In addition to programming all the time, I’ve also been known to hack my way through the kitchen whenever I get the time.  My latest creation was tested out at a chili cookoff last month where it took 2nd place for Best New and Different Chili.  I whipped up a second batch last night for a potluck at work, and after handing out samples around the office, I got a lot of requests for the recipe.  Please, do try this at home kids.

Marc’s Bacon Honey-Mustard BBQ Chili

Ingredients:

• 1lb Bacon strips
• 2lbs Ground beef
• 1 Onion diced (I used yellow, but can be varied for taste)
• 1/2 jar Honey Mustard (5 oz?)
• 3 tbsp Honey
• 15oz can of Kidney beans
• 32oz Tomato sauce (I used Classico Tomato & Basil)
• 1 pack Caroll Shelby’s Chili Mix (includes cayenne pepper in separate packet, so you can set your own spice level)
• 10 cloves of Garlic (yeah, you read that right)
• 10 drops Liquid Smoke
• 1 lime

Tools:

• Crock pot
• Garlic press
• Wok or other large frying pan

Directions:

In a wok or frying pan, cook the bacon on medium-high heat, 4-5 strips at a time.  Get them to the point where they’re just turning brown, then remove and set aside.  Do not discard the bacon grease that accumulates in the pan, leave it there.  Chop the cooked bacon into bite-sized pieces, approx 1 inch on a side, and dump in Crock pot.  Once all the bacon is cooked, throw the ground beef in the wok and brown it in the bacon grease.  Empty the entire contents of the pan (fat, juices, meat and all) in the Crock pot.  Dice the onion and brown that in the wok, then empty into pot.

Add honey mustard, honey, kidney beans (including juice from the can), tomato sauce and liquid smoke to the pot.  The chili mix contains several packets of spices.  I used half of the cayenne pepper packet (to keep it mild) and all of the other packets, so toss those in.  Press the garlic and add to pot.  Cut the lime in half and squeeze into the mix.

You should now have filled the Crock pot with all the delicious ingredients, so mix the entire concoction together.  You can either cook it on High for 4 hours or on Low for 8 hours.  I did high the first time and low the second, and they both turned out great, so it’s really up to you.  Low lets the flavors seep in more, so I prefer it when I have the time.  Now grab a cocktail and wait till it’s done.

Once the cooking is done, stir it really well and set the Crock pot on Warm.  Grab a ladle and serve!

Did you like it?

If you enjoyed this recipe, leave a comment and let me know!  What did you like best?  What did you do differently?  If there’s interest, then I’ll post some of my other recipes as I make them.  Enjoy!

I started my college career as a Computer Science major, with some basics already under my belt and an eagerness to learn “complicated, college-level programming”.  By December of my Sophomore year, I had finished the lower-division CS courses, but was left unimpressed.  Most of them were clearly designed to be “weeder courses”, classes forced on the students for the express purpose of encouraging people to drop the major.  This is a common strategy for CS, which is easy to complain about, but definitely has its merits.  The problem is these complex concepts should be taught, not buckshot down students’ throats by inarticulate (but tenured) professors.  I had one, single college CS professor that was a good teacher.  Scratch that, a great teacher.  He taught us SPARC Assembly programming, about as low-level and dry as you can get, but he made it interesting!  You still had to have the brain power to grok it, but you actually went to class to learn, not because it was a masochistic exercise.  Sadly, his great teaching was the exception to the rule.

At the time though, this didn’t strike me as strange.  As a Freshman in college, you take the status quo for what it is.  “This must be how it’s done,” I thought.  My true disillusionment came when working on a side project of mine, with several Seniors in the CS department.  They could crank out code, yes, but it was buggy, poorly documented, and only version controlled because I wouldn’t look at it if it didn’t come from our CVS tree.  These were students finishing up their degrees!  I decided if that was the education I could expect, I’d be better off switching majors.  I could use my side projects to expand my programming knowledge, and get something different, but useful out of the official classes.

As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong.  Earlier this week, noted programmer Joel Spolsky wrote the following:

“It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

Where are students supposed to learn about version control, bug tracking, working on teams, scheduling, estimating, debugging, usability testing, and documentation? Where do they learn to write a program longer than 20 lines?

Many universities have managed to convince themselves that the more irrelevant the curriculum is to the real world, the more elite they are. It’s the liberal arts way. Leave it to the technical vocational institutes, the red-brick universities, and the lesser schools endowed with many compass points (“University of Northern Southwest Florida”) to actually produce programmers. The Ivy Leagues of the world want to teach linear algebra and theories of computation and Haskell programming, and all the striver CS departments trying to raise their standards are doing so by eliminating anything practical from the curriculum in favor of more theory.”

