serialized.net

I noticed this blog was slow from time to time, and decided to do a bit of investigation.

That took the form of a very very sweet hack that I will publish at a later date, but for now I’ll just share some of the results.

In the sidebar I am using pretty standard WordPress plugins to load in

• my latest images from Flickr
• my latest tweets from Twitter
• my recent bookmarks from del.icio.us

These plugins are all implemented as server-side fetches.

Here’s the thing, those services aren’t always very fast. For example, on a recent run I got these results:

Host	Service	Load Time
128.121.146.228	Twitter	1.831s
fe.feeds.del.vip.ac4.yahoo.net	del.icio.us	1.148s
www.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com	Flickr	0.274s

I guess I need to either switch to using an in-browser widget model, or cron a fetch of that data locally on some reasonable interval. That might be a nice service for WordPress to have internally for widget authors: ‘cron/cache mode.’ Provide a URL to curl periodically that updates the caches on all your active widgets, as well as a global configuration about how fresh you want your data to be.

I don’t care if any of those results are more than an hour up to date, I’d much prefer to have my page load time cut by 3.24 seconds than have it be up-to-the second accurate.

Filed under: Tech by Joshua Barratt
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Maybe it’s a par-braise? Not sure.

In any case, here’s the essence:

When you’re cooking something that has it’s own residual moisture, use that moisture (instead of additional fat) to help cook the items by putting a lid on your pan.

2 good examples I’ve used this on recently are mushrooms and onions. Toss a bit of olive oil or butter in a pan, add the veggies and cook for a bit, then lid the pan. Because the environment gets so steamy you’ll actually be able to cook the vegetables more than you would have (for the things like mushrooms and onions, where ‘cooking more’ is more virtue than crime) without them starting to stick and burn.

Mushrooms in particular are known for absorbing any fat you throw in the pan, then, as you cook, spitting it back out, and getting greasy.

Capturing the water vapor (deliciously flavored water vapor, I might add) and using that to keep everything nicely lubricated solves that problem.

Then, at the end of the process, when you’re close to the texture you want, pop the lid off, and let that little bit of fat you added in the beginning do it’s magic and brown things all up.

I’m curious to see if this works with other ’superabsorbers’ like eggplant, but that’s for another day.

Filed under: Food by Joshua Barratt
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I was almost asleep when I got a text message that jolted me awake. To settle back down I decided to sort out my keys. It’s pretty amazing what I have to carry right now:
11 real keys
2 battery powered keyless remotes
1 RFID tag for a coded door
1 gym bar code tag

Thankfully, within a month I should be
-1 key and keyless from selling the Subaru
-2 keys from my subleased office I am moving out of
-2 keys from selling my scooter
-2 keys from my new office (once converted to use the RFID).

So for now I just have to live with a bloated ring.

I wonder how many years it will be before we look back on keys as a hilarious antiquated concept. There’s already enough hardware in my car and office building that they could at least offer an iPhone compatability mode. And you only have to search ‘bump key’ on YouTube to realize how silly ‘traditional’ locks are.

Oh well. Time to see if I can get back to sleep.

Filed under: Ramble by Joshua Barratt
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