Seattle.BloggersPub

I’ve been really slacking off in the feeds that I read and as a result I’ve been missing some of the coolest news from the community. Having MXNA down makes it even worse. But after a really great, relaxing week in Ireland I’m back on the RSS crack and since I’ve switched from Google Reader […]

There’s a funny/cool post over on Content Consumer about a guy who let his girlfriend lose on a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 and asked her to do some basic things like download a music album, draw a picture, and find the capital of Bosnia. One of the tasks was to go watch a YouTube video. […]

Adobe Developer Connection just rolled out a commenting system for the Flex Developer Center. I used to have trouble pointing people to a place they could get information about building with Adobe technologies but the Developer Connection has been doing a pretty good job of getting new articles across a wide array of products. I […]

A couple of weeks ago Matthew Amster-Burton wrote about some frozen croissant dough which Trader Joe’s now carries, and gave the product the thumbs up.

I thought it would be nice to do breakfast at home this morning, so I decided to give them a try. All I did was put out a couple on a sandwiched aluminum cookie sheet last night, then I woke up, preheated the oven, and baked them for a little under 20 minutes. They reminded me of the quality of croissants I found at average chain bakeries in Tokyo, which is pretty good. If I walked down the street to one of the coffee shops in my neighborhood, I’d have croissants with no crunch, a victim of transport… they resemble dinner rolls more than croissants, even though they come from a reasonably decent bakery.

The Trader Joe’s version were also just the right size… I usually want two pastries just for variety’s sake, but in the typical portion sizes in the U.S. that’s a prescription for a heart attack, or at least some substantial weight gain. These ones work out to be 150 kCal a piece, assuming you don’t slather too much in the way of toppings on them. I ate two with some kaya custard, so it wasn’t exactly diet food, but I should live to see tomorrow.

Cafe Besalu is an occasional (frequent?) weekend indulgence for me, and their laminated pastries are hard to beat, but there’s something to be said for being able to eat freshly baked croissants in your bathrobe.

Even though I like eating well on my own, I tend to keep breakfast and brunch rather basic, so I thought it would be good to have some more good stuff that required little work.

I had half a grapefruit from Harbor Island Citrus in Florida, which I picked up at Sosio’s. These grapefruits were labeled in Japanese with the phrase 「糖度センサー使用」, which means that they are sugar-tested with a brix sensor (yours for just $3000, or $9000 if you want the melon-testing model). They’re sweet, but also incredibly full-flavored. Thanks to the label, I discovered that this grapefruit is exported to and sold in Japan (at least online), and are actually fairly reasonably priced… not much different than I paid, and slightly cheaper in quantity.

The season’s pretty short, so I bought a couple more this weekend, just in case it’s my last chance. They might have them for another week at Sosio’s downtown; I was told that there are only about 40-50 cases left in the country.

I also had a sunny-side up egg with truffle salt, making a simple but luxurious breakfast. Sometimes it’s good to stay home.

I subscribe to adaptive feed reader, it would most certainly know I don’t understand French, and therefore would significantly reduce the number of posts from David’s blog that end up in front of my eyes. But alas…

I read at Seahawks Insider (where else?) tonight that the Seattle Seahawks agreed to terms with both Anthony Russo from the Washington Huskies and Michael Bumpus of the Washington State Cougars as undrafted free agents recently.

As was the case with Marcus Trufant, Michael Bumpus will be granted a one-year window in which to make up for the fact that he was a Cougar.

Go Seahawks!

In the past week, I’ve invested a little over $1,000 into my Acura Integra, including a complete tune-up, replacement parts and brand new tires, in the hopes that at some point around the year 2033, I can report back here about how I’ve doubled my most recent milestone.

Does your feed icon really have to be that big?

Really?

After firing up C3PO this morning, I noticed that a distribution update was available for Ubuntu. I had the option of upgrading from 7.10, which I originally installed, to 8.04 LTS (not 8.4 LTS). I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Hardy Heron, so deciding whether or not to upgrade was pretty much a no-brainer.

The upgrade process went very well. It was straightforward, kept me informed of the overall progress, and I especially liked how it not only warned me when important configuration files were about to be replaced, but also let me look at diffs between my installed copy and the one by which it would be replaced. I thought that was really impressive, if perhaps a little too technical for the layman, if only for the fact that it let me note some of the differences down on a piece of paper so I could go back in and make the appropriate changes later on (since in almost every case I opted for the latest and greatest version of the file).

The total upgrade process only took about 45 minutes to an hour, and once it was finished I restarted C3PO. It was very obvious as soon as the login screen showed up that I was working with a new version of Ubuntu, although I can’t say I’m as fond of the new login screen as I was of the old one (simply because the new one seems a little too bright). Once I logged in, I was pleased to see that the majority of the important services running on the box (PHP, Apache, etc.) were intact and working as desired.

The only problem I ran into involved MySQL. For months before making this upgrade, I had been having problems updating the database server to the latest package due to some obscure file or library problem. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but for some reason, during the upgrade to 8.04 LTS, both the MySQL server and client packages were removed. Fortunately, remedying the problem was as simple as running sudo apt-get mysql-client-5.0 and sudo apt-get mysql-server-5.0 and then updating the my.cnf file, since it was one of the aforementioned files on which I jotted some notes down on paper. Once I did that, my database was up-and-running again, all the latest data and tables were in place and working as expected. So that was good news.

Finally, one of the best things about the upgrade is that I’m now running Firefox 3 Beta 5 by default, rather than Firefox 2. It’s nice being able to take advantage of some of the new features when I’m browsing on my Linux box.

I’m just getting my feet wet with this new release of Ubuntu, but so far so good, and I’ll likely post more on the subject after I’ve had some more time to check out some of the newer features.

No matter how many times I refer to them here at my blog, I can never seem to remember whether the “U” in URI and URL stands for “Uniform” or “Universal.” As of late, I’ve been leaning more and more toward the former, but when writing up another post tonight, I decided to check Google just to be sure. Sure enough, a search for “uri stands for” returned the following:

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the first search result was a link directly to an older post of mine titled URI vs. URL, but I was very unpleasantly surprised to see that the post actually says “URI stands for Universal Resource Identifier and URL stands for Universal Resource Locator,” when this, in fact, isn’t true at all.

A look at Wikipedia quickly clears up the matter, but it’s pretty embarrassing to know that the combination of a little Google Juice and some unchecked stupidity have likely managed to cause more confusion than to provide clarification.

May God have mercy on my soul.

Update: Google’s misquoting me! Though, I still can be pretty stupid sometimes