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Cory Doctrow’s New Book

Cory Doctrow, who also runs the Boing Boing weblog, has just released his second book – Eastern Standard Tribe. I haven’t finished reading his first book (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) yet, but I will say that I like what I’ve read so far.

Not only are Cory’s books available to buy in stores, he has also released them for free download from his website. Although this seems like it would be economic suicide for an author, he has in fact been selling books “hand over fist”.

Cory has also written a page called What’s this site?, where he explains his reasons for releasing his books for free. This page and the discussion that follows provide a great insight into the mind of an author who really “gets it” when it comes to modern distribution of artistic work.

As always, here’s a nice quote to convince you that you really should go read this now:

There are 70 million Americans engaged in file-sharing today, violating a copyright law that hasn’t kept pace with technology… No author is going to turn those downloaders into customers by calling them thieves. By contrast, the author who figures out how to capitalize on that activity will find himself sitting pretty

It will be interesting to see how that quote holds up 5-10 years from now…

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Pictures are back

All of the picture galleries are working again. It took a little longer than I would’ve liked to get everything moved over, but it’s finally done. While I was moving files around, I found some great pictures that somehow never got posted.

Here’s Sam playing with some ribbons:

Sam playing with ribbons

And here he is napping on the back of our old couch:

Sam taking a nap

That should give you an idea of how old these pictures are, we got rid of that couch months ago.

I also have a few more good pictures of me and Max that I’ll post in the next few days.

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Get Categorized

I finally broke down and added categories to the site. You’ll find them in the navigation bar on the right side of the home page. So if you’re just here for the technical stuff, like this post, you can go to the Technology Category and read all of it at once.

I’m not really happy with the names of the categories yet, but they’ll do for now. The only problem with this system is when I ramble on about several different things I’ll have to assign that post to multiple categories.

In other news, I just learned how to spell the word “category”. I think I’ve been spelling it “catagory” for my entire life. A Google search for catagory turns up about 503,000 pages, so I guess I’m not alone…

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Soup Recipe

I didn’t get home last night until about 10:30pm, so I had to put off posting this recipe one more time. Sorry to everyone who’s been asking for it for the last few months. Finally, here it is.

All of these ingredients should be readily available. The wonton wrappers are usually in the produce section or near the tofu. Be sure to check the date. Refridgerate the wonton wrappers and use them within a few days of buying them. They will turn green if you leave them sitting around too long.

War Wonton Soup

Wontons:
1/2 pound ground pork
2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 teaspoons minced ginger
2 teaspoons sliced green onion
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
24 wonton wrappers

Soup:
6 cups chicken broth
1/4 pound raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 carrot, sliced
1 cup chinese cabbage, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 cup snow peas, trimmed
1/2 cup mushrooms
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons sliced green onion

This soup cooks very quickly, so be sure you have all of the ingredients ready to go
before you start.

First, prepare the wontons by mixing the pork, rice wine, soy sauce, cornstarch, ginger,
sesame oil, salt, and pepper in a medium bowl.

Place a teaspoon of the mixture in the middle of a wonton wrapper. Brush the edges the
wrapper with water and fold the bottom corner over the filling to make a triangle. Fold
the left and right points of the triangle in to the middle of the wonton, then fold the top
point down.

In a large pot, bring the chicken broth to a boil. Add the wontons and cook about 3
minutes. Add the shrimp and cook for about 1 minute. Add the carrot, cabbage, snow peas,
and mushrooms and cook 1 minute.

Everything should be done at this point. The wontons should be white and the shrimp should be pink. Simmer a little longer if needed.

Add the pepper and sesame oil to taste and garnish with the sliced green onion.

The following ingredients are also sometimes added to the soup:
1/4 cup sliced chicken breast
1/4 cup sliced barbequed pork
1/4 pound fresh scallops

To me this is like chicken noodle soup on steroids. Nothing makes me feel better when I’m sick or just feeling run-down.

If you can only buy ground pork in 1 pound packages, you’re probably wondering what to do with the other half-pound. It’s great added to sauce with pasta, or you can do what I do – make egg rolls.

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Happy New Year

Today is what most of us call “Chinese New Year”, even though I think several other Asian countries celebrate it as well. The year is now 4701, the year of the monkey, according to the Chinese calendar. In honor of the new year I’m going to prepare a Chinese feast for us this evening.

According to the stats on our webserver, people still come to our site looking for War Wonton Soup. I’ve even had a few people leave comments asking for the recipe. So, as my new years gift to everyone, I’ll post the recipe sometime tomorrow. In addition to the soup, we’re going to have home-made egg rolls and at least one kind of stir fry depending on what looks good at the store.

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Tutorial Updates

I’ve gotten several requests to update my Lua tutorials for version 5, so today I sat down and got it done.

Each tutorial has been updated with the changes required for version 5. At the end of the first tutorial I have zip file of headers, libs, and dlls for developing Lua programs on Windows. I also updated the downloads for each tutorial so you can easily download the source code for Lua 4 or Lua 5 on Windows or Linux.

Now I guess I’ll get to work adding a few more SDL tutorials. I’ve gotten a few requests for those as well. Next I’m going to try to cover animated sprites.

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More politics

If you vote, then please do a little research before you decide. I don’t care who you pick. To be honest, I don’t think it makes that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things. But please pay attention to what is going on in the world before you make your decision. With that in mind, here are a few interesting stories I’ve read in the last few days.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Paul O’Neill scandal. He’s the main source for the book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. In it he says that from the first day in the White House George W. Bush has been trying to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. CBS News has a nice article about O’Neill and the book. Here’s my favorite quote:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” forcing top officials to act “on little more than hunches about what the president might think.”

Another new book deals with the “Bush Dynasty”. American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips reveals details of the Bush family’s many connections with the Middle East. The website Common Dreams has reprinted an article about the book that originally ran in the L.A. Times. Here are a few nice quotes from this article:

…the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.

In a way this backs up something I’ve thought for a while now – if George W. Bush had not been elected president, the September 11 attacks may have never happened.

The U.S. is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons. As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 “Nightline” program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: “It is becoming increasingly clear that George [H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.”

You can read more about the book and some excerpts at http://www.americandynasty.net/.

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We’re back

If you’re reading this, then you’re looking at our site at DreamHost. I still don’t have all of the other pages working yet, but they’ll be back soon.

I thought I’d share a few interesting sites that I stumbled across today.

First, Jeffrey Zeldman mentioned a site called Fontifier. Basically, it turns your handwriting into a font that you can use on your computer. You’ll be able to print something from a word proccessing program that looks like it was written by hand. Very cool.

Metafilter had a link for Steal it Back – police auctions on line. They describe it as eBay meets an episode of “Cops”. I think that’s pretty close. I’m still looking for my bike that got stolen back in elementary school…

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Things are about to get weird

We’re moving all of our web sites from Modwest to DreamHost. I don’t have any complaints with Modwest, and I’d recommend them to anyone looking for a good hosting company. I just happened to get a special deal with DreamHost that I couldn’t pass up.

It can take up to 72 hours for DNS changes to happen, so if you have any trouble accessing this site for the next three days, that’s why. Check back around Wednesday and everything should be back to normal.