I promised my cow-orker/friend N that I’d post links for these in my blog for her son, so here they are.

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I am beavering away today, not just with housework, but at making the tables in my favorite Ice Cream how to book (that H got me for a birthday a few birthdays ago).

There are many wonderful aspects to recommend the book, not the least of which is Chapter 9, “Chemistry of Ices”. In my quest to get off my ass and make good non-dairy ices with my ice cream maker (and older version of this one), I have, this weekend, encoded a lot of the tables into a Google Docs spreadsheet, which anyone can view.

I will happily package something like this up as an excel spreadsheet for like-curious folks, and folks interested in poking around with the spreadsheet to model how to mess about with ice creams and frozens.

Let me know if you’re interested.

I will probably add things to it as I go. I want to, as I said before, get a hydrometer/saccharometer also, which will help me with making sorbets too.

Some free advertising for CrushPad in SF. I happened to be surveying the market for quality hydrometers/saccharometers. Not for winemaking or beermaking (though aside from biochem suppliers, that’s where you have to look for them these days) but for ice cream and sorbet making. Turns out knowing the density of your mixture, especially in terms of sugar syrups, is important for making your own recipes and getting the right mouthfeel.

But I found CrushPad, which is an ultrapremium winemaking club, essentailly. You pay for your grapes (from ultrapremium vineyards), their transport, you rent space, equipment, barrels, and can monitor your fermentation remotely after the initial harvest, processing and prep. The FAQ says that the barrels go for around $6k to around $10k per barrel, which translates to about $20 - $35 per bottle.

I honestly had no idea, but having it be in SF totally makes sense.

To be clear, the concept, to me, is interesting. I don’t think I would do it, because I actually don’t like wine, but for those who do, I can totally see this being a very interesting vacation. And apparently the harvest is going on right now. Also, H says, and I think she’s right, that it would be a great thing for an IT executive type to do both from the point of view of a working-on-something-else vacation as well as from being able to have a hand in a really good corporate giftgiving type product.

Just so you know, when I’m not playing my new copy of Spore (thanks to H for giving it to me as a birthday present!), I watch these videos I recently found on YouTube videos about the Periodic Table of the Elements (by the University of Nottingham).

These videos are extremely geeky and so are the participants in the videos. They’re geek gold.

The intro video.

The entire collection.

And let me start you out with Hydrogen.

Yes, in case you’re wondering, these are the sorts of geeks I hung out with for most of my post-high school education.

Just a short update.

It turns out that even the venerable Peter Guttman (who proposed in 1996 or so that we use a 35-pass wipe according to a strict algorithm to protect our old/deleted data) thinks that with today’s storage and recovery technologies, only a few passes are now needed to protect us from snooping.

I used to advocate the 35-pass wipe algorithm but now I think you only need to do that if you don’t know what types of passes should be used for the type of modern drive you have.

A private Wiki article.

The Guttman article with the Epilogue about the actually required passes versus the 35-pass algorithm.

For the iBook or PowerBook (at least - try Crucial’s Memory Advisor™ tool and see if you come up with DDR PC2700 type memory and you may also be able to use it).

Details below the link/cut:

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So my sweetie’s Powerbook G4 is having some performance and operation problems, and I just thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about what the symptoms appear to be and what what our action plan is to get it back into operation.

Updated to make certain decision-points a little clearer.

Updated 2 with alterations suggested by ckd, some wording corrections and some price estimates.

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I didn’t know this before, and it could conceivably help if you happen to be trying to track down a troller by incoming domain name or e-mail address and you find inaccurate WHOIS information.

There is a way of dealing with false WHOIS information. You can report it to the InterNIC and they will process it and try to rectify it.

You start with this form (the Whois Data Problem Report) and follow the directions there.

The form does require your real name and a functioning e-mail address, so it will leave a paper trail that could conceivably implicate you should someone track it back, but it’s a good tool to know about.

Which is, I guess, okay, since I upgraded them both recently.

But it’s gonna bother me until I fix it all.

(assuming you have a domain you can control/create subdomains on)

I just set it up. Took about 30 geeky minutes, including a 20 minute call in which I was attempted to be recruited about a job in Northern Virginia.

It’s two php scripts, a very little console work, and if you’re hosting on Dreamhost and running PHP as CGI, some additional cruft in the .htaccess file.

The scripts are in a package called phpMyID.

The console work is in that package’s readme (basically hashing your ID, your PHP realm and your chosen password and sticking it in the configuration file - one of the two php scripts).

The .htaccess file work is described here. A note about the .htaccess stuff: If you’re running csh or tcsh, take the stuff out of single quotes and put them directly in the .htaccess file with a text editor or else the shell will misinterpret the ! and other punctuation and screw it up for you.

Apparently you can host multiple IDs if you want with various intelligent file clonings and tweakings, but the system’s really designed for individual IDs per subdomains/domains.