learning to be human, since 1984
Archive for February, 2010
Observations on an Early Saturday Morning
0721 days
It’s a sweltering 7° Fahrenheit as we pull into Park Falls, Wisconsin for the Price County Democrats’ February meeting. The air smells of wood furnaces, and swarms of snowmobiles wait patiently to peel across the busy highway that defines the downtown strip. A sign at the bank informs: ATMs Now Here.
Well, it’s about Tyme.
5 Reasons I Rarely Buy Salted Butter
2This is just a quick list, brought up by something I learned when I snagged a pound of salted organic butter from the fridge by accident (rather than the unsalted one) while making dough for tartes tonight (#3):
- Better control over salt content. Even with the nutrition label data, it’s hard to know exactly how much salt is in your butter – you could use butter to season your food, but that’s not really its job. Butter is my fat, not my salt.
- Salt is a preservative. I don’t have solid evidence for this, but I would assume salted butter is older when purchased than its unsalted counterpart. Even so, I’d rather buy it in smaller quantities and know it’s good rather than have a mummified beurre-pharaoh in my fridge.
- When making pie crusts or other similar doughs, salted butter melts faster and is MUCH harder to work with. There’s a reason it’s used on winter roads. This one is not so obvious, but very
- It overwhelms the subtleties that great butters can possess. This isn’t always true (see my post on Kiel), but it is the case more often than not. Fresh creamed butter, especially unpasteurized, it absolutely fantastic and unrivaled in complex flavors. I swear I can taste the clover and other pasture feed in some butters.
- I love fresh bread with butter – and this is the one case where salted butter might be better – but I generally go with anchovy paste for the salinity, or some other umami-laden saline vehicle.
Sorry salted butter: you’re…toast.
In Search of the Perfect Tom Kha Recipe
0730 days
Tom Kha (or tom kar) is sin in a bowl. And if I believed in the afterlife, I would wish that I would spend eternity as a fish swimming through vast oceans of unadulterated sin. Oceans of Tom Kha, that is.
For those unfamiliar with this unctuous soup, tom is Thai for “boiled” and kha means “galangal”. Galangal, or blue ginger, isn’t actually ginger but a close rhizome relative. Unlike it’s sharp, pungent cousin, galangal is sweet, citrusy and earthy. It’s skin is smooth and almost waxy and it’s hard root is moist but almost woody.
Traditionally, that’s the foundation. Adding to the flavor structure of the galanga is lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and Thai or Birdseye chilies all boiled in a mix of coconut milk and another liquid, typically water or stock. “Gai” which is Thai for chicken makes the soup into Tom Kha Gai. “Kûng” or shrimp makes it Tom Kha Kûng. You can use chicken or shrimp/fish stock respectively, or stick to water. Veggies and straw or oyster mushrooms are sometimes added. After everything has been briefly boiled, the soup should be removed from the heat and seasoned with lime juice, cilantro, fish sauce, and sugar. Don’t overdo the fish sauce – use salt instead to taste. The inedible lime leaves and slices of galangal remain present as garnishes, as a reminder of where the dish gets its subtle and unique flavors.
That’s the classic framework, anyhow.
The best Tom Kha I’ve ever had is far from classic. EE Sane is my favorite Milwaukee Thai restaurant. Their tom kha is thick, creamy, spicy, pungent, sweet and tart, all in perfect balance. The flavors fiercely fluctuate, competing for attention while its luxuriously thick and spicy coconut broth coats the palate. It’s not traditional. It is not subtle. The broth is orangey-red, laden with the oil of the chiles – exciting compared to the usual opalescent swirl of tropical milk. The lemongrass, galangal and lime leaves are not to be found with the usual suspects: shrimp, broccoli and the occasional baby corn. And I swear, they add cream.
Sometimes, tradition is wrong. I don’t think that’s the case with Tom Kha, but the subtleties of the traditional dish would have a difficult time competing with EE Sane’s implementation; after all, it is the latter against which I compare all other versions of this soup. I will someday post a recipe as close to EE Sane’s as I can achieve. Until then, good eating.
