So, I got a new desk - a really nice large desk with plenty of filing space, and I have been cleaning things up and throwing things out like crazy. But the last thing I needed was a storage cabinet, for all the odds and ends that couldn’t really go anywhere else. Blank media, blank paper, tools, planispheres, that kind of stuff. (Actually, I already have a good place for my planisphere…)

I finally found the storage cabinet I wanted on Office Depot’s website, so I ordered it earlier this week. I got an email confirmation with details on how to check my order status, so I went ahead and checked out the order page.

Lo and behold, the very first order status, before anything has actually happened, is called “Buyer’s Remorse.” What’s up with that??

(The only thing that made me feel any remorse was that the estimate said it was going to take a month to get my storage cabinet.)

• The National Aquatics Center

The pattern on the wall is called a Voronoi diagram, and is formed by taking a bunch of random points, and dividing the space into regions that are closest to a particular point. The boundaries are lines that are equidistant between two points.

The ceiling of the aquatics center uses the same technique:

• Interior of the National Aquatics Center

Who knew?!

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it since I was in the swimming pool when it happened.

So now I am trying to figure out if it is a massive nationwide conspiracy.

Anyway, the article goes through and describes how to create “the perfect hamburger,” although it focuses primarily on the preparation of the meat patty. This is only one of many factors in preparing a perfect burger. But, I am also a bit obsessed about perfect hamburgers, and I had never tried grinding my own meat for making burgers, so I decided that it was worth giving this whole thing a try.

The article recommends using a blend of different cuts of beef, and this is similar to what I have heard other people recommend. Chuck is a common component of self-ground hamburgers; it turns out to be a nice, soft, frequently fatty cut that really adds a nice component to the burger.

Steingarten recommends using brisket, short rib, and/or hanger steak. Alton Brown also did an episode of Good Eats (”Daily Grind” episode) in which he ground his own hamburger meat, and he used a 1:1 mix of chuck and sirloin. Now, I am not convinced that I would necessarily notice the difference between chuck/brisket and chuck/sirloin (being a plebeian), but I like to smoke briskets and I knew I wouldn’t use a whole one for this little experiment, so I went with the chuck/brisket combination.

Steingarten’s article is notably short on details, which can be pretty frustrating if you are trying to figure out how to create “the perfect burger.” So, having seen the Good Eats episode about grinding your own burger meat, I tried to follow that process. You cut up your meat into 1″ cubes, then pulse them in a food processor until they are coarsely ground. At least, this is the texture that Alton Brown likes, and this is the only major complaint I had about the entire exercise. I am used to hamburgers having a certain texture, and coarsely ground chunks of beef ain’t it. The burgers reminded me much more of pre-chewed steak than actual ground hamburger meat, which was just foreign enough to turn my stomach quite a bit. It looks like a hamburger, but then you take a bite and you have little chunks of steak in your mouth. “Is this pre-chewed steak?!” you subconsciously ask yourself. Blech.

Next time, that meat is going to be finely ground.

As far as everything else was concerned, it was just great. I got some great, soft, whole wheat hamburger buns, iceberg lettuce (for traditional hamburgers, this is the only choice), good American cheese, thinly sliced onions, pickles and tomatoes, and mayo. That’s really all you need for a great burger.

Of course, you need to assemble it in the proper order too, and for me that order is:

• bottom bun with mayo
• onions, thinly sliced (1/8″ thick is good)
• pickles, also thinly sliced
• burger patty, cheese side down
• ketchup, if any, goes on the top of the patty
• tomatoes, if any, go on the ketchup (no more than 3/16″ thick)
  • NOTE: If you have any love of decency and your fellow man, lightly salt and pepper your tomatoes!!!
• iceberg lettuce on top of the tomatoes
• top bun with mayo

This order has a couple of benefits. First, it’s pretty stable. Each layer has enough traction with the adjacent layers that stuff doesn’t go shooting out of the burger when you take a bite. Second, the most savory stuff is on the bottom of the burger, nearer your tongue, so you get to enjoy the fullness of that flavor. Third, the ingredients under the patty can handle heat the best, so if you want to serve your burgers partially constructed and let your guests do the final assembly, the pickles and onions only get better under the heat, while you wait. Wilted lettuce and soft tomatoes just aren’t that great.

