bbq season started and so a small post to make the perfect medium rare tri-tip steak.

The thing about tri tips is that they are so big that you can have all kinds of rareness in the steak at the same time. So there is a part which is perfect for everybody. Normally the ends are well done and the more you get to the middle the more rare the steak becomes.

Anyway here is a recipe how to cook it on a gas bbq.

1. get a 1.5 - 1.8 lbs tri-tip steak
2. marinate it for 12 - 24h in a marinade of your choice
3. preheat the bbq as high as possible
4. drop the steak on the bbq on very high temperature and let the lid open
5. wait 5 minutes
6. turn the steak and let the lid open for another 5 minutes
7. reduce the heat to medium low and turn the steak
8. close the lid for the next 10 minutes
9. flip the steak
10. close the lid and wait another 10 minutes
11. now its done.
    

afterwards place the steak in a wooden board and let it rest for 5 - 10 minutes before you cut it. Since we don't want that it drys out.

enjoy.

the lack of code quality in open source software, particular maven.

• why is it that you can't download a program, follow the installation procedure and it just works?
• why is it that a program version is marked at stable and released to the public and does not do what it's supposed todo?
• i don't expect it to be flawless, but it should provide some working results
• why is it that maven 2.0.6 is not compatible to the plugins of 2.0.5?
• there are standards to version software
• a 1.0.2 version has to be able to work on the data of a 1.0.1 version without errors
  
• a 2.0.0 version does not have to be compatible to a 1.9.9 version.
• a 1.2.* version should be compatible to a 1.1.9 but it doesn't have to be
  
• why does maven fail to install particular packages in a multi module project
• i use the software and build software it, it makes me look bad if I have to work around bugs in very unprofessional ways
• a user should not be expected to get a documentation for compiling a software like this
  

short why is there not a certain amount of code quality in maven, every time I use a new plugin I spend at least 2 hours to work around it bugs and get it started.

For example eclipse does not have these problems, they have a stable system to release projects and to make sure that they are stable. Why can't be maven like this?


What is the result of these issues? I consider to download the latest maven sourcecode and start to develop my own maven2 fork. just to get to a working standard which works like it's expected.


...yes I hate to waste my time on things I shouldn't have to, specially if it's my weekend.

Now that my mac book is dead an I'm frustrated for other reason I decided there is only one thing todo,

time to buy toys!

In this case I finally bought a second flash for my camera and start learning to use it.

My first idea to shoot throw a glass plate did not really work that well. Basically there was barley any difference to using only one flash.

Now using it as a rim light, is another story, I actually really like the effect of a rim light in this case.

time todo dishes.

oh noes my little mac book died, to be precise the display cracked after a drop of maybe 2 inches onto the corner of my chair.

...live truly sucks right now...

Since one of my server disk died a couple of days ago, I thought I use this opportunity and take it apart and snap some pictures.


And i actually really like them, just wish they had a little bit more depth of field.

wounder full you go to the dentist to replace a filling and they tell you that they can't make a new filling, since the material they use is not sturdy enough,
so you end up to replace a perfectly fine filling with a crown and have 500$ out of pocket expense...

...at least I finally got rid of the amalgam filling and also of my sensitive teeth problem, which seemed to be related to it.

I finally managed to take my camera with me to lake Tahoe, since we got our scientific retreat here and it's just wonderful to take pictures of this area. Everything is just so beautiful.


you can find more in my galleria!

after reading some more and more about my spontaneous shopping I came to the conclusion that I have to find a osx 10.4 cd or have to install a bigger hard drive.


Currently it has 40GB and only syncs recently added movies and songs. Sadly you can only sync with on pc. Since we got 5 pc's this brings some kind of a challenge.

If I could sync at least two pc's it would help alot since it would be able to sync with lindsays laptop and with my main laptop.

the easiest would still if it could just access an external hard drive as it's supposed to be,
...at least in my opinion...

today I finally managed to get my car smogged (AU) and went shopping for new toys. I was way to brave in February.



20 Minutes later I got a new airport extreme (our wireless router just died :( ) and an apple TV. Now my idea was to share a 500GB HD on the airport extreme with the apple tv, but this worked not out since I don't have a leopard 10.4 cd laying around and so have no way to enable ssh accss on the apple tv...

new plan

airport exteme + HD --> minimac (mounts the HD) --> itunes --> apple TV (display data from itunes)

an image (not taken by me, i tried, but didn't get it done)

after we had a nice evening with friends which provided home made pizza, which was extremly tasty. I went shopping and bought a pizza stone + peeler + cutter.

Why? Pizza stones make the pizza so tasty and it's not burned. And they are cheap, 35$ for a stone and peeler and cutter is not to bad.

I also finally bought an umbrella and lightstand to improve my flash based photographies.

night of the mojito,


this night I decided to make some mojitos,

with some I mean I went to the store and went nuts on buying different kind of rums. Which means I end up with:

1 x 10 cane rum - 40$
1 x barcadi lemon - 20$
1 x pitu - 20$

several limes, soda and mint.

now my favorite recipe for the night turned out to be

• 2 shots of barcadi lemon
• 2 shots of soda
• 10 leaves of mint
• 1 lime - dark greeen, the light green just don't cut it
• fill up with crushed ice
• 2 tsp brown sugar
  

the 10 cane needed to much sugar to taste good (better for caipirinhas) and the pitu was just to strong.

and I'm really looking at the SB-600 or the nikon F1/8 80mm as my personal birtday gift...

today I received a 250GB hard drive for my laptop and I honestly have to say I'm amazed that you can put so much stuff in a small laptop drive. Now I actually can really use the laptop to its full potential (linux + windows XP + windows vista + several VMs)

and it only cost a little bit over 100$,

after a couple of hours of frustration with my mac and the eternal question:

why wont java use more than 2GB of RAM, if the system has 8GB Ram I found the answer here:

http://developer.apple.com/java/javaleopard.html

basically you need to provide the JVM flag -d64

thanks apple for doing something simple so complicated. On every other os java automatically uses 64bit without the need to set some stupid flags...

it finally happened, my software project is now available as opensource (at least parts) and I also got accepted by atlassian, which means we get all there cool tools for free.
jira,
bamboo,
confluence,
crowed,
fisheye

binbase uses them all for code management and documentation.

You can find more out under:

http://binbase.sourceforge.net/

or at our ohloh account

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11844?p=binbase

which is very helpfull to push our google hits higher and higher.

oracle is back to live after a long time - 36h give or take,

procedure was:

1. connect sqlplus sys/******* as sysdba
2. shutdown immediate
3. startup nomount
4. restore control file
5. shutdown abort
6. startup mount
7. exit
8. export MALLOC_CHECK_=0
9. rman catalog rman/******@BACKUP target sys/******
10. restore database
11. recover database
12. alter database open resetlogs;

a simple 9 step procedure once you got it all figured out and just because a ******** barge hat to cap the cables at the sacramento river and took me out of business.

Helpfull links: this

or like a wise man said:

boss: how long do you need to fix the problem?
wise man: 10 seconds after I found the solution

fighting with oracle since 16 hours because of a stupid bug.

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

connected to target database: BINBASE (DBID=3083741697, not open)
connected to recovery catalog database

RMAN> recover datafile 1;

Starting recover at 15-FEB-08
Starting implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=155 devtype=DISK
Crosschecked 103 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08

Starting implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08
using channel ORA_DISK_1
Crosschecked 10 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08

searching for all files in the recovery area
cataloging files...
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0cc2f3a8 ***







RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of recover command at 02/15/2008 23:46:02
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================


basically it is some cglib mojo with the glib library from centos which kills your application if it thinks it founds a bug...

it is pretty well described here


In short:

The version of glibc provided with CentOS 4.3 performs additional internal
sanity checks to prevent and detect data corruption as early as possible. By
default, should corruption be detected, a message similar to the following will
be displayed on standard error (or logged via syslog if stderr is not open):

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x0937d008 ***

By default, the program that generated this error will also be killed; however,
this (and whether or not an error message is generated) can be controlled via
the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable. The following settings are supported:

0 Do not generate an error message, and do not kill the program
1 Generate an error message, but do not kill the program
2 Do not generate an error message, but kill the program


3 Generate an error message and kill the program

After I set this variable I made some progress.

...need to take more pictures...
...need more spare time...
...need to figure out how to get a new visa...
...dentist, need togo to dentist...
...need more mojitos...

it's the 14th of febuary and at it happened we won a gift certificate at a raffle from our apartment complex. What is it about? 30$ for the resturant fuzzios, but since I really can't stand fuzzios and another person won a 30$ gift certificate for Bistro 33, which is my favorite resturant around here...


...I started talking and trading and convincing the other person and got her certificate in exchange for my certificate since she didn't like bistro...

Yay I finally can eat the 25$ coffee powdered rib eye steak this saturday \o/

i finally managed to get my continius integration system running in the way I like it. The current configuration contains:

1 x Bamboo trial license
1 x Trac for issue management
1 x maven2

and tests my code against the following services:

1 x oracle 10g - filled using DBunit snapshots
1 x postgres8 (todo)
1 x jboss 4.2.*
1 x rocks linux cluster 4.3 - simulated using vmware server (2 nodes,1 frontend)

and all this runs on my 3year old workstation and performs quite well.

The official address is currently: bender

now I just need to get a Bamboo license for our opensource projects and write a lot more testcode. I just wished I would had started such a thing 3 years ago, since it would make things a lot simpler...

drink of the week:

daiquiri de nase

1 x fresh orange
1 x fresh lime
1 shot tripple sec
2 shot mailibu coconut rum
1 TS brown sugar
1 CuP (250ml of ICE)
5 frozen strawberries

put all in a blender (lime/orange just the juice),
blend it,
trink it

tasty with a nice sour note

currently I'm wasting my time with the hopeless attempt to develop better code. For this reason I'm migrating right now to maven from ant, which is just a nightmare.

Maven itself is a pretty cool and fancy tool and my ant scripts where always written in a way that they simulate the behavior from maven. But since my projects get more and more complex, it's just no fun to keep adjusting antfile for N projects. So I switched last friday to maven...


...one week later I'm still trying to figure out why the stuff does not work as it should and why it is so complicated. I'm actually ending up with setting up a complete continius build enviroment including:

- rocks cluster based on vmware
- maven mirror for artifacs
- continium, a continius build tool
- a postgres testdatabase
- a oracle testdatabase
- an apache
- a bugzilla

Which all takes forever since the cluster installation is so buggy that it's really no fun todo it.

Which also complicates things alot is that my car, mhm basically blew up. I have no idea yet what's wrong, but I'm looking forward to look in the greedy eyes of my mechanic when he tells me how much hes going to charge me, if he is fixing it...