Today was the first day of my vacation. It’s nice to get some breathing room. Didn’t get anything done today. Spent too much of the morning lazing about. Got some papers organized and I have a bit more to do tomorrow. Made Rosemary Chicken Breast for dinner but it didn’t turn out very well. It was edible though but I’ll tell you how I feel tomorrow. The only good thing I did today was run. Pretty pathetic but the first week back is always the toughest.

Today’s experiment: Brown Butter and Balsamic Ravioli. Tomato and Onion Salad. A couple of mishaps but it tasted alright. Taken from Rachael Ray’s “30-Minute Meals Get Togethers”.

The tomatoes needed to be seeded but I left the seeds in. Made the salad a little watery. I need to cut the tomatoes chunks a little smaller. The salad was easy to make and quite tasty, I can see myself making the salad on a regular basis. I put too much balsamic vinegar into the ravioli by mistake. I really should measure stuff out into a cup before pouring it into the dish. Buying prepared ravioli made this dish much easier.

I’m quite happy with today’s results. There was a chicken dish that was supposed to go with the ravioli and salad. But I felt lazy. I’ll try the chicken dish tomorrow.

Link: Lura.net - Half Your Age Plus Seven.

Finally some evidence for this rule of thumb!

The first recipe I tried from my new cookbook. Turned out well if I say so myself. I had to make a couple of modifications. I substituted the 1/2 stick of butter in the recipe for olive oil (I ran out of butter). That didn’t seem to affect the dish at all. In fact, probably made the dish a little healthier. The next time I try this dish though, I need to find some reduced sodium chicken broth as the chicken broth I used made the dish a little salty.

Feeling like a career change? Want to rule the universe? Then learn what to do in Peter’s Evil Overlord List.

In here, you’ll receive helpful tips like:

9. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.

As an Evil Overlord myself, my personal favorites include:

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

At this point I should laugh manically, but that wouldn’t be following the list. Hah!

My copy of “Everyday Italian” arrived yesterday. I’ve looked through it and there are some recipes I’m going to try while I’m on vacation. Of course, the book has many shots of the beautiful Giada De Laurentiis. Some of the reviews on Amazon have complained about this, wishing that there were more photos of the finished dishes.

But I’m not complaining!

Link: ArkLinux - Ark Linux 2005.1 released.

Another brand new Linux distribution worth investigating. I’m really hurting for no longer having an X86 box to work with. It feels like we’ve reached a new age of Linux distributions (almost like the third generation from when I started). Almost all of these new generation Linux distributions offer LiveCDs, easier installations and more polished GUIs (for better or worse).

Decided to revise my PL challenges for 2005 considering that a quarter of the year is now gone. I’ve picked up bits and pieces of various programming languages over the last 3 months and now it’s time to re-evaluate what I want to learn.

I’m dropping Self for now. IO and Self are very similar to each other. They are both prototype based languages. This class of language is new to me and I only have the bandwidth to process one of these languages. IO is being actively developed and that is my primary reason for sticking with it.

I’m dropping OCaml. I’ve found a nice set of material that I want to explore with Haskell (Darcs, Pugs, The Fun of Programming, GHC 6.4). Haskell also seems to be a better language to start understanding the strongly typed functional programming languages.

I’m dropping Groovy for the Java environment. The Java environment has a rich set of languages and tools I think is worthwhile exploring. I’ve discussed this in another blog entry.

I have a renewed interested in (re)learing Ruby after checking out 43Things and Basecamp. Both of these websites use the RubyOnRails framework which might be the killer app for the Ruby language. I want to (re)learn Python because I attended a talk by Guido this year and there are some cool new features in it that I want to explore (list comprehension and generators).

AppleScript is new to the list. This is closely tied to my goal for learning Objective C (but really the Cocoa framework). I want to program my PowerBook. For too long, I’ve depended on my knowledge of Unix to script my Mac. It’s time I went to the next level of scripting my Mac. This means AppleScript. JavaScript could also work for this purpose. AppleScript is the standard on all Macs and that is the trumping factor over JavaScript.

C# is also new to the list. Java has the JCP but there are no open source implementations of the virtual machine or the compiler. This is not true for C#. Mono provides this open source implementation. For that, I’m putting it on the list.

Erlang is still on the list although I’ve not looked at it yet. There is a large amount of material dealing with concurrent programming using Erlang. It’s this aspect I hope to explore more this year.

The list now stands as follows:
0. Ruby
1. Objective C
2. Java Environment
3. Haskell
4. Lisp
5. Io
6. Erlang
7. Python
8. AppleScript
9. C#