We had ratatouille yesterday. I made this “Common Method” recipe many times (well, usually for ca. 1/3 the ingredients), and it’s just excellent, check it yourself.

So I was making the ratatouille, I put in the tomatoes, added herbes de Provence rather generously, and… got into a state of emergency! What’s that smell? Tarragon! Bleah! I saved the day somewhat by adding lots of basil, but my ratatouille was merely edible.

I like when herbes de Provence contain basil, which according to wikipedia is not a must. I wouldn’t mind a pinch of tarragon in it. But nowhere, nowhere, did I see any mention that herbes de Provence should be dominated by tarragon! What’s that, herbes d’Estragon, for chrissake? I should ask for money back, claim for moral damages, oh, gallows are so démodé nowadays…

On the other hand, that was my daughter’s first ratatouille, and suprisingly, she liked it. She’ll love the next one, which will be properly spiced.

Well, I knew about my little contest entry being linked from this page for quite some time now.

Anyway as I went there today, I realized, that, whereas I am linked at the very bottom of the page (the link is defunct, but this one at the web archive isn’t *), Marcel Duchamp is mentioned at the top.

No, no that’s not an ego-booster for me, how dare you! The page is just in chronological order ;-)

* The moon image is gone, it didn’t get archived somehow. I will have to recreate this page on my site, so that it doesn’t get lost again.

Update: The copy of my 5k contest entry is here

We had some new herrings yesterday. I wouldn’t have bought them, but the name Scheveningen* Matjes was so tempting…

According to the book I’m stuck reading, “History of Food”, the dutch way of preparing the herring dates back to 1350 when Wilhelm Beuckelszoon came up with the idea of preparing the fish on the sea and putting them in barrels of brine. By gibbing the herring already on the sea, the Dutch gained a competitive advantage, since everybody else was preparing them ashore, which required some extra time.

And thus in-place editing was born :-). So, if you believed in-place editing is a Unix thing, forget all the seds and kshs now, and go for the real thing! With chopped onion and a bun. Yummy!

*amazing -wikipedia says the name Scheveningen was used as a Shiboleth during WWII. I never thought that Shiboleth goes beyond it being a byblical excuse for a “proper” bloodbath

Two months ago I put online my license viewer script. I had some time on my hands, so I got rid of the msie:download object, and instead of parsing xml using javascript myself, I wrote an xslt that transforms xml files to javascript tables. Look at a demo here, download it here, read more here.

Update 2007-11-6: As I have upgraded to ClearCase 7 I found that the $! variable I was checking, is getting set to “Bad file descriptor” regardless of success of the operation. Must be something with the perl version they are distributing with CC 7. I changed that condition, but if you want the old version with normal check, it’s here.