Homemade Pizza Recipe
I often make pizza from scratch, it is a great way of using up various bits and pieces I have lying around. Over the years I have tried various recipes for the base, but this is my favorite (and also the easiest). I am particularly proud of this effort because a lot of the ingredients came from my garden.
Ingredients:
Base1 Cup Flour
Goodly splash of olive oil
Cold Water
teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder Toppings
Whatever you can find in the fridge/garden, in this case:
Tomato paste
3 baby leeks chopped
2 cloves of Garlic, finely chopped
2 small Tomatoes, very thinly sliced
Red Pepper, sliced
Mozzarella Cheese, sliced
Basil Leaves
Salt/Pepper
Olive Oil
Method:
Put flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl and pour in the oil (about 2-3 table spoons, maybe more). Pour in a little water and mix. If the flour is still dry, tip just a little more water in but go slowly – it is easy to make it too wet. You want a soft dough, not a cake mix. If you go too far put in some more flour.
Take the dough out and kneed it for a few minutes to complete the mixing, then wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and let it sit for 30 minutes on the bench.
Put your heaviest (the heavier the better) cooking tray in the oven and heat to 220°C.
Take out the dough and kneed again then divide into 2 or 3 hunks. Roll out each hunk into a roughly circular shape a few millimeters thick. Put the bases on the hot cooking tray and add toppings.
Smear the top of the base with tomato paste, like you were spreading jam on toast. Next put the chopped garlic and leeks (normally I would use onion, but I just happened to have leeks). Slice the tomatoes as thinly as you can and add them along with the basil leaves. Finally slice the mozzarella and put that on top as well – it doesn’t have to cover everything.
Don’t try to heap too much on the pizza – it needs to cook quickly to get crispy.
Salt and pepper to taste and drizzle on a decent amount of olive oil. Put back in the hot oven and cook until it looks like a pizza. Serve with wine, salad, another pizza.
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Book Review : Juggler of Worlds
Juggler of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner
ISBN: 0765318261
Larry Niven’s Known Space stories were like crack cocaine to me growing up. A huge, sprawling history of the future filled to the brim with exotic aliens, wacky spaceships and gadgets, and vast otherworldly landscapes was the perfect escapist fantasy.
But most of the Known Space stories were written 40 years ago, and collaborations between aging science fiction authors have a (shall we say) uneven track record. It was with a sense of dread that I picked up Juggler of Worlds, but how bad could it be?
Juggler of Worlds is a novel that retells many of the original Known Space tales (which were already linked) from the point of view of one of the minor recurring characters. In many ways this is a bit of a cop out – no new parts of Known Space are opened up, almost the entire plot is recycled. Rather than huge and sprawling, Known Space seems to have contracted Star Wars disease; there seem to be only 6 people in the entire universe doing anything interesting.
Having said that, as exercises in picking over the bones go this isn’t actually terrible. It has been so long since I read the stories that revisiting them from a different angle is actually a pleasure and the writing has not suffered from being a collaboration, if anything it is better than ever with more rounded characterisations. It still isn’t a great book, and anyone unfamiliar with the original source material is probably going to be lost, but it could have been worse.
Recommended if (and only if) you like this sort of thing.
Related posts:
- Book Review : The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation
- Book Review: The Algebraist
- Book Review : Cryptic and Oceanic – Two SciFi Short Story Collections
Experimental Long Exposure
I have been experimenting with shooting in low light conditions using 30 second exposures. It is a pretty mixed bag, but I like this shot of the cabbage tree in the back yard with the moonlit clouds in the background.
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Book Review : The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation
The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation by Alwyn W. Turner
Terry Nation casts a long shadow over British television, although only in very particular corners. His main claim to fame (and riches due to canny licensing deals) is that he wrote the first Dalek story for the then new Doctor Who but his career stretches over many decades. Starting out as a comedy writer, he eventually made the switch to drama in the early 60s and never looked back. The list of shows he wrote for reads like a perfect rainy Saturday afternoon’s viewing: The Saint, The Avengers, Doctor Who, and Blake’s Seven, plus all sorts of other thick slices of cheese on toast. One of the last things he did was Macgyver, back when it was good.
This biography is a bit of a strange beast. It is incredibly detailed in some respects, going over each show (and sometimes individual episodes) with the kind of meticulous scrupulousness that only the British can muster.
On the other hand, Nation was a man who entered his chosen profession early, worked hard, made some contacts, and found success pretty early on. An admirable way to live your life perhaps, but not much to hang a great biography on. His childhood is covered in a few pages, somewhere along the way he acquires a wife. His first born child gets a brief mention, but only because Nation wrote a popular children’s book for her. His other child only appears for a sentence or two. There are no serious setbacks along the way, no lost loves, no professional rivals. Just page after page of Nation churning out stories.
