Macadamia nut chicken

Yummmm, macadamia nut chicken for dinner tonight! We got this outstanding recipe from our friend Barbara several years ago. She lost her copy a while back, and happily we were able to get a copy back to her! Several people have asked me for this over the years, and I can never remember how to make it. So here, for posterity’s sake, is one of the greatest chicken recipes known to humankind, especially from the kitchen of my capable wife!

Ingredients:
– 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts, about 2 lbs.
– รขโ€ฆโ€ c seasoned bread crumbs
– 1 egg
– ½ c macadamia nuts, chopped
– 1/8 tsp salt
– ¼ c butter, divided
– 2 Tbsp olive oil
– ½ c chicken broth
– ½ c orange juice (fresh-squeezed is best)

  1. Pound chicken until ¼” thick.
  2. Combine bread crumbs, macadamia nuts and salt in a shallow bowl. In a separate bowl, beat egg.
  3. Dip each breast into egg, then coat with bread/nut mixture.
  4. In a large skillet over medium heat, melt 2 Tbsp butter with olive oil. When oil is hot, add chicken and cook until golden on all sides. Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook 5-7 minutes or until chicken is fork tender. Remove chicken and keep warm.
  5. Pour chicken broth and orange juice into skillet, heat to a gentle boil. Cook until sauce is reduced by one third.
  6. Blend in remaining butter, 1 Tbsp at a time, until sauce thickens. Pour sauce over chicken.

Serves 4.

We usually serve this over brown rice, which seems to enhance the nutty taste of the chicken. Enjoy!

Posted in Recipes, Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Caitlin’s first gym meet

Judges' Cup logo
Caitlin, my youngest, competed in her first gymnastics competition last weekend (2005-08-27), Judges’ Cup 2005. The meet was hosted by Technique Gymnastics at the CSUS gymnasium, which has no air conditioning. Fortunately the weather wasn’t nearly as hot as it often is in Sacramento in late August–only 38 °C, when it could easily have been 42 °C! (Those 4 degrees make a big difference, trust me.)

Caitlin took 3rd place on beam and 6th overall in her division. She did pretty well considering that she had sliced her hand open two days before. Also, I think she was a little intimidated by performing in front of judges and all the spectators, because she made a couple of mistakes that I haven’t seen from her for months, if not years. Understandable given that this was her first meet. Even so, she’s already qualified to progress to zone in post-season. Yeah, Caitlin!

The lighting in the gym was terrible and no flash photography was allowed. (Not that a flash would have done any good–I couldn’t get close enough to the events for it to make a difference.) Even so, I managed to get a few shots that weren’t completely ruined by overlong exposures and funky lighting.
Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Marin Quilt Show

On Saturday my wife and I took my mom to the Marin Quilt Show in San Rafael (Marin County), California. One of the highlights of this show (for me) of is the venue–it’s right across the pond from the Marin Civic Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
View to Marin Civic Center (another view)

The featured artist this year was Julie Hirota, especially apropos because her quilting specialty is “art glass”, a medium at which Frank Lloyd Wright excelled. All the work that she had on display was attractive, but the piece that inspired me was “Queen of Hearts”
Queen of Hearts \"art glass\" quilt
I don’t think I’ll duplicate this piece. I’d rather take the idea and apply the techniques to another subject–perhaps a book cover?

The most impressive quilt I saw this year was a carousel horse. I didn’t note the artist’s name, but I may be able to find it later. The front of the quilt showed “love of craft” and was well-executed, but this isn’t something I would normally like; however, the back of this quilt was incredible!
Front of carousel horse Back of carousel horse quilt
The plain black backing combined with the bright threads used for quilting this piece was extremely bold. It seems to shout, “Check out my quilting prowess!”, rightfully so. Only a master quilter could pull off something like this. Well done, and bonus points for chutzpah!

