January 2009 Archives

Having never tasted real Barbados falernum, I tried to perfect my recipe as best I could, based on information found on the Intertubes, at various drinking blogs. Once I'd made a couple of batches, I planned to try some out while in Barbados, comparing it to my homemade batch, and at the same time, finding out what Bajans thought of falernum in general, and what drinks they made with it.

After two batches, and two different recipes, we headed down to Barbados for vacation, and we got an interesting insight into the culture of falernum. For one, most people either weren't aware of it, or didn't like it. Frankly, I can't blame them. Falernum in Barbados was weakly spiced, barely tasted of lime, was cloyingly sweet, and was a clear liquid with only a tinge of green. There were three different brands of falernum available at the grocery store, all looking pretty much identical.

Also, when you asked for a drink with falernum in it, most bartenders had to think about it. The result was invariably a Corn 'n Oil:

• 1 oz. rum
  
• 1 oz. Velvet Falernum
  
• possibly a dash Angostura Bitters
  

Most people in Barbados didn't like Corn 'n Oil. Most people either drank straight rum with a chaser, or a Black and Coke:

• 1 oz. Mount Gay Extra Old rum
  
• 4 oz. Coke
  
• possibly some ice
  

Perhaps the best kept secret in Barbados is the bottle of Mount Gay Eclipse rum that comes in a 12 oz. soda bottle (and is sealed with a bottle cap -- there's no resealing after it's opened). This one is for serious drinkers, or people with friends. They don't export it, and it's pointless to try to get it through customs, since it's only a 12 oz. bottle, and you should really be bringing back the larger 750ml bottles.

So, with that experience fresh in mind, I figured that my recipes might be a little too flavourful to compare with authentic falernum. Indeed, an interesting article on the supposed origins of falernum describe the concoction as simply:

• 1 Part Lime Juice
  
• 2 Parts Sugar Syrup
  
• 3 Parts Rum
  
• 4 Parts Water
  
• some almonds
  

which doesn't sound particularly memorable.

In any case, I figured it's time to post the second falernum recipe. My second batch turned out much better than the first. It had a great spicy, limey flavour, with a consistent colouring, and it didn't separate like the first batch did. I think the latter was helped by the extra filtering.

Falernum #2

• zest of 5 limes
  
• 1/2 cup diced ginger with skin
  
• 40 whole cloves
  
• 1/2 tsp crushed black cardamom seeds
  
• 1 tsp coarsely ground allspice
  
• 6oz Wray & Nephew overproof rum
  

Combine ingredients for 24 hours in a 12oz wide-mouth bottle or covered bowl. Strain through cheesecloth or filter through coffee filters. Strain again, to remove fine particles. Then add:

• 1 tsp almond extract
  
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
  
• 4 oz lime juice
  

Pour in 750ml bottle and add 2:1 simple syrup to fill.

This looks like the batch I'm going to standardize on, since it turned out so well. I may make some minor alterations in the future, but this is pretty good.

I was at a bellydancing party with a bunch of R's friends over the weekend. There was this corn snake in a terrarium, and after a few drinks, someone extracted the little guy (actually, it was a female snake), and started putting it on various people (oh, those wacky bellydancing folks). At some point, the snake (Lily) ended up on my shoulders, and began poking at my neck (a creepy sensation indeed), as if it were trying to burrow into my head. Suddenly, a big flap of its skin began folding back and it began shedding.

People were congratulating me on being a safe warm place for the snake, and everyone closed in to get a good look at the moulting process, most having never seen it happen live before. Thankfully, the owners finally extricated the beast from the inside of my sweatshirt, and put it back in its house. There we all got to marvel at the beauty of nature -- insofar as it was a snake shedding its skin.

Yes, this was me in the picture. And yes, it was actually kind of cool. I was glad I could get a view of it.

After playing around with the Movable Type Motion Beta (I've got a copy of it running somewhere), I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out if the problems with updating external app streams (such as Twitter updates) were related to some kind of configuration problem or related to the beta-state of Motion. After realizing that the run-periodic-tasks script for my permanent blog does nothing for installed betas, or other instances of Movable Type (me stupid), I realized that MT still hasn't corrected some easy errors in their modules. Nor have I. The problem is fixed now, and I'm writing down two simple fixes to two hard-to-research problems.

Problem 1: Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC

So, say you're getting a constant error in your daily cron logs when trying to do background publishing in Movable Type. You know, you're trying to run the run-periodic-tasks script to take care of background tasks by setting up a cron job, either daily, or six times an hour. Assuming your crontab syntax doesn't suck ass, now you're getting messages that look like this:

Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ...

This website has some good examples on how to fix this (hint: you don't have to modify @INC, you can simply modify your run-periodic-tasks file).

Getting background publishing to work in MT 4.1 -- GoBecky.net

The problem is that '..lib';. It's simply pointing to the wrong place in the MT file structure, which is weird, given that it's their app and all, but whatev. So what you need to do is point the script to Bootstrap.pm using the absolute filepath, and all will be well.

Problem 2: Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler and Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter

After upgrading your v2.x of Movable Type to v3.x or even v4, you may see these messages in your daily cron logs, if you're running the run-periodic-tasks script to enable background publishing and housekeeping:

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 41.

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 22.

Took me a while to sort this out, but only because I enabed run-periodic-tasks for two fresh installations of v4, and there were no errors in the logs. As discussed here, the problem is that the postproc.pm isn't used in v3 or v4 of Movable Type. To fix these very noisy messages in your crontab logs, go into /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/plugins and edit the processtags.pl file, replacing:

use bradchoate::postproc;

with something like this:

if (MT->VERSION =~ m/^2.2/) { require bradchoate::postproc; }

or even just comment out the line altogether. You'll notice all your post processing still works, and you'll get no more error messages.

The lateness of this post is likely a little misleading. We finally got the server problems sorted out last week, and I took a 5 day mini-vacation in Montreal (actually 4 days, and I kind of screwed around on Tuesday). Apparently my MySQL-foo is pretty spot-on, and I was able to restore 10 jigabytes of data to to a backup server from our backup server. We're now rebuilding the failed DB server, which looks more and more as if its LSI Logic RAID card simply reset at some point, causing a massive RAID failure. Luckily, we do nightly backups.

However, the version of mysqldump had a bug in it, whereby it exported the system database, information_schema, along with our own db. This system database can't be imported, so the whole restore process kept failing. The only solution was to edit the db backup (which was, as I said, 10 jigabytes, making it impossible to open in a conventional editor), so we used a line editor to remove the first x lines of the backup. This worked, but it then took about 8-10 hours to re-import the data and only after upgrading the MySQL server and other required packages.

So, the server was offline for a total of 3 business days, and two of those days were spent trying to recover the server without destroying the data onboard. Turns out our time was better spent finding a new (if temporary) home for the data.

Montreal was fun.

I'm sitting at home, cup of coffee in hand, working on a Sunday. I've recently been having problems (a lot of them) with one of our servers. Three big problems, really...

There was a programming glitch, which set about 90% of our licenses to expire on the first of January, a bone-headed move which neither I, nor anyone else realized would cause big problems on New Year's Eve. So, with 2 hours sleep, and a wicked headache, I worked feverishly to restore licenses to most of my customers, hopefully without them even noticing. Many of them noticed.

Within 2 days of the first event, we had one of our domain names expire. This was not my fault, as our domain names are now maintained by another department -- a department, which, when questioned, said that all domains were properly re-registered. Cool. Not my fault, except that in order to resolve the aforementioned server, one needed this particular domain. So, now with about two dozen or so customers trying to relicense their systems, and no access to my server, more bad things happened. After the other department admitted that they had not, in fact, re-registered the domain, it fell back on us to get it registered using someone's personal credit card.

Now, a week later, this same server's gone dark. I'm attempting a remote reboot of it, but I'm not overly optimistic about it.

I'm tinkering with my MT-Twitter plugin. If this works, it should create a Twitter update with a tinyurl instead of a longer zuckervati.com url. In MT 4.x, the MT-Twitter plugin should automatically do this if the URL is longer than 30 characters, but:

a) I'm not using MT 4.x (although I've downloaded and am testing the open source MT 4.x)

b) I want this to shrink all the URLs to tiny format

Hopefully this will work, otherwise I'll either have no Twitter update or something very crazy-looking.

Thought I'd make myself sad by showing some pictures of this fantastic place. I really miss Barbados, and do still want to move there. Hopefully I'll come into a bunch of money soon, so I can make this dream come true.

If you look carefully at the rainbow over Bridgetown picture, you'll see a ghost image of my camera. It was taken from inside the exec lounge at the Hilton.

I've discovered two new side-effects of the MovableType 3.34 upgrade:

1. The new realtime layer/script which allows you to make the entry fields bigger or smaller by clicking on a button interferes with my ability to post from Blackberry. The text simply disappears from my screen after about six words. This is the larger of the two issues. I can still enter as much text as I want into the field, I just won't be able to see it.

2. The MTEntryAuthorDisplayName now (rightly or wrongly) uses the user's display name from their MT profile. Unfortunately, if you leave this blank in your profile, it disappears from all newly-posted or newly-rebuilt entries. It's not a big problem, since all I had to do was make sure all authors also had their Display Name filled in, and then rebuild the blog.

Now that I've isolated these, they're pretty easy to work around.