www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:46:09 GMT

The new RSS feeds for www.gulker.com: RSS http://www.gulker.com/feed/ RSS 2.0 http://www.gulker.com/feed/rss2 ATOM http://www.gulker.com/feed/ RDF http://www.gulker.com/feed/rdf This feed should be remapping to http://www.gulker.com/feed/, but, it's not. While we de-bug, please use the above.

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 04:54:43 GMT

This blog has moved, as of July 24, 2006 to a new publishing system and a new home page. We'll be attempting to move the RSS feed over as well (so you shouldn't have to change). Navigation for the old pages is here. A fond adios to Radio Userland, and hello to WordPress...

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:13:34 GMT

Friend Cathy Podell's birthday dinner seemed to go well, 100+ degree heat notwithstanding. Barb's empanadas and black bean soup were 'killer' (I ate 4 empanadas), and the Cuban pork and Sea Bass were well received. Well worth the effort, heat and all...

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 22:44:19 GMT

Archive of www.gulker.com's blog from January 2002 to July 2006 is now up. It provides a quicker way to go from month to month and year to year, than the calendar navigation in the sidebar. Most of these pages are in Google's index, and can be found with our Google site search. One step closer to the beta...

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 22:44:26 GMT

It's hot again today, hotter than two days ago, and where does this scorching day find me? On the patio? At the beach? Nope. Been in the kitchen, roasting pork. Today is the birthday of my spouse's best friend, and friend Barb Slaton and I are cooking dinner for 8. Barb thought it would be fun to do a Cuban theme. So she's doing black bean soup, empanadas and flan, and I'm bringing Cuban pork and Lubina a la Criollo (Sea Bass in Creole sauce). The pork recipe is from Cook's Illustrated and is a doozy: one starts by putting a pork shoulder in a brine of orange juice, salt and sugar for 24 hours. Next the pork is rinsed, dryed and rubbed with a paste of garlic, citrus juice and herbs. Then it goes on a the BBQ for 2 hours over indirect heat with an aluminum foil barrier, before going into the oven for 3 hours. It rests for an hour, then is sliced and served drizzled with mojo sauce. The fish will only take 20 minutes as will the black beans and rice in El Bodegita del Medio style. Had I known it would be over 100, I think the menu would have leaned more toward chilled gazpacho...

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:59:15 GMT

Debugging has begun in earnest on the new site and blogging system. Last night we found a bug that showed up only in FireFox, and figured out a fix. We also figured out how to convert the HTML blogroll to OPML, using BBEdit and the time honored search-and-replace feature. Now that the blogroll has been scrubbed and imported into WordPress, we note a very nice feature: every time you load the page, the blogroll is loaded in a different random (or pseudo-random) order. Nice. The to-do list is starting to shrink faster than it is growing. I sense beta 2 is fast approaching, meaning that we will be moving the new, fully configured blog here to gulker.com's main index. The current pages will remain, linked from an archive navigation page that will make it easy to find the old system's and new system's content. Onward...

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 14:46:17 GMT

Hacking the blogroll: the old blogroll is flat HTML, which is one of the reasons it was hard to maintain - I used to have to go into a few thousand lines of HTML on the home page, find the start, and then carefully hand code and (usually) debug it. By keeping it in OPML - Outline Processor Markup Language - I can manage it using tools built in to WordPress, and it becomes easy to maintain and export. Trick is, its current form is an HTML ordered list. How best to convert to the XML syntax required by OPML?

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:12:19 GMT

Another reason to move the blog to WordPress: while attempting to claim www.gulker.com (yeah, yeah, what took me so long?) over at Technorati, I discovered that their spiders can't parse our HTML. When I added Technorati's 2 lines of javascript and submitted the changes back to the Radio DB, Radio made quite a hash out of the resultant HTML in the browser edit window. It still loads in Safari and Firefox, but it has lots of problems. The W3C validator chokes on the first line. I have no idea why Radio suddenly decided to do this. It appears to have changed out all the whitespace in the template with non-printing codes of some sort. Not sure if that was a consequence of editing the template in FireFox, an admirably standards-compliant browser, and then sending it back to an ancient blogging system. It's been 5 years since Radio was meaningfully updated, and I'm guessing that sleuthing just what in the cruft stack caused this won't be time well spent. Better just to cut over to WordPress: the beta blog is handled just fine by Technorati...

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:29:23 GMT

Here's my Technorati Profile for www.gulker.com. Finally getting around to 'claiming' gulker.com...

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:05:33 GMT

Pretty sky this morning as we jogged across Stanford campus. I think Linda will be blogging this morning about the great bicycle mystery over at FirstBlush...