeah, that old). And, as luck would have it, my desktop machine at work had IE6 — you would think that IT would have left an older version of IE on there for me, knowing I’m a web developer ;).

In any case, during the early stages of coding, I had to ask around for an IE5.0 machine so that I could test my code. And, the IT guy (yeah, they have just one IT guy) found a Win2k laptop that still had IE5.0 on it. So, he loaned that to me and I set it atop the three-drawer cabinet next to my desk.

The laptop had WiFi, which meant that I didn’t have to bother finding a network cable, though I did plug in the power since I’d be using it for a few days. Normal IE-frustrations aside, the setup wasn’t too bad. But, it became cumbersome over time to have to use the trackpad and its laptop-sized keyboard.

So, even though the laptop was right next to me, and almost within reach anyway, I decided to install VNC on there — VNC is a GPLed client/server app that allows remote control of a PC over a network connection (the remote PC’s desktop just appears as a window on the client’s screen). And, even though I’d be using VNC for a Windows-to-Windows connection, there’re versions available for other operating systems such as Linux and (I think) Mac OS.

I was already familiar with one of the VNC forks, TightVNC — it’s actually backwards-compatible with VNC but it includes a new compression algorithm for a more responsive remote desktop. And, I was about to install TightVNC on the two machines when I ran across UltraVNC (yet another fork). The distinction with UltraVNC is that it includes a “Video Hook Driver” for Win2k/XP which “dramatically improves performances and reduces CPU activity over LAN connections”.

Since they’re all free anyway, I decided to see if UltraVNC’s video hook driver really made a difference. And, sure enough, it did — accessing the laptop via my desktop machine was just about realtime and even JavaScript rollovers appeared almost instantly. So, with the help of UltraVNC, I was make use of the laptop’s IE5.0 installation while still using my desktop’s full-sized keyboard and mouse :).

The only downside with UltraVNC is that it’s only available for Windows at the moment. Howver, since it’s designed to be backwards compatible with regular VNC, that’s not much of a problem. But, in my case, Windows support was all I needed at the time, and it worked out really well.

Though I recall that there may have been some flavor of VNC available for Mac OS, I can’t seem to find it at the moment (at the VNC site or elsewhere). If I could find an OSX (or even OS9) version of VNC, then I’d be able to setup a VNC server on one of the Macs at the office, and could do all my browser testing from my desk :).

It’s been a little while since my last update and I’ve been crazy-busy at work until now. This all started last Monday; under the original deadline, I had until the following Monday to complete all 90-some pages in the site. Fortunately, the deadline was extended a bit and they also allowed me to bring on another contractor to help. The site is just about done now, and I’m glad that it’s behind us.

In any case, I wanted to celebrate the progress and — coincidentally — Mike and I had a 6 lb bag of frozen strawberries that was taking up a good deal of room in our freezer. Mike suggested that we could make strawberry smoothies and that sounded pretty good to me.

As it turns out, I had originally bought the strawberries (at Sam’s Club, natch) for use in smoothies. And, my intention was to create some kind of healthy protein-based drink. At the time, I filled the blender about a third-full with frozen strawberries, and added a about a cup of milk, a quarter cup of Splenda, a tablespoon of vanilla, two scoops of protein powder, a quarter-package of tofu, and some ice.

Considering the nature of the ingredients, that smoothie wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t something that I’d find myself craving and I’d say that it fell more on the side of a meal-replacement smoothie than a dessert smoothie. But, considering the project completion at work, I wanted something that was extra-tasty this time.

So, Mike suggested that we use ice cream instead of tofu — not exactly a health-motivated substitution, but a potentially delicious one. We needed to go to Sam’s Club for some groceries anyway, so we headed off and picked up some Blue Bell Vanilla ice cream there.

Being that Mike had made ice cream-based smoothies before, I let him man the blender. First, he added both the strawberries (about two-thirds full) and the ice cream (about an inch up the side of the blender). He blended those, and then added about a quarter-cup of Splenda, about a teaspoon of vanilla (not too much since the ice cream was already vanilla), and half a banana. And, the ice went in right at the end.

I’ll have to admit — this was a very good smoothie, and the recipe wasn’t hard either. It was definitely better-tasting than my original smoothie, but I’m guessing that the tofu / ice cream substitution may have had something to do with that ;). Considering the nature of the recipe, I’m curious whether our creation may have been more of a milkshake than a smoothie (?).

So, we made a couple smoothies on Monday evening and again on Tuesday evening (yeah, they’re that good). And, we’re working our way through that 6 lb bag of frozen strawberries, so all this smoothie-drinking has the side-benefit of freeing up some room in the freezer as well :).

After reading about the deliciousness that I encountered, Mike writes about his adventures in creating an Elvis sandwich (yeah, the peanut butter / banana / bacon one), complete with pictures of the event. In particular, he cleverly solved the butter-on-the-cutting-board problem by buttering one side of each slice of bread, and then placing the buttered-sides inwards before adding the peanut butter.

In other news, my former employer called me in today for a freelance job for the week. It’s one of these where the project became delayed (for various reasons) but the deadline stayed the same. So, I’ll be putting in a lot of hours this week and I may not have a chance to write many entries.

I’ve set TiVo to record Ebert & Roeper, primarily because I miss out on movie commercials (I skip all commercials with TiVo). And, last December they reviewed Equilibrium, which had some gun flights which intrigued me at the time. Christian Bale — that guy from American Phycho — plays the main character.

But, it only received 35 at Metacritic and I didn’t think much of it again until recently. Now that we have Netflix, It doesn’t cost anything extra to watch bad movies ;), so I suggested that Mike add it to our queue.

So, Mike and I watched it last weekend. And, I was completely amazed by this movie — it not only had good story and character development, but also gunfights that rivaled or surpassed those of John Woo. There wasn’t a “lobby scene”, but there is one scene in particular which I enjoyed just as much (nah, I’m not going to spoil it here).

If you like guns — and lots of them — then this is the movie for you. As someone who appreciates intricate gun work, I was smiling from beginning to end. And before the movie was even over, I knew that it’d be among my top 10 favorite movies.

I thought about how it’d place on my top 10 list, and here’s how it fits in:

1. The Matrix. I saw this five times in theaters and I don’t think there’s a single part I didn’t like about the movie. “Guns. Lots of guns.” [buy on DVD]
2. Return of The Jedi. Yeah, critics often like Episode 5 more, but I preferred this one for its climactic action scenes. [not available on DVD]
3. The Empire Strikes Back. Some would place this as the best of the series, but I think we can all agree that it’s better than Episode 4. [not available on DVD]
4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day — Director’s Cut. One measure of a good movie, in my mind, is its quantity of guns & explosions. This has plenty of both :) [buy on DVD].
5. Star Wars: A New Hope. At times, this is a little hokey, especially compared with ESB and ROTJ (“But I was going to the Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”). But, the lightsaber scenes were reason enough to include it ;). [not available on DVD]
6. Equilibrium. The mythical martial art that was invented for this movie, gun-kata, is astounding and almost plausible. [buy on DVD]
7. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah, the other two in the series were also good, but the second one seemed a bit off and the third one didn’t reach the levels of the first. [buy on DVD]
8. RoboCop — Director’s Cut. Favorite line: “Put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.” (and the resulting scene that follows). And, if you haven’t seen the director’s cut, it’s even more violent than the theatrical release (yes!). [buy on DVD]
9. UHF. Weird Al’s comedic masterpiece. Favorite line: “I’m thinking of something orange!” (you’d have to see it to understand). [buy on DVD]
10. Amélie. Before seeing this, I knew absolutely nothing about it (only that my friends had recommended it highly). And I was quite surprised to hear French dialog when the movie first started ;). Still, a charming movie. [buy on DVD]