(excerpt from Capstone projects and time management, 10/26/09)

If you haven’t heard of Joel, he’s one of the top programmer-bloggers in the world.  If your job in any way involves programming or working with programmers, I highly suggest you start reading his stuff right now.

Clearly, my observations of the CS program years ago weren’t far off the mark.  Learning the detailed theories is incredibly useful, but almost worthless without the practical knowledge to go along with it.  Heck, even something as simple as version control would be stupidly simple to incorporate into the curriculum.  Example: “Whatever you have checked into your SVN project trunk at the time of the deadline is what you’re graded on.”  Wow!  That wasn’t hard at all!  But do the universities do this?  It’s almost 2010, and the answer is still No.

This is why the vast majority of companies want people with “3-5 years of experience”.  Having a CS degree fills a checkbox, it’s not 4 years of experience.  If a student relies solely on their university for their education, they’ll end up with a sheet of paper that says they’re Great(tm), but they won’t know the first thing about actually building a real software product as part of a team.  The company that hires the inexperienced new grad then has to pay the price of teaching them what they should have learned in school.  Only the kids that get great internships and/or work on side-projects, anything outside of school really, come out with practical knowledge.

When CS grads tell me they’re going to develop their next web app by emailing and FTPing files around, I used to want to smack them.  Now I know, I should go smack their teachers and departments.  Come on slackers, you can be better than this!

A few weeks ago, I got to attend Merb Camp on the UCSD campus.  For those of you that haven’t heard yet, Merb is a new web framework written in Ruby, which many consider to be the spiritual successor to Rails.  Essentially where DHH (creator of Rails) professes that “the Rails way” is the way to go, Merb takes a much more Linux-style approach in figuring that individual components of the framework should be swappable for others with as much ease as possible.  Equally as important, Merb is thread-safe, allowing it to scale much more easily than Rails.  I haven’t yet gotten to cook up any releasable projects with it, but I’m very excited to get going on it.

Anyway, Merb Camp had ~150 attendees at the CalIT2 building.  We were also joined by hundreds more that were watching the live webcast from all over the world and participating in the discussion via IRC.  When the Q&A sections after each talk happened, I volunteered to read out the questions that came in via IRC, so that our international guests got a chance to be a part of the fray.  Once we got to the Merb Team Panel discussion on Day 2, I was asked to moderate the panel.  The video has since been posted on the Merb Camp Video section of the site.  Here is the direct link to the panel video where you can see me in impromptu action.

All in all, it was a very fun conference, where I got to meet all kinds of developers from all over the world.  I can’t wait for the next one!

After 10 weeks, I’ve now been able to watch all of the final presentations from the different groups. Considering that my group was the only “experienced programmer” team, I really didn’t know what to expect from the others. All in all, I’ve been incredibly impressed by the various projects they’ve managed to produce. Most importantly, it’s clear that the quality of the project ideas has nothing to do with programming ability. Implementation is another thing, but even groups of self-proclaimed “newbies” with only (prior to this class) basic HTML exposure came out with some very cool projects.

Something I hadn’t expected, but makes sense in retrospect, is the correlation between prior experience and willingness to learn new things. The class represented a huge cross section of prior-experience from student to student. Overall, those who knew the least starting out were the ones most willing to embrace new ideas and technologies. The eagerness with which the “beginners” jumped into their ideas was truly inspiring.

Soapbox: Pro’s and Con’s

I spent a decent amount of time in and outside of class evangelizing Rails since it was so appropriate for a lot of the project ideas out there. This had different effects on different people. One group actually ran with it and built their entire project with it. A few people were probably bored to tears by my rambling. The majority of the class now knows me as the “Ruby on Rails guy”. I’m glad that I was able to expose more people to the framework, but I don’t think I was effective in conveying the core concept that I work by:

If you’re going to tackle a problem, use the best tools available.

Rails is a great tool for a wide variety of web apps. It is not the be-all end-all solution to life’s endless problems. I think I came across more as “Rails is the answer to everything” instead of what I was shooting for “Use new tools, not just what you already know.” A large part of this problem stems from our own group using Rails for the backend; something I was actually trying to avoid.

The aim of the class is for each person to learn new technologies and develop something with them. Our project, due to the nature of its complexity, was going to require a lot of coding. Once it became clear that we were going to need our own backend DB, I wanted to avoid using PHP. Not because it wouldn’t work just fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, especially for a project this small. The problem, as I saw it, was that 4 out of 5 people in our group had a medium to high level of experience with it. That doesn’t allow for a lot of “new” learning.

