Late Night Thinking

by Thomas L. Kula

Banana Nutella Snack

Slice a banana in half lengthwise. Spread Nutella on both halves (it won't stick well since the banana isn't exactly the worlds easiest thing to spread on, but stirring the Nutella well to loosen it up helps). Spring some ground flaxseed on both halves, put bag together, eat. Have a napkin handy, it's messy.

Radish Parsley Salad

Mentioned by a friend, adapted from a recipe I found online. 1-1/2 C radishes (about a dozen or so) 1-1/2 C flat-leaf (Italian) parsley 3 stalks celery 1 lemon 2 T. olive oil Salt and pepper Cut off the ends of the radishes, cut in half, then cut into 1/8 inch slices, making little semi-circles of radish. Pull the leaves of the celery (at least getting most of the big stems out).

Cucumber Onion Salad

Craving something like this that my family used to make a lot in the summer when I was growing up, but not wanting to put a lot of mayo on it, I found this very simple recipe online and adapted it slightly. 3 cucumbers 1 sweet onion Dill Rice vinegar Wash the cucumbers, then slice very thin. For bonus visual appeal, before slicing run a citrus zester down the cucumber.

Pastys!

Okay, so the plural of pasty (the Cornish by way of UP of Michigan shortcrust filled with stuff dish) should probably be "pasties", but every time I say I'm making pasties my smartass friends make wisecrack remarks about sticking things to stripper's boobal regions.... Filling: Heavy on the root vegetables, onions, turnips, potatoes. I threw in some diced up celery root, which seemed to be tasty, and put in some peas and carrots because I could.

Moving to New York City

My harebrained scheme actually went through: by the end of October I'll be living in New York City, starting a job at the Columbia University library at the beginning of November, doing various computery infrastructure things in support of many of the projects the library does. I came up with this scheme, moving to NYC, after visiting it twice in July. Very simply, I fell in love with the city, and got bitten by its bug pretty hard.

Hacking AFS Dumps for Fun and Profit

Well, for fun at least. The traditional way of doing AFS volume dumps tends to follow a classical "Full,incremental,incremental" pattern, with occasional new Full dumps so that the number of dumps one has to restore for a given time period is manageable (at work, we do something that is roughly "Monthly-Weekly-Daily"). This also lets you do expiration of dumps for stuff you no longer need — if you only want to keep two months worth of dumps it is easy to determine which dump files you no longer need.

Beet Salad

Inspired by the same dish at Syrian Bakery: 6 beets 1 small onion 5 cloves garlic, whole 1 lemon 8 oz feta cheese 1 cup parsley, chopped Pepper Olive oil Put a steamer basket in a big pot with some water, start that up. Trim the leaves from the beets, cut off any little dangly bits, lightly score each one with an X on the bottom, put in the steamer.

Capresish Salad

Inspired by something I had over the weekend at Lou and Julie's house, made for our weekly dinner night: 3 pints of grape tomatoes 2 green peppers, seeded and sliced into squares 1 jar green olives 8 oz mozzarella, cut into smallish pieces Juice of one lemon 1/2 cup of parsley, chopped A big drizzle of olive oil A bunch of dried basil Salt and pepper Mix well in a big bowl, let it sit a bit in the fridge.

Ad-hoc Binary Diff

Had a need for a binary diff, didn't have anything on the machine I was on and needed something quick and dirty: od -cv file1 > file1.od od -cv file2 > file2.od diff -bu file1.od file2.od Worked like a charm.

Object Snapshots and Deadlists

I've done a bunch of reading up on ZFS, the Zettabyte File System that is part of modern Solaris. One of the more interesting parts to me is how ZFS handles snapshots, and its use of deadlists to handle object expiration. Various projects I've had rolling around in the back of my head need some sort of object store with a practical snapshot capability. Some of those projects, like large scale backups, could involve a gigantic number of objects, and trivial object expiration mechanisms just don't work that well for that.