Bugs and Other IETester Issues
0730 days
I recently started using IETester for visual and functional website development testing. While overall a nice product, there is a bug that might grow tiresome. I personally don’t mind. Commercial use might also come at a cost someday.
The Bug
The IETester software uses tabbed browing, as many modern browsers do. The difference is that each tab can be set to render using a different version of Internet Explorer, from version 5.5 through 8, including the system default. After 5-10 minutes of use (or idle), all but the main tab crash. This is not to say the whole program crashes. It is a multiprocess program, which means it can run instances of programs within it; each tabbed window is like it’s own instance of a browser, all hosted within a singular parent application (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE 7 & 8, and others all use a similar process to render tabs). So, the good news is the whole program doesn’t take a dive. The bad news is you have to refresh the tabs somewhat regularly. Not such a big deal if you’re testing webpages anyhow.
The Potential Cost
IETester is free for personal and commercial use, for now. The company that makes it also produces DebugBar – a web development tool, which is free for personal use, but costs 59€ for commercial implementation after 60 days.That’s currently about $80, American. I would imagine once IETester is out of alpha/beta releases, a similar license would be implemented.
The Conclusion
Even if IETester didn’t have issues, I’d be hesitant to pony up. There are better free alternatives as mentioned in a recent post, including running a legit copy of Windows XP in VirtualBox, Sun’s Virtual Machine. That’s the path I’ll be taking soon, right after I figure out how to share files between host and guest. More on that in a post to come.
Fix IE 6 Floating Element Double Margin Bug
0732 days
If you read my last post, you know that I develop for IE6 and why. As is the case, IE6 throws annoying little gems at us, like its non-compliant box model, and the subject of today’s blog: the ever persistent double margin bug.
As the title alludes to, IE6 doubles the right and/or left margin on a floated element unless you declare:
display: inline;
Don’t worry about block-level items losing their width or height: they won’t. This isn’t a comprehensive explanation of the fix; it works for the conditions specified.
Testing for IE6
1I recently got a new laptop and needed to get my machine ready for web development . I’d previously been using MAMP on my Mac and running Parallels for testing in the IEs. After some deliberation, I decided on XAMPP for Windows – I’m running 7. XAMPP installs Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, ASP, Mercury, FileZilla, and a slew of other daemons/services. There are some potential conflicts with the PHP/MySQL versions used for Drupal, but after testing, I haven’t run into any issues. Even if it becomes problematic, I can always manually configure a different version of either PHP or MySQL.
After getting my testing server up and running, I needed a way to test for IE6. Yes, I’m on Windows – but Windows 7 never shipped with IE6 or 7, unlike Vista – so standalone solutions no longer work. I just found a program that solves this issue – and is able to render pages simulating IE5.5-8. IETester v0.4.2 is the current version, though it has been out since March of 2009. Somehow, it entirely missed my radar – probably because I was still running XP and didn’t broaden my queries.
I should say this: IE6 support doesn’t come for free. Clients whose user-base is heavy in the IE6 department can’t afford to not support those users. So, while I can develop for such users – they won’t be getting the same experience – and certainly not without an increased cost. It is my job to push internet standards, including A-level, modern browsers; efficiencies in development/production cut costs over the long-run especially for larger clients. When I have to dick around making tweaks because one idiot browser still won’t die, it’s annoying. For all business owners, large and small: please entertain this suggestion:
Encourage your users to upgrade their browsers.
Obnoxious/semi-invasive design via javascript-based browser sniffing would do wonders to bump browsers into gear. Hell, even showing a simple survey that asks “Do you ride a dinosaur to work? Why do you use an ancient browser?” followed by multiple choices that lead back to a site that encourages browser upgrades.
This tangent is officially over.
I had been running Sun’s Virtual Machine with an XP installation to do IE6 testing, but this alternative has made things easier. The only real issue is sharing files between the host – Windows 7 – and the guest – Windows XP in the VM. That shouldn’t be too difficult, but time is important and I’d rather stick with what works for now.
With that said, my nose is back to the grindstone (though it won’t really move much at all).