My motivation for using Rails in our group was to introduce already-skilled programmers to something new, even if it meant limiting my own exposure to “new” things. For my own learning, I made sure to take time outside of our group meetings to teach myself other pieces that I haven’t seen or used before. The most visually interesting result of that is the drag-n-drop ordering of Categories. Working out the SQL queries needed to find stores that are open at a given time definitely stretched my boundaries. Obviously not as major as learning a whole new language, but it was a great way to push myself beyond what I already knew coming in.

If You Could Go Back…

Were I to do it all over again, I would have spent more time trying to preach the core philosophy of “use the best tool” instead of keeping the focus on Rails. For example, I only realized last week that we, it appears, are the only group using any kind of version control. Giving a talk on basic SVN usage, I think, would have been valuable to the class as a whole.

I had a lot of fun working on Open Past Midnight for this class. After all, I’m a programmer. But the neatest part of this class was getting to see what other people came up with, especially when they had to work with limited experience. That constraint can be incredibly discouraging, but they pulled through beautifully.

It’s been too long since the last update, especially since we’ve overcome a lot of hurdles in building this system. I’ll talk about each in its own right.

Hours of Operation

The primary quandary we faced was in how to represent a store’s hours of operation in the database. The obvious implementation is to have separate columns for each day’s open and close times. This gives us 14 columns added to the ’store’ table, named ‘monday_open’, ‘monday_close’, ‘tuesday_open’… and so on. Since we have a different column for each day, it would make sense to have the column be of type ‘time‘ right? No!

Especially because we’re dealing with locations that are open late, we need to deal with cases like “On Monday, we’re open from 10am – 2am”. If the columns only handle time, then we’ll have a store with monday_open = 10:00 and monday_close = 2:00. That means we need to do some serious condition checking to see if its open. Better yet, how do we query for all stores that are open at a specific time? Not very efficient.

So how did we deal with this? We want the columns to be able to know not just the time of day, but also the day of the week. For the example above, we want the columns to read more like monday_open = Mon 10:00 and monday_close = Tue 2:00. This would make queries a whole lot easier, as we can resort to a simple open < right_now < close test, without having to create extra logic. But SQL databases don’t have a type to represent time + day of week. The options are time (hours, minutes, seconds only) or fullblown datetime (year, month, day, hour, etc). Since we’ve concluded that time is not enough on its own, we’re forced into using a full datetime field.

But wait! That means monday_close will look more like March 4, 2008 2:00 -0800. How are you going to deal with the comparisons when it’s now June? The condition will always fail, thinking the store closed months ago! And that’s where our solution comes in. The solution is, to some degree, in the question. Our comparisons will involve the entire datetime, but we only care about day-of-week and time. Therefore, we just need to pick arbitrary values for the rest of the datetime fields and have the code enforce their usage. We ended up using the week of Jan 1, 2007 for our project, primarily because Jan 1 is a Monday, making it very easy to translate a number to day-of-week. Throw in a few helper functions to make the date translation seamless to the user, and we’re set!

Website Hosting

As I said in my previous post about web hosting companies, DreamHost is a great cheap shared-hosting solution, but its Rails support leaves a bit to be desired. I was pleased to see that they’ve cleaned up their documentation, and getting a Rails site running requires a lot fewer hacks now. But the speed issue is still a huge one. Big enough for me to still say that for a commercial Rails app, I would not use them. For a class project, they’re perfect.

Introducing the Team to Rails

We’ve transitioned the project to Rails completely, which has made, as usual, a lot of grunt work disappear into thin air. It’s working well for what we need from it, albeit a very simple site. The real issue with Rails is that, being so new, still very few people know about it, much less have used it before. Whenever introducing a group of people to a new technology, you’re going to have mixed results, and our team is no exception. Some have taken to it excitedly, some with reserve, and some are just not very interested. All this is fine, especially since there’s plenty of work to do outside of Rails. It’s interesting to have such a cross-section of reactions to it all working together.

Interfacing with Google

Since our project employs Google Maps to display store locations, we need to interface with their API. More importantly, we need to load latitude and longitude coordinates of the stores into our own database. Since we all quickly agreed that we didn’t want to do that by hand, we worked out an alternate solution.

The interface to add a new store to the database employs Google Local Search to find stores that are already in Google’s system, and therefore already have all of the information we need (except hours). From the search results we get back from Google, we can click a button that then pushes the data up to our own server. Then we go in and set the hours of operation and assign a category. It took a lot of tweaking to get it working right, but after a few hours of Rodolphe working on the client-side Javascript and me working on the server-side receiving end, we got it ironed out.

For those of you that have not heard, my grandfather is very ill and in the hospital.  I’ve been back and forth to LA several times this last week to try and help out the family as much as I can.  Even better, I picked up a really nasty cold somewhere along the way.  All in all, I’ve missed a bunch of classes, a few assignments, and a midterm.  I’m playing catchup, first and foremost on Open Past Midnight.  It’s one thing to get behind on my own work, but to set back my whole group is not acceptable.

That said, we’re transitioning the Open Past Midnight project to Rails since we’ll need to be dealing with our own database.  I’ve already got Evan set up with the dev environment.  Then again, he’s running Leopard, so it took all of 5 minutes.  The other teammates all use Winblows, so it might take some extra time.  Either way, I am eternally grateful that Rails 2.0 now uses SQLite as the default DB.  No longer will I need to take time to explain MySQL privilege tables to my classmates when all they want to do is some basic development.

More to come in later posts, but we’re still going to try and deploy this project on Dreamhost.  Since it’s hardly a commercial endeavor, I’m not as worried about DH’s poor Rails support.  It will be interesting though to see how far they have (or have not) come.

Due to some slight difficulties in acquiring the needed domain name, our COGS group has changed its name to Open Past Midnight.  We’ve been working on some paper-prototypes for the site layout.  Vivien found a very cool possible technology for generating heatmaps called gheat.  Given the implementation, I don’t think it will be directly usable for our project, but it does lend some great ideas.  There might be parts that we can yank out and use.  We’ll see.

I’ve also been working a lot on the server-side systems we need to make this project run smoothly, both in development and production. Just as with Rails, Capistrano is my friend.  I’ve almost got it working for this project, even though we’re likely to do any back-end code in PHP.

Also, it turns out that Google will pay you to submit verified listings of local businesses.  They call it their Business Referral Representative program.  If we’re lucky, we can get into the program and get paid for doing all the data gathering we would anyway.  More to come.

So our COGS group has decided to do a Google-maps based site that allows the visitor to find nearby restaurants (maybe stores, etc) that are open at different times of the day.  We’ve set up some framework stuff (SVN, domain, etc) and need to start getting things together.

By Thursday (1/31/08) we will have mapped out the data for the following locations.  This means we need to go to those areas and grab all of the data about the various stores (name, phone, address, hours) and submit it to Google’s database (or verify that they already have it.)

• Chris: Costa Verde shopping center
• Evan: Ralph’s shopping center
• Rodolphe: Whole Foods shopping center
• Marc: Einstein’s Bros shopping center
• Vivien: Vons shopping center

Our in-progress feature list:

Must-Have Feature Set

• Default time should approximate the user’s local time
• An interface to allow the user to change the time displayed
• Search for locations based on name and/or time

Would-Be-Nice Feature Set

• Mobile-access compatible (iPhone, etc)
• Heatmap of neighborhoods to display density of locations open at the given time

The first assignment for COGS 121 was due last week.  I worked up a simple site on Practical Chinese for Nerds.  The content leaves a lot to be desired, but that was essentially filler for me.  I was focusing on two things while I built this site.

1. Building a completely image-free site by hand.  Something I haven’t done in a while, considering all of my recent work with point-of-sale and e-commerce.  The verdict: I’m in love with Rails, not HTML.
2. I wanted to really get a feel for the differences using SciTE on my laptop versus Textmate on my desktop for the same, small project.  The verdict: my next laptop will be a Mac, purely because I love using Textmate.  If you’ve got a mac, but haven’t tried it out, I sincerely urge you to.

The thing I’m really looking forward to playing around with is OpenLaszlo.  It looks very powerful, and I’ve got a few ideas for projects where I could implement it.  The most interesting would be to use Laszlo’s DHTML output to create an interface to a Rails app.  Muhahaha.

Update:

Two very kind users have repackaged the driver for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. The old package is still available below, but the new one is here: starcupsdrv_2.3.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

Old driver
Finally! After very popular demand, I’ve managed to post starcupsdrv_2.3.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb just for you! Since WordPress is not nice about uploading .deb files, I’ve put it on a separate sub domain with a direct download link. No special scripts or sign-in required.

If you download and use the deb file, I’d appreciate if you could leave a quick comment on this post to say hi. If the deb is really that popular, I’ll work on expanding support for it.

Once you’ve downloaded the deb, you can install it with the following command:

dpkg -i starcupsdrv_2.3.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb