fromagique

[fromagique]

Pork Wellington

Transcribed from Alton Brown's "Good Eats", season 13, episode "Tender is the Pork."

Ingredients

1 pork tenderloin

1 sheet of puff pastry

1 oz. dried apples

2 tbsp whole-grain mustard

1 tsp fresh thyme, minced

5-10 slices of prosciutto

1 egg, beaten with 1 tbsp water

Method

Preheat oven to 400, with rack in upper third of oven.

Thaw 1 sheet of puff pastry for 30 to 45 minutes wrapped loosely in a kitchen towel to preserve moisture.

Run dried apples in food processor until roughly chopped

Remove silverskin from tenderloin, and split down the middle. Flip one half around so that the tenderloin is even in thickness.

Lay prosciutto slices between two parchment sheets and roll to cement them together

Sprinkle the minced thyme, 1/4 tsp kosher salt, and 1/4 tsp black pepper over the prosciutto. Place the tenderloin across the prosciutto slices, and place the chopped dried apples between the two halves of the meat.

Roll up prosciutto, tucking the end under before pulling the parchment away so that it stays put.

Lightly flour a work surface and roll out the puff pastry to 12x14 inches.

Spread the mustard on the pastry as evenly and thinly as possible.

Position the pork roll 1/3 of the way across the pastry, and roll from the short side. When only a couple inches of the free side are remaining to roll, brush the free bit with the egg wash. Roll up the rest of the pastry, then pinch the ends to seal.

Move the completed pastry roll to a baking sheet with a sheet of parchment. Brush the top with the egg wash.

Place the assembly in the oven and bake 25-30 minutes, until internal temp is 140 and outside is golden brown, rotating the pan halfway through.

Place the pastry roll on a cooling rack and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Slice with a very sharp serrated knife into thick slices, and serve (possibly with a nice green salad.)

[fromagique]

The tomatoes are looking fine and healthy... looking forward to an awesome season of bruschetta, salads, etc.

[fromagique]

Hex string to bytestring in Python (2.x)

Here's a quick and kludgy way to convert a string of hex digits (full bytes, an even number of digits) into a binary bytestring in Python 2.7.

def hex2bytes(h): return ''.join([chr(int(h[x:x+2],16)) for x in range(0,len(h),2)])

[Edit]: Or you could just use binascii.unhexlify. But what the heck, it was fun to figure out.

[fromagique]

Using UTC in OS X (10.8) Calendar app

Just a little hint: if you want to use UTC as your time zone in the OS X Calendar app, turn on time zone support, select "Other" in the dropdown menu on the upper right corner of the Calendar main window, and type in "UTC" in the Closest City field. It will then switch to what it calls "GMT", which is close enough for me.

[fromagique]

iOS Personal Hotspot with OS X Lion 10.7 and iTunes 11, on a late 2007 Macbook 3,1

Yeah, I know the title is really wordy. But I wanted to make sure people could use the Google to get here. You see, this issue has frustrated me to no end, and so if I can help someone else find the solution, I want to surely do that.

The issue: you have an iOS device on which you’ve signed up for a cellular data plan that includes a “Personal Hotspot” or whatever your carrier calls it. (It used to be known as “tethering” in some circles.) You want to use this data plan to ride the tubes on the Internets with your beloved Macbook 3,1 (or other Mac of similar vintage, that being about late 2007), which is now deemed obsolete and cannot be upgraded to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and you want to use a USB cable to connect your iOS device, for any number of good reasons, as opposed to 802.11b/g/n/ac or Bluetooth. (I’ve always hated the name WiFi... it’s such a complete marketing term.)

You have also upgraded your iTunes application to 11.0 or later.

You now notice that your Macbook refuses to acknowledge the presence or activity of the iDevice as a network provider, when you open System Preferences and select the Network icon. No matter how many times you plug and unplug the cable, reboot the iDevice, reset its network settings, turn the Personal Hotspot on and off, etc., nothing happens.

OK, so here’s why this was happening to me. (It may be the same thing that is happening to you, although I certainly don’t guarantee anything.) Time for a little deep diving into the bowels of OS X, and how it talks to the devices plugged into it.

The central software part of OS X which controls everything else is called the “kernel.” The kernel knows how to communicate with various devices by means of small software modules called “kernel extensions”, or “kexts” for short, which it loads whenever someone asks for the specific kind of device that it controls. (Some are loaded at startup because they’re so vital to basic functionality, but that’s not important right now.)

One of these “kext” modules is responsible for communicating with an iDevice that’s trying to provide network (internet) service to the Macbook over a USB cable. The name of this kext is AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext and it lives in a very specific place in the Macbook’s filesystem, with very specific permissions and ownership. For those of you with developer skillz, here’s the relevant information:

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Apr 19 00:29 /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext

OK, now for the rest of us, the kext file (package) lives in the directory /System/Library/Extensions and is owned by user root and group wheel, and has permissions of 755. This information will come in handy later.

The problem occurs because iTunes 11 installs a version of this kext (kernel extension) which is somehow incompatible with the Macbook. I know, Apple is supposed to be all perfect and everything, but the Macbook 3,1 that I have is now listed as “obsolete” or some such insulting language, and they’re apparently not testing for its unique characteristics anymore.

Nerd note: I suspect that what’s happening is that the kext that iTunes 11 installs is a 64-bit-only version, and since the Macbook 3,1 can’t run a fully 64-bit kernel and EFI, it fails on load. At least that’s what I got from watching iosnoop as I plugged my iPad into the Macbook. But I could be very wrong.

So, fortunately there is a way to get a version of the kext that will work properly, but it’s kind of a real pain in whatever body part you usually choose to have pains like this in. You have to replace the kext with a version supplied by iTunes 10.6.3, which can be downloaded here (http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1575).

Note: this procedure involves mucking around with the internals of your system software and may very well render it unusable. This will get you a very unhappy look from the Genius you take it to at an Apple Store, as well as lots of inconvenience. If you’re not comfortable with this risk, DON’T DO IT.

OK, now that the disclaimer is out of the way, here’s the steps. This involves typing lots of fiddly commands into the Terminal, as the root user.

Download iTunes 10.6.3 from the link above.

Quit the iTunes app and disconnect any iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc. from the Macbook’s USB ports.

Execute this Terminal command to remove the existing kext that was installed by iTunes 11. (You will have to enter an administrator user’s password): sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext

Execute this Terminal comand to remove the iTunes application. Yes, completely remove it. This will not disturb any of your music, movies, apps, etc.--it’s just the application itself: sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app

Open the iTunes 10.6.3 DMG file you downloaded in step 1 and run the installer inside it.

DO NOT OPEN THE iTUNES APPLICATION.

Execute the following Terminal command to open the Extensions folder in the Finder: open /System/Library/Extensions

Find AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext in this folder, and Option-drag it to your Desktop. Make sure you hold down Option; this will copy the kext instead of trying to move it, which probably wouldn’t work.

I would advise right-clicking on the copy of the kext on your Desktop, and choosing “Compress AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext” in order to zip up a nice backup copy of this pristine version of the working module for safekeeping. Put it somewhere safe, like where you put other important backups.

Now reboot your Macbook.

When you’re back to the desktop, plug in your iDevice, make sure its Personal Hotspot feature is turned on, you have a cellular connection, etc., and open System Preferences. Choose the Network icon, and you should see “iPad USB” or “iPhone USB” as an active option in your list of network devices. Congratulations. Turn off any other network connections such as 802.11b/g/n/ac or wired Ethernet, and try a website you know should work such as ford.com. (I use that one because it’s not likely to be in your browser’s cache--unless you’ve been car shopping lately or something.) It should come up just fine.

Now we need to get iTunes back up to version 11. The problem is that it will now overwrite your nicely working kext with the bad version again. This is why we copied it to your desktop, so we can overwrite the bad version after reinstalling iTunes 11.

So, repeat steps 2 through 4 to remove iTunes 10.6.3. (You can skip step 3, since it’s not going to matter. The important thing is to remove the iTunes app.)

Then go download the latest iTunes installer from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Open the iTunes 11 installer DMG and run the installer.

Now repeat step 3 to remove the bad kext.

Now execute this Terminal command to copy the good kext where it needs to be: sudo cp -r ~/Desktop/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext /System/Library/Extensions

Execute this Terminal command to set the proper permissions on the copied kext package: sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext

Execute this Terminal command to set the proper ownership on the copied kext package: sudo chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext

Now reboot your Macbook again.

When you get back to the desktop, repeat step 11 to test your Personal Hotspot connection. It should be running OK. If it’s not, well, frankly, I don’t know. But good luck...

NOTE: After applying a new iTunes update, if your Personal Hotspot stops working again, grab your zipped backup copy of the kext, put it on the Desktop, open it to decompress it, and repeat just steps 16 and following--this should get you running again.

As with all shade-tree surgery, your mileage may vary with this procedure. May the Force be with you.

[fromagique]

When Debian's a little too helpful

I use Virtualbox for a lot of things, including staging and testing servers for website projects.  A lot of the time I have no need for a GUI; it just gets in the way and takes precious memory, since I'm only interacting with the box via ssh.

Virtualbox has a set of "guest utilities" that gives a nice set of drivers to manage things like the virtual display, network devices, etc.  This is very helpful.

I also very much like Debian GNU/Linux.  It's a solid, stable distribution that has many handy and sensible defaults and methods.

However, when using Virtualbox, it is a little too helpful.  It automatically installs a set of guest utilities, which because it includes an X11 driver, necessitates downloading a whole bunch of packages that I don't need, and taking the time to unpack, configure and set them up.  So then I have to go and delete all of them again, as I remove the automatically installed guest utilities (because they're a very obsolete version anyway) and then reinstall the latest ones, minus the X11 driver.  It's very annoying.

Ubuntu doesn't do this.  You would think it would be the other way around since Debian is usually the one that leaves more to the expert user to configure, but no.

So, here's how to get rid of the default Virtualbox Guest Utilities, if you ever need to do so:

# apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-* # apt-get autoremove

After this, follow the standard path of installing the Guest Utilities:

Mount the Guest Utilities "CD" via the menu item for this purpose.

Copy the Linux Guest Utilities files from the CD to somewhere convenient.

(Dismount the CD volume)

Make sure you've got the tools installed:

# apt-get install build-essential module-assistant # module-assistant prepare

Run the Linux G-U installer script as root: sh *.run is a convenient shortcut (assuming you have no other files ending in ".run" in whatever directory you happen to have stashed the script.)

At this point, you should be good to go. Have fun!

[fromagique]

Creme de Menthe Brownies

I might just have to try making these soon.

[fromagique]

Freesoulcaffe (Tustin, CA)

I went to Freesoulcaffe in Tustin for lunch recently; they’re vegan and their stuff is really tasty. I gotta say though, they have the strongest coffee I’ve ever had. I had a caprese panini (in the foreground) and my friend had a Greek salad (in the background).

Highly recommended. A little expensive though ($16 for panini, salad and nuclear-caffeinated beverage.) It’s just down the block from Rutabegorz (on Main just west of El Camino Real, on the other side from Ruta.)

FreeSoulCaffé: 191 E Main St, Suite 1B, Tustin, CA 92780 Weekday hours 7:00am – 9:00pm (not sure about weekends)

[fromagique]

Starting a Refinery site with PostgreSQL

Refinery apparently doesn't like starting with anything but sqlite3.  So use the following steps to get it working with postgres:

Prerequisites: Refinery requires imagemagick, so get that installed somehow (brew install imagemagick with homebrew on Mac, apt-get install imagemagick on Debian/Ubuntu, etc.)

Assuming you have the ability to install Ruby gems (via rvm or whatever) already, gem install refinerycms.

Start with a basic Refinery site: refinerycms project_name

Inside the new project_name folder, move config/database.yml out of the way (or just delete it), and rename config/database.yml.postgresql to config/database.yml.

At the end of the Gemfile, add the line: gem 'pg' to enable the PostgreSQL database adapter.  Also comment out the gem 'sqlite3' line in the group :development, :test do block near the top of the file.

Run bundle to get the 'pg' adapter gem properly installed.

Edit config/database.yml and set all the proper database names, usernames, and passwords. (These should have already been set up by you or your database administrator.)

Run rake db:migrate and rake db:seed in the top level of the project directory.

You should now be able to start up the application with rails server and have it function as in the Getting Started guide on the Refinery site.