And churn them out he could. Almost all his colleagues were in awe at the speed at which he wrote (his secret was never doing second drafts) and the consistent quality of his scripts (his secret was to have a lot of stock scenes that he could “recycle”).
In fact, this biography is a testament the Nation’s approach; like his serials each episode in the book is entertaining but the whole thing is a bit same-y if you consume the whole thing in one go. You don’t even get a chase through dimly lit corridors or a bomb to liven up the plot.
Only recommended if you really like this sort of thing.
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Tiger Slug – Limax Maximus
I disturbed this fellow while gardening today. He took off at speed across my lawn but since he is a slug I had plenty of time to get my camera a snap a few shots.
This is Limax Maximus – the Tiger Slug (or Leopard Slug depending on whether you like the striped tail or the spotted mantle) and they are impressively large. My garden is full of them. Most slugs I kill on sight, but I leave the Tiger Slugs alone because they supposedly kill other garden pests. Besides, they give me a slow moving target to practice macro photography.
Arrrggh, it’s coming right for me!
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Book Review : Two Non-Fiction Books on Destruction
A relatively recent book on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, including information straight from the man himself. I got this hoping for an exciting and twisty crime story about a master criminal, but it turns out the Madoff’s scheme was stupidly simple – he lied about some stuff and keep lying. He wasn’t even very clever about it, but somehow managed to keep the house of cards upright for decades.
Henriques’ book covers a huge amount of ground – going back to Madoff’s childhood upbringing to his peak as a pillar of the New York community. A huge amount of research has been distilled into a very readable story – just about everyone who ever met Madoff seems to have been interviewed, and enough time has passed that the full effects of the scam have been revealed. I just wish that the crime was more ingenious.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing
Death From the Skies! By Philip Plait
Plait runs the popular Bad Astronomy blog which is far more interesting than it has any right to be, this book is even better. There are many books that seek to explain the wonders of the universe in an entertaining way, but Death From the Skies! is the only one that takes the “How could this kill us all” approach. From supernovas to comets, Plait runs down the numbers and details exactly what would happen to the Earth should such misfortune strike (spoiler: it doesn’t look good).
Plait clearly explains the concepts behind familiar astronomical terms and breaks down the magnitude (usually way to large large) and probability (usually not small enough) of each occurrence. It’s all very entertaining, but not something you want to read straight before going to sleep.
Highly recommended
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Book Review : Cryptic and Oceanic – Two SciFi Short Story Collections
A mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing.
Not every story is a corker, but most are good and some are downright excellent. My one complaint is that they tend to be rather constant in tone and style, I finished the book yesterday and the stories are all starting to blend together in my head.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing
Oceanic By Greg Egan
Another collection of Scifi short stories, this time by Greg Egan. Egan is a programmer, and his stories are hard-as-diamond tales of artificial life, strange physical frontiers behind every atom, and clear-eyed researchers heroically hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms. Great stuff, and this collection really shows his ferocious imagination and range as a writer. The title story (full text here) in particular is a very well done piece that packs a lot of depth into a few pages.
Highly recommended
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Crème brûlée
I got a blowtorch for Christmas, and what better way to break it in than to make Crème brûlée?
(I think it is pretty obvious this is my first attempt, but it tasted just fine)
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Reading Old Books
I have been going through a phase of reading old, out-of-copyright books – partly because I find it fascinating to see how various literary forms evolved over time, partly because if you go back far enough the books read like science-fiction – alien concepts and strange customs abound, partly because it allows me to affect an air of being well read, but mostly because you can download them for free from Project Gutenberg and I am a cheap bastard.
A Voyage to the South Sea by William Bligh
A while ago I read The Bounty by Caroline Alexander, a modern account of Captain Bligh’s famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons expedition to Tahiti aboard The Bounty. It focused mainly on what happened after everyone got home again. This book is the tale told by the man himself, compiled by Bligh from his logs kept during the voyage and it is a fascinating read. Even if there wasn’t a (spoiler alert!) mutiny, it would make for a cracking story as Bligh has an eye for both nautical detail during the voyage and a keen interest in how Tahitian society (very different to the English system) worked after The Bounty arrives.
And breadfruit, the dude was obsessed with breadfruit.
Once the mutiny occurs, the story turns into an epic struggle of survival as Bligh and his few remaining crew find that people treat you differently when you turn up on their island without a fully armed three-masted collier anchored just outside their reef.
It is a real pleasure to drop into the world of a competent person doing an interesting job. Since it is taken directly from his meticulous logs there is a charming matter-of-fact style as things unfold without foreshadowing or subplots. The one problem for a modern reader is that it is almost impossible to avoid hearing the text being read in James T. Kirk’s Captain’s Log voice; the style is exactly the same.
A Journey of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
This early novel in the form of a diary purports to be a day-to-day account of the life of a young London man during the 1665 outbreak of the black plague as people were dying in their thousands. Defoe did actually live through the plague but he was only 5 at the time, so the story is fictionalized but obviously carefully researched. Defoe uses the experiences of the narrator to highlight how various aspects of society (the rich, the poor, etc) reacted to the plague, maintaining a detached tone while horrible things are occurring on all sides. The thing that struck me the most was the general atmosphere of resigned bewilderment that permeates the book – nobody in pre-germ theory London really understands what is going on but society continues on as best as it can while people are dropping dead and whole streets worth of houses are empty or contain only corpses.
After reading lots of disaster fiction (The Day of the Triffids, Dawn of the Dead, etc) I was heartened to see that people do not automatically devolve into angry, paranoid mobs during a real life events that kill a large percentage of the population, although plenty of isolated complete bastardry apparently will occur.
The Battle of the Safes, or, British Invincibles Versus Yankee Ironclads by George Augustus SalaAnd now for something completely different. During the Paris Exhibition of 1867 a public relations spat broke out between a British firm of safe makers and an upstart American firm as to who made the safest safes. This was apparently a big deal in an age when people kept large amounts of cash on hand.
The American firm challenged the British to a public demonstration where each firm nominated a crack team to break into the other’s safe in the shortest possible time. Everything should be simple but the Americans (boo-hiss) keep changing the rules in their favour. Eventually the contest comes to an unsatisfying conclusion but everyone can see that the British (yeay!) have scored a great moral victory.
This is a short, enjoyable, one-sided account of an inconsequential event, filled with all kinds of intrigue and skullduggery. Nothing really gets resolved but it doesn’t matter unless you are really into safes (and the illustrations are great.)
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Capturing Video at the Speed of Light
When I was a child I used to amuse myself by imagining how things would look if light moved at a few meters per second. I thought it would be cool if you could walk into a dark room, turn on the light and watch as the light spread throughout the scene. Wielding a flashlight would be interesting – you could easily make curved beams.
Now these guys have built a camera fast enough to show the same effect:
Of course, they do cheat a bit by only taking a 1 dimensional slice at a time and relying on the fact that they can repeatably fire identical pulses of light to make their images. Still this is exactly what I imagined it would be like.
Now someone needs to build the high wattage laser targeting system capable of taking out houseflies without blinding humans that I invented when I was 9.
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Foo Fighters
I unexpectedly went to the Foo Fighters concert yesterday.
Click to enlargeUnexpectedly because I wasn’t planning on going, but a friend had to pull out and I bought her ticket. That was also unexpected, because I don’t really dig the Foo Fighters.
I mean, I think they are OK. Acceptable. Competent. But lacking in that spark that I look for in a rock band.
The weather was not good, it had rained all afternoon and Western Springs Raceway was already soggy when we turned up so we staked a spot on the terraces and watched the support acts. We missed local heroes, Cairo Knife Fight, a band I know nothing about except that bFM name checks them constantly but never actually plays their tracks.
The second support act was Fucked Up – a canadian punk/death metal outfit who should have been terrible but come over very well. The lead singer left the stage and spent most of the set wandering around the crowd hugging people and occasionally drinking their beer between verses.
Next came the highlight of the evening for me – Tenacious D. For a joke band they did a tight set and Jack Black is genuinely funny on stage.
Finally, the Foo Fighters. Although they are not my favorite band, you have to respect a group that are prepared to play for almost 3 hours, even if 20 minutes of that was Dave Grohl nattering to the crowd. They played all their hits (after 17 years they have had quite a few) and seemed pleased to be here. The crowd loved it and even the rain let off to let them play. I can understand why Grohl is so popular, he comes across as a sincere and decent person. In my book that is a strike against him as a rocker, but I seem to be outnumbered.
Despite the rain I had a great time at the Foo Fighters. Not enough to buy their music, but I certainly got my money’s worth.
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Another Panorama
Click for the big view
Here is another panorama made from shots from my cell phone, this time from outside of the brand new Viaduct Event Center. It is surprising to me that Hugin managed to stitch together the constantly moving waves in a fairly convincing manner.
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Jumping Frogs – Using Python to Solve Puzzles
A few months ago I came across the following puzzle in a video game I was playing:
Three frogs are happily hopping along a narrow board together when they meet another group of three frogs traveling in the opposite direction. These frogs can only move in the direction they are facing, and only if there is a space directly in front of them. Additionally, a frog can jump over the frog in front but only if there is clear space on the other side to land in.
How can the frogs (moving one at a time) pass each other and continue on their way?
Of course, this is a hoary old puzzle that most people come across and solve as children. It should be only a couple of minutes work with a pen and paper to confirm that it is possible to exchange both sets of frogs but I wouldn’t be much of a programmer if I used a piece of paper where hundreds of dollars of computer equipment would do just as well.
To solve a puzzle like this programatically requires three things: a representation of the current state of the problem, a way of generating every possibly legal move from a given position, and a way of figuring out when is a good time to stop.
Firstly, the representation of the board is a simple python list:
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start = [1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1]
Frogs traveling right or left are represented by “1″ and “-1″ respectively. Empty spaces that frog can move into are represented by “0″. The advantage of this representation is that you can calculate the new position of a frog by:
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newPos = pos + (representation * distance)
where pos is the current index in the array, distance is the size of the hop (either 1 or 2) and representation is either 1 or -1.
Next, we need a way of generating legal moves for a given position:
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def legalMoves(board): moves = [] for pos, piece in enumerate( board ): jumpmove = pos + (piece * 2) move = pos + (piece) if ( piece == 0 ): continue if (not (( jumpmove < 0 ) or ( jumpmove >= len(board)))): if (board[jumpmove] == 0): t = list(board) t[pos] = 0 t[jumpmove] = piece moves.append(t) if (not ((move < 0) or ( move >= len(board)))): if ( board[move] == 0): t = list(board) t[pos] = 0 t[move] = piece moves.append(t) return moves
Now we need a way of keeping track of all board positions we have seen, so once we find the target we can print the states that led to the solution:
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def evalAll( current, target ): next = [] for a in current: n = legalMoves(a[-1]) for q in n: t = list(a) t.append(q) if ( q == target ): return t next.append(t) return next
This code keeps a list of lists, each sublist being it’s own list of the sequence of moves investigated so far. For each sequence of moves, the next legal moves are discovered and new sequences are added to be investigated the next time this function is called. Technically this is called a breadth-first search because at all of the current legal moves are investigated before moving on the next stage. This is a very simplistic way of doing the job, but in this case the puzzle is small enough that it works well enough.
Finally, a simple wrapper that we can use to set things up and return the final result.
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def solve(start): temp=[[start]] end = list(start) end.reverse() while(temp[-1] != end): temp = evalAll(temp, end) return temp
So now we can do this:
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print solve([1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1]) [[1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1], [1, 1, 0, 1, -1, -1, -1], [1, 1, -1, 1, 0, -1, -1], [1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 0, -1], [1, 1, -1, 0, -1, 1, -1], [1, 0, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1], [0, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1], [-1, 1, 0, 1, -1, 1, -1], [-1, 1, -1, 1, 0, 1, -1], [-1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, 0], [-1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 0, 1], [-1, 1, -1, 0, -1, 1, 1], [-1, 0, -1, 1, -1, 1, 1], [-1, -1, 0, 1, -1, 1, 1], [-1, -1, -1, 1, 0, 1, 1], [-1, -1, -1, 0, 1, 1, 1]]
Success!
You might say this is a waste of time since you figured out the problem in your head. Good for you, but try this on for size:
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[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1]
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Panoramic View From The Office
Recently I have been playing around with making panoramas with Hugin. Here is one I stitched together from a series of shots from the balcony outside one of the offices at work (not mine, unfortunately) using my cell phone camera.
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Stuff from my Old Hard Drive
I don’t usually keep a lot of files around. When I get a new computer I don’t tend to copy all my documents across – anything I haven’t looked at for a couple of months is probably not worth the fraction of a millimetre it takes up on the platter. On the other hand, some things I can never bring myself to delete. Here is something I rediscovered the other day:
This is one of the first MODs I wrote back on the Amiga. I never had a sampler or a very large collection of instruments, but I loved mucking around with MED trying to get a pleasant sound out of the 4 channel 8-bit sound. It is often said that there is a lot of crossover between programming and music, and the soundtracker clones of the 90s made that explicit which is possibly why I enjoyed it so much. Now days I can fire up GarageBand any time I want with any number of sampled instruments. I could say that I regret not having the time to produce music as an adult but the truth is that the inspiration isn’t there any more – my interests have moved in other directions.
Although none of my MODs ever sounded anything like as good as the music from the games and demos of the time, I am still pretty pleased with this one. It must date from form 6 (I was 16) which makes it vintage 1991. Listen to the sound of 20 years ago…
You browser does not support the <audio> tag, but you can still download the music from the links below.
Jungle Drums MP3
Jungle Drums OGG
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