The show seemed a little “off” this year–fewer quilts, fewer visitors, a couple of vendors that regularly attend were missing. I’m not sure if this was due to the price of fuel, or perhaps because ticket prices have risen a bit, or something else. It was still an excellent show, and I’ll be coming back next year.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Patch “how-to”, patch files fixed

I don’t really do much Unix development, but I’ve recently been learning more due to the care and feeding of my blog. Lately I’ve been figuring out some things about the patch utility, especially creating and applying patches. I found a decent tutorial on patch and diff which are the two tools needed to apply and create (respectively) patch files. The tutorial goes into much more depth than I would ever attempt. It’s also well written, so I’ll just point people there instead of re-inventing the wheel. But I think a “diff & patch” nutshell usage would be appropriate, so here it is.

Creating a patch (individual files)
diff -u old-file new-file >patch-file

Creating a patch (whole directory/tree)
diff -urN old-directory new-directory >patch-file

Applying a patch (individual file or whole directory/tree)
patch <patch-file

While reading the article, I discovered that I had made some mistakes when I created at least one of my patchfiles, so I went through all my patch-related posts and re-created everything. I’m very glad I did! I found a whole bunch of small corrections I had made to BorderlineChaos which I’d forgotten to document and/or release in my post on Borderline Chaos’s date format. Likewise, I made many minor changes which I didn’t document in my journalized-blue post. Finally, the patch for Felix Wong’s tags plugin was definitely broken. I’ve corrected it and updated the original article.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2, patches [re-]applied

I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress blog software to version 1.5.2 today. I also took this opportunity to apply Kimmo’s entity patch, which takes care of HTML entities ½ and ¾, and probably some others as well. At least I remembered to reapply the tags patch this time!

Applying these patches got me thinking about folks that aren’t “patch-aware”, i.e. don’t know how to apply patches. It’s almost trivially simple. On a Unix (or Unix-like) system, the command is:
patch original-file patch-file
where patch-file is the name of the file containing the patch(es), while original-file is the file that you are going to fix. This works fine as long as only one file is affected, as is the case with Kimmo’s patch. You can tell this by reading the patch file and looking for long lines of punctuation such as
***************
or
===================================================================
If you see more than one of these lines, there are multiple files affected. Such is the case with Felix Wong’s tags patch. For this one, the command is:
patch -p1 <patch-file
which should be executed from your wordpress directory. Explaining this command requires knowledge of directories/file structures, which I don’t want to cover right now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Google-powered pedometer

This is so cool! A Google-powered pedometer (or, in my case, a bike-o-meter). I can’t believe Joseph hasn’t blogged this already, since he’s the one who told me about this.

Once you’ve arrived at the pedometer site, choose your country (if outside the US), state, and type in your city. As on the original Google Map site you can scroll around the map and zoom in/out to focus on the area that you’ll be riding (walking, running, whatever). The app can not only save a route that you’ve mapped, it can also create a TinyURL at the same time. I used this to map the route I ride between work and home.

This app is great, but the site is made even better by the “Acknowledgements and references” section. (Scroll down below the map, the section is on the left side with all the other text.) The links to all the enabling technologies and resources are awesome!

The only problem I’ve seen so far is printing. Clicking the “Print map” link is supposed to reformat the map for printing, but on my browser it opens up the print dialog. I have to cancel the print dialog to view the reformatted map. I’m using Firefox 1.0.1 on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X Panther v10.3.9. It’s an easy enough workaround, and until I get around to updating Firefox I’m not going to report this as a bug.

Posted in Mac OS X, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Gaming organizers’ meeting

Most (hopefully all) of the organizers of various Sacramento gaming groups, websites, et cetera, will be getting together for an organizational meeting on Sunday, the 11th at 5:30 PM. Our preferred meeting place, Fox & Goose, is closed on Sunday evening, so we’re trying to come up with a suitable “stand-in” venue. I’ll update and/or comment on this post when we settle on a meeting place.

FYI, this is a meeting, not a game event!

Organizers of gaming events or groups in the Sacramento area are invited to attend. Whether you host game nights at home, run a “real” game club, manage a gaming website, or are one of the Meetup co-organizers, we’d like to all get together to coordinate our efforts.

Topics of discussion: (“Agenda” sounds so formal…)

  1. ConQuest convention in Sacramento 2006
  2. Membership, i.e. Chicago vs Sacramento
  3. Calendar, scheduling–are we having “too many” events?
  4. Locations–can we schedule/post events outside Sacramento, e.g. Elk Grove, Davis, Roseville, etc?
  5. Interlinking Sacramento-area gaming websites
  6. Promoting the hobby/our groups–game store flyers, word of mouth, news coverage?
  7. New members–some prefer more structured introduction, some just like to dive in. We’re good at the latter, need to improve for the former.
  8. Recurring meetup events–designating “hosts” or who’s responsible for posting the event, collecting feedback, etc.
  9. Meetup “kitty”–the site is no longer free. I don’t mind paying for it for the time being, but I’d like to start collecting change from people willing to chip in. I guess this means treasury reporting. ๐Ÿ™
  10. Other topics upon request, leave a comment on this entry.
  11. Gaming, if there’s time and inclination. ๐Ÿ˜‰
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Release date for Harry Potter book #7

Harry Potter #6 cover

About three weeks ago, I got together with a few other Harry Potter fans to discuss the story. One of the topics that came up was the release date for the final book. Somebody (don’t remember who, sorry) said that they heard it would be published in 2007. This lead to speculation about the actual release date, which we predict will be July 7, 2007. This will be a Saturday (Friday night/Saturday morning at midnight), just like the last few books. Besides, since 7 is the most powerful magical number, how could the 7th book possibly be released on any other date than 7/7/7 (2007-07-07)?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 62 Comments

Displaying (vs executing) PHP code on web pages

While working on an earlier post, I needed to find a way to display a PHP module on a web page without having it executed. I knew this was fairly simple and involved the .phps file extension, but I hadn’t done it before. A quick search of the PHP site pointed me to the highlight_file function. About halfway down the page there is a blurb about the MIME type that I needed. It turns out that my web hosting service already has this enabled, so all I needed to do was get a .phps extension on my file. I did it the easy way, with a softlink:

ln -s myfile.php myfile.phps

For those who don’t know Unix, this effectively creates another name for the same file, which is exactly what I want. This leaves the original .php alone, so that it can be run by the web server. But is also allows me to post the code on the web, using the .phps “file” which the web server will display instead of executing. The elegance of this solution is that if/when I modify the original code, I won’t have to make any changes to the displayable code because there is really only one file (with two distinct names).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Footer plugin requirements, notes

A few days ago, Joseph and I were talking about bolting statcounter onto our blogs. He’s the one that pointed out statcounter to me, and all he needed to do was add the statcounter script to his theme’s footer.php file. This would probably work for any single-theme site, but I’m still running multiple themes on my blog. I need to do one of the following if I want to use statcounter:

  1. Drop all but one theme. There are several good reasons for this, most important of which is maintenance. This would allow me to add the statcounter script to the remaining theme’s footer.php and I’d be done.
  2. Add statcounter to all my themes. This probably wouldn’t be too bad, except for maintenance–whenever a new version of one of my themes came out, I’d have to manually reapply my changes.
  3. Write a plugin to insert the statcounter script in the footer of every page. This would be the most work up front, but it would give me a good excuse to learn how to write plugins for WordPress.

I found some useful resources for plugin authoring. The WordPress codex has a section on writing plugins. Owen’s tutorial is a great introduction–just read it and start hacking! ๐Ÿ™‚ Carthik’s Plunge into Plugins article has lots of good advice, but isn’t a tutorial–check it out after/while you get started with Owen’s page. More good info is available on the Codex page Writing a Plugin.

I’ve started working on this plugin, and I’ve already been bitten by the “extra blank line” problem. (Admin interface was reporting “Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by…” error. Note to self–scroll to the bottom of each PHP file, and make sure the PHP close tag is right at the bottom of the file.) I have the code to insert arbitrary text into the footer, but I still need to add the Options menu which would allow J. Random User to edit the text to be inserted. (Right now, the text is hard-coded in the “plugin”, which I have installed and activated on this blog. Check the bottom left corner of any blog page for the statcounter.)

I don’t see any reason for this plugin to be statcounter-specific. It would be more useful to provide some sort of generic footer plugin which would allow HTML or javascript to be inserted in the footer. We’ll see how it goes. If I’m happy with it by the end of the night or later this week, I will go ahead and release it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments