Is Google Losing A Step?
(Internet • Web Stuff)
I try to follow certain geek rules, and No. 4 is that if a particular piece of software is performing to your satisfaction, do not “upgrade” it. “Upgrades” as often as not fail to improve upon the older program version they just replaced. And sometimes they add “features” such as spyware or other annoyances. But in a Homer moment, I fell for the promise of improved service, and upgraded a favorite web stats analyzer.
Doh!
The upgrade corrupted this web site’s database. In so doing, it not only failed to provide enhanced web stat evaluation, it invisibled all the web stats that had been meticulously gathered over the past couple of years.
I knew I could pretty much fix things by importing a backup of my database. However, since this site is mostly a collection of my ramblings, and not what I consider data-critical, I only have my auto backup scheduled for once a week. That was Sunday. I’d written a couple of blog posts since then, but figured losing them was better than losing a couple of years’ worth of web stats. So I imported the backup database.
And then I remembered that Google stores copies of the pages its spider finds as it searches through the web, in the form of Google cache. (If you do a Google search, many of the results include a link marked “cached.” If you click on that link, it usually provides a version of the page from a slightly earlier point in time. Check it out.)
Only today, I learned that Google’s cache has been asleep at the wheel. After conducting a series of advanced searches using Google’s date feature, and employing the cache, I learned that the last time Google had cached my site was Aug. 26 – four days before the two recent posts I had chosen to sacrifice but now was trying to revive.
I tried Yahoo, and Bing, and Ask, and several lesser-known search engines that include caching. Strangely enough, each of them had last cached this web site on Aug. 26. What are the odds of that? Do you think they’re all sharing Google’s cache somehow?
Turns out Baidu got cache. Only Baidu displays it as four Chinese characters I can’t reproduce using our greco-roman-ish alphabet.
Turns out Baidu last cached this web site on Aug. 31. That allowed me to cut and paste my two missing blog posts and, if I hadn’t just tattled on myself, no one would’ve known the difference.
Two morals to this story: Whenever you’re tempted to upgrade to the latest slick version of your favorite software, remember Geek Rule No. 4. And when you’re stuck in the middle of deep web research, remember that Google not only isn’t the only game on Earth, it isn’t even the biggest or necessarily the best.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 01, 2010, 10 05 AM
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Dead Simple Pepper Sauce
(Food • Garden)
When it comes to making hot sauce, you can get as elaborate as you like. My own efforts pale, for example, next to those of a friend who grows his own tabasco peppers as a front-yard hedge, and ages the results of his exacting recipes in miniature oak casks.
On the other hand, if you have several plants squirting out serrano, jalapeno and mirasol chilies like a bad scene from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, you might want to find a couple of quicker, easier methods of preserving all that culinary heat before it slips from the vine.
Here are a couple:
→ Flash-freezing. Wash and rinse as many hot peppers as you think you might like to use to spice up your cooking over the winter and spring, slice them in two, scrape out the seeds and chop them coarsely. Spread the pieces on a cookie sheet so they aren’t touching, and lay them in your freezer for two or three hours until they have “set” and look frosty, not moist. Then take them out and bag them up into individual serving-sized bags, and put the small bags inside a big freezer bag (and then, yup, store them in the freezer). Because you flashed ‘em separately, they won’t glob together and are thus more easily applied.
→ Hot Pepper Vinegar. You might like to try a pepper blend for this recipe; I like to make separate batches using all one kind of chilie. What can you do with the finished product? It’s almost easier to list what cannot be enhanced with hot pepper vinegar. Don’t sprinkle it on Cheerios, for instance. But do sprinkle it on almost anything else. Cooked vegetables, meat, eggs. You probably shouldn’t drink it straight out of the bottle.
Here’s how to make it:
First, I wash the peppers I’ve lined up for this task – only perfect, firm fruit, with all traces of the stems and stem caps removed – and slit each one with a sharp knife. Stuff them one by one into small, very clean jars.
Then I make a blend of vinegars in a stainless steel pan, using mostly white vinegar with cider or red wine or even a little balsamic vinegar blended in at maybe a 4-1 ratio, with white vinegar being the 4. I tend to make about a quart’s worth, which is more than I need, but I seldom seem to learn that lesson.
I begin boiling the vinegar mixture and add about four tablespoons of brown sugar, four tablespoons of kosher salt, a generous handful of black peppercorns and whatever other seasonings feel right that day. Then it’s time to stir vigorously to mix.
After the mixture has boiled for three or four minutes, turn off the heat and let it cool down just a little. Then, use a funnel and pour the hot vinegar carefully into the pepper jars. Fill it up near the top, because it will settle and absorb into the fruits after a few hours.
Cap the jars and let them sit on a kitchen shelf for at least two weeks before using. Once open, you can refrigerate. They’ll last for months.
Simple, huh?
→ B.Dunn, Aug 31, 2010, 06 14 AM
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Don't Paint That Fence, Hide It Inside A Vine
(Plants for the South • )
Apparently we live somewhere near Vine Heaven. After we moved in several years ago, we bought some vines to cover a fence and some latticework, basing our purchases on the size estimates at the nursery. They all grew much larger.
Millettia reticulata, for instance. This is a great vine for the Deep South, with dark reddish-purple flowers that bloom from late spring through September, and are so fragrant that the odor is best experienced at a distance, because up close, the aroma is intense. Sold under the names Tropical Wisteria or Evergreen Wisteria, this vine isn’t a wisteria at all, but it does come from China like true wisteria, and resembles them somewhat, too.
Many nurseries market reticulata as a 10- to 15-foot better-behaved wisteria that doesn’t take over the landscape. Maybe not on quite the same scale. However, five years ago I transplanted one from a 3-gallon pot, with a few scrawny stems no more than 4 feet high. I planted it at the base of a fence post. Today the vine has taken over 20 feet of the fence and is duking it out for the rest with a trumpet vine. In the other direction, it swallowed about 80% of a 10-foot althea bush which it kind of used to get a boost up to a pecan. It’s now more than 25 feet up into the pecan and coming down the other side, over our driveway.
When strong winds come out of the east, like they did they other day during some serious storms, they push the bulk of the vine kind of like a sail, sliding the vertical portion of it over the driveway. I can tug it back into the yard by its enormous main stems, but in an effort to tame it down, I strung a rope from the end fencepost around the bulk of the vine, and tied it to another fence post.
The result looks somewhat like a giant curtain that’s been tied back. Only not so tidy.
I think that if I hadn’t encouraged the vine to attack the pecan tree, it probably would’ve behaved itself better and remained a fence dweller. I do have to cut it back every couple of months, to keep its tendrils from entwining some potted plumeria I’ve set along the fence.If you plant Millettia reticulata in Zone 9, be sure to give it some room
But to me it’s not much trouble, and worth that anyway because of the frequent and fragrant flowers, and the tropical-looking leaves.
It’s been an evergreen here with the exception of the latter portion of last winter, when we had several days of 20 degrees or less – down to 18. Aside from dropping most of its leaves, the cold did almost no damage to the vine. Plant references indicate it can handle cold down to about 14 degrees, although people grow it in Zone 8, apparently, where it can get colder than that.
You can’t see them in these photos, but the flowers fall off and are replaced by pods that look a lot like lima beans. These can be dried, and the seeds planted, but it reportedly takes 10 years to obtain a plantable vine that way. Cuttings are said to be a lot faster, and I plan on experimenting soon in that regard.
For you herbal medicine fans, Millettia reticulata is believed by Chinese researchers to contain compounds that increase red blood cell production, and it has been used to treat menstrual problems, stomach aches and anemia. I haven’t tried any of that at home, kids, and wouldn’t advice you too, either.
But this vine supposedly also contains rotenone, a common ingredient in organic bug-killing compounds. That I might try.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 30, 2010, 11 49 AM
Diamonds Are Forever But Afghanistan Is A Close Second
(War • )
They bust this real high-ranking Afghan official after catching him demanding a car bribe for his son, see, but then it turns out there’s a curtain behind the man…
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
No worries though, because we know that they know that we know that they know.
Now if we could only figure out how to lop a few trillion off of the deficit…
On the other hand (and I do believe I have one left someplace), just as the moon shot brought us Tang and Space Blankets, so has failed Afghan War research brought us Invisible Heat Rays we can fire at prisoners if things get out of control or too dull.
Sometimes you wish you were making stuff up, but you aren’t.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 26, 2010, 04 37 AM
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