Grant McWilliams

I understand that as time goes on people take ideas from other areas. The fact that rice is very popular in South America is a great example, it grows well there and is cheap so it satisfies the need. Imagining Mexican food without rice is difficult. I also understand that if I'm in Seattle and I want to have a French restaurant I'm probably going to cook Salmon because it's readily available and the locals like it. Sometimes you can get food from one culture in another because people request it. An example of this is the amount of soy sauce you find in Thai restaurants. I've been in Thai restaurants and had someone say "what kind of Thai restaurant doesn't have soy sauce?".  That's like asking what kind of Polish restaurant doesn't have Italian food.

I was at the annual Seattle Night Market in Chinatown/ID last night and took a photo of this food truck.  Now granted, the trucks name was Fusion on the Run but I think we're stretching the term a bit when you have Banh Mi, Tacos and Macaroni Salad in the same truck. Reminds me of the old joke - A Vietnamese man, A Mexican and a white guy walk into a bar... Never mind.

My issue is not that you can't have different kinds of food from the same truck/restaurant but that the odds that the cooks will know and understand each different culture and be able to do a decent job is small. The only way I could see this working is that if you actually had three different accomplished chefs that decide to do what they do best and combine their efforts. I don't think this is how these things come together though. It's usually an entrepreneur trying to figure out what his customers want and providing for that.

The Blimpies Sub shop near the Everett Mall is run by people from India who make burritos. I was talking to the owners and they relayed to me that Mexicans come into the shop and tell them that they don't actually eat burritos in Mexico and yet when you go into a Mexican restaurant there they are - burritos. I rest my case.

Fusion keeps life interesting and we can be thankful for it otherwise Thai and Indian food would be bland, Italians wouldn't have red sauce, the Irish wouldn't have potatoes and the middle east wouldn't cook rice but still I wonder some times.

After weeks of skipping out on any sort of food related post I was in the garden today and thought I'd update people on the science of tomatoes. That's a fancy way of describing me avoiding work and staring at plants.

Since I'm trying to learn about Tomatoes I ask everyone what they grow. I'm finding out that people know as much about what they grow as what they drink (referencing wine drinkers that think red and white are varieties) which doesn't help me learn. So here's the current results of my tomato growing experiments. Keep in mind that we're talking about Seattle climate and if you live somewhere else all bets are off.

I grew two indeterminate hybrid varieties (Bettery Boy and Champion) and one indeterminate heirloom (Brandywine). Indeterminate just means that they'll vine forever and keep producing fruit throughout the growing season instead of one batch like a determinate tomato plant. The Hybrids have been bred with certain traits. The Better Boy is a VFN and the Champion a VFNT. This means they're resistan to certain diseases. The key is as follows.

V - Verticillium Wilt

F - Fusarium Wilt

FF - Fusarium, Races 1 & 2

N - Nematodes

T - Tobacco Mosaic Virus

A - Alternaria Stem Canker

St - Stemphylium Gray Leaf Spot

Going into this I had two tomatoes in mind - Brandywine and Black Russians. I chose them of course based on flavor, not practicallity. I gave up on finding the latter and picked up 4 Brandywine plants in eastern Washington. They were a little shocked and surprised at the change in weather and did nothing for about a month. The Better Boy was chosen because it's suposed to fruit quickly and I wanted *something for my effort if the others failed. The Champion was a good compromise and is resistant to quite a lot (VFNT).

I was told that indeterminate tomatoes like being pruned and I have to agree. Pruning is everything. They respond to pruning as well as my grapes do. Early on I thought my Better Boy was going to be the only plant with fruit on it and even now it's the only one with red fruit. However, it seems to be very sensitive to water on it's leaves (rain) and has been fighting off a cold. The Champion however, did nothing but make leaves forever and then one day it exploded. The Brandywine thinks it has all year to make fruit although it has at least started if very late.

Here is the results so far:

• Bettery Boy: 13 tomatoes
• Champion VFNT: 26 tomatoes
• Brandywine: 2 tomatoes

I use the SuperBlogger plugin to add blogging features to Joomla! In the past I had article star ratings, links to bookmark the article, digg it, add it to del.icio.us and to post it on Facebook.

As time goes on some of these services have dropped away or have been replaced by others. I'm really starting to use Google+ more so while adding +1 buttons to my template I cleaned it up a bit too. Anymore the big three in social networking is Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The latter arguably may replace both of the former. WIth this in mind I've slimmed down the template to only include Tweet this!, +1 and post on Facebook. There is still a link to Disqus comments as well as I want to encourage commenting. Also the Twitter and Google+ links are both on the main article listing page as well as the individual article page. This allows you to tweet the article without having to click on it's header first. A lot of times I'll post the entire article without a Read More link so people may never see the Twitter, Google+ and Facebook links.

I hope you like the new cleaner look. The old links for PDF, Print and Email are still present as I use them myself. Enjoy

I've been using Google+ quite a bit lately and have come to the conclusion that it's just about everything Facebook and Twitter are combined plus Picassa, Youtube and Chat included. Because of circles you can follow people and they don't have to follow you back ala. Twitter. You can also post publically like a personal blog or Twitter and people can follow you. If you have something private to say you can post it just to the groups (cough.. circles) or individuals you want. It's both a public blog/notification service and private social networking combined!

However Google doesn't currently have a URL shortener so people can pass around user identities. Yes, you can put a link on your site but it won't be anything you'll put on a business card so a service called plus.to popped up and you can link a Nickname to your Google+ profile.

Here's mine if you want to follow my rants and inciteful thoughts there. I'll continue to post full articles and Howtos here but status updates and thoughts over there.

http://gplus.to/grantmcwilliams

Thanks for your support..

Grant

There's been a flurry of activity around The Man, The Myth, The Legend in the Xen Howtos section and for good reason - CentOS6 was released. It all started as a simple update to my installation tutorials but ultimately I spent half a week on it. There were some issues with how I was doing things because CentOS5 used the old Xen kernel and CentOS6 uses the new libvirt kernel. As of RHEL5/CentOS6 Xen Host (dom0) support is no longer in the kernel. However, Xen Guests (DomU) is and  is handled by libvirt. Last week the last bits of Xen Dom0 support were merged into Linux Kernel 3.0. This means that going forward all Linux distributions will have Xen Dom0 ability unless the distributors remove it.

I've written and tested two xen tutorials this week.

• CentOS 6 Virtual Machine (32 bit) installation on Xen
• CentOS 6 Virtual Machine (64 bit) installation on Xen

During the process of writing these tutorials I shrunk the size of the Disk Image. I did this because I like nice small VM disk images (and sparse too) so I can duplicate them and move them around easily. It's fairly easy to resize a disk image so I updated all four tutorials on how to resize Dom0 Disk Images and Logical Volumes as well as DomU Logical Volumes and partitions. I attempted to make it clearer too what the scenario was so people would know what the tutorial was trying to accomplish.

• Resize Disk Image used as a DomU hard drive
• Resize Disk Image used as a DomU partition
• Resize Logical Volume used as a DomU hard drive
• Resize Logical Volume used as a DomU partition

As always have lots of fun and let me know if something doesn't work via the comments.

Note: I lost my original xen config files so I've created new ones here. I no longer have a xen system so I can't test them. Please let me know if the tutorial still works or not -Grant

Introduction

A lot of this tutorial was stolen from my CentOS 5 Installation which in turn was stolen from the CentOS wiki. I've shortened and updated it for installing a CentOS 6 DomU. I just copy and paste all the indented lines into a root terminal and voila! a CentOS VM.

1. Creating an Virtual Disk Image

The first step is to create an disk image that will act as the VM hard drive. The following command will create a 4 GB sparse disk image named /srv/xen/centos6.img. A sparse file is created in such a way that the disk image doesn't actually take up the whole 4GB until you fill it up. If you'd like a larger (11GB) disk image substitute seek=10240 into the following line. I make my VMs nice and small so I can move them around easier. Making a disk image larger or adding a second drive later is easier than making it smaller or taking a drive away.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/xen/centos6.img oflag=direct bs=1M seek=3800 count=1

wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/isolinux/vmlinuz -O /boot/vmlinuz-xen6-install
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/isolinux/initrd.img -O /boot/initrd-xen6-install
wget http://www.grantmcwilliams.com/files/xen-centos6-x86_64-install -O /etc/xen/centos6

3. Starting the installation

A kickstart file holds instructions for automatic installation and is referenced in my xen config above. My example kickstart file is very minimal but is enough to get a working CentOS 6 VM.

Note: I lost my original xen config files so I've created new ones here. I no longer have a xen system so I can't test them. Please let me know if the tutorial still works or not - Grant

Introduction

A lot of this tutorial was stolen from my CentOS 5 Installation which in turn was stolen from the CentOS wiki. I've shortened and updated it for installing a CentOS 6 DomU. I just copy and paste all the indented lines into a root terminal and voila! a CentOS VM.

1. Creating an Virtual Disk Image

The first step is to create an disk image that will act as the VM hard drive. The following command will create a 4 GB sparse disk image named /srv/xen/centos6.img. A sparse file is created in such a way that the disk image doesn't actually take up the whole 4GB until you fill it up. If you'd like a larger (11GB) disk image substitute seek=10240 into the following line. I make my VMs nice and small so I can move them around easier. Making a disk image larger or adding a second drive later is easier than making it smaller or taking a drive away.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/xen/centos6.img oflag=direct bs=1M seek=3800 count=1

wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/i386/isolinux/vmlinuz -O /boot/vmlinuz-xen6-install
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/i386/isolinux/initrd.img -O /boot/initrd-xen6-install
wget http://www.grantmcwilliams.com/files/xen-centos6-i386-install -O /etc/xen/centos6

3. Starting the installation

A kickstart file holds instructions for automatic installation and is referenced in my xen config above. My example kickstart file is very minimal but is enough to get a working CentOS 6 VM.

n case you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks you'll know that Google released it's Google+ service. Normally I wouldn't take Google too seriously when dealing with social networking because they've been completely unsuccessful in the past (Orkut, Waves, Buzz) and in the latter case the results were disasterous. However, Google+ is a force to be reckoned with. I've been using Google+ along with Facebook for the last week or two to get an idea of how good/bad it is. Here's a few thoughts first.

• Looks kind of like Facebook mixed with a 1984 Apple Mac
• The people who are on it currently are techies mostly so there's very little of this -
• It's very easy to find and add friends
• It's got it's tenticles in everything (something FB has just started by allowing you to like things on third party sites)
• You can search your posts
• I don't see any Notes functionality
• There's no game apps (but there's hints of that coming in code)You can add posts from igoogle or gmail
• You can drag and drop media on your post box
• You can import entire on disk photo albums in one shot
• The handling of photos is on a completely different level
• There's group video chats
• There's outside feeds for your wall
• You have complete control over who sees what

I think if you know google products you'll see a lot of integrated code here. Google reader, picassa, google chat, gmail, google search etc...

Apps

Facebook largely unseated MySpace because of it's numerous apps and games. We'll see how fast Google adds this ability.

Notes

The notes will be really easy if they integrate blogger but for me they'd still need to have the same level of access control.

Wall

Wall posts, would be easy but I'm not sure they'll do it because it would be difficult to integrate it into their access control system. Currently when you post you get to see which circles (or all) can view the post. If someone else posts on your wall how do you decide this? They'd have to give up some of the access control functionality if they allowed wlal posts unless all wall posts were moderated by the wall owner. For instance someone wants to post on my wall, I'd look at the post and decide which circles get to view it before any could. That would be possible.

Messages

Direct messages should probably be handled in chat/mail. It's all starting to blur anyway. In Facebook a message has persistance whereas chat messages disapear as soon as you close the window. Facebook has already started to merge these two things into one although very clumsily. I think I'd rather Google use chat to handle user messages than email since it saves it in your email anyway and has direct delivery if both parties are online.

Design

Design wise I think FB is a bit tighter and more space effecient. I also think that having contrast between sidebars, comments etc.. is a nice thing which Facebook does. Google+ was designed by the same guy who did the Macintosh interface from the 80s and although reviewers have raved about it I think the designer isn't aware that at some point computers started coming with colored monitors standard. Maybe he designed it on an 80s Mac. Here's hoping that Google tightens it up a bit in the future.

If you were the single largest commercial entity in the world don't you think you could afford to hire someone that could work on your website without taking it offline?

Or even freeze the content on the website, copy it, do the updates, then flip IP addresses so now the new one will show up? Maybe Walmart pays their IT people like they pay their other employees.

Oh and I'd be curious how fast the response from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. would be. LOL