Of course, like I said, this is a pretty traditional hamburger, nothing out of the ordinary (well, besides being totally awesome), but there are a lot of other options when you are making a hamburger. Maybe someday I will go through a few other varieties (or write a “top five hamburgers in the whole wide world” post), but here is one other that I think is just awesome. It is based on a burger I used to get at a local lunch spot back when I used to work in Marina Del Rey. And it is really not traditional.

This burger is really all about mayo and Ciabatta rolls. Well, and capers and garlic. (You can see why I like it.) You start off making this great mayonnaise, by getting a whole bunch of garlic and capers, finely chopping them up, then mixing them into some mayonnaise along with some fresh-ground pepper. I never measure this stuff, so you can figure that out on your own. I usually use approximately equal amounts of capers and garlic though.

Once you have your fancypants mayo mixed up, you can start assembling the burger. I usually toast both sides of the Ciabatta roll since I love that texture and flavor, and then liberally spread that mayo mixture over both halves of the roll. Skimping on this step will only lead to sorrow.

Then you put down the burger patty, then a bunch of baby leaf lettuce. (This is definitely a place where you want to use a more fancy kind of lettuce, because you want something with enough flavor to stand up to the strong flavors of the garlic and capers. Iceberg lettuce would be completely out of place on a burger like this.) And that’s it - nothing else is necessary. If you’re desperate for cheese you could use some Provolone; I’d melt that on the burger patty before assembling the burger though.

That is my other favorite kind of burger to make. But I digress.

Anyway, the entire exercise of grinding your own hamburger meat turned out pretty well, and I suppose that if I were throwing a BBQ for a bunch of people, I would definitely consider going that route, because the hamburgers are simply unforgettable. Plus, medium-rare actually becomes an option.

But, it was a pretty big hassle too, especially with all the cleanup and extra food-safety precautions in the kitchen. So I won’t do that for small parties, but for special occasions it’s definitely a cool idea.

The database is going to be pretty simple, but even simple databases are pretty complex pieces of software. NanoDB will initially support only a handful of data types, and it will lack most of the sophisticated schema-management features that modern databases typically offer. Also, when we have an option to make something simple vs. making it fast, we’ll probably choose to make it simple, since that’s what will help students understand what’s going on.

Today I finished up the core file-storage functionality, which should allow us to start storing tuples in data files, traversing them (i.e. simple SELECT statements), and even deleting tuples! I am using a very simple version of the slotted-page file format, partly to keep it simple for students, and partly because I don’t want my implementation to be too good!

One of the things that students always seem to enjoy is a competition. So, at the end of the term I want to run a “Database Olympics,” where students can run their databases against a large set of queries and other operations. The fastest databases will win… something? (Probably not better chances with the ladies…) Because of this, the base implementation I give them should not be the fastest possible implementation.

When implementing a database storage format, it is easy to think only about SELECT performance, without thinking about the performance and cost of INSERT or DELETE operations. To improve INSERT operations, database files frequently store a linked-list of “non-full pages,” so that a page with enough free space can be found with only a few disk accesses. Correspondingly, when DELETE operations are performed, this list of non-full pages needs to be updated properly so that the DB can easily find the space that just opened up.

My implementation doesn’t do any of that. So, it will be slow for lots of INSERT operations, or a mix of INSERT and DELETE operations. Not to mention that it will probably waste quite a bit of space on the disk as well.

But, it will be a good opportunity for students who want to dig into file-storage optimizations. And a few relatively simple adjustments should produce a database with much faster INSERT and DELETE performance, not to mention a smaller data-file footprint.

I can’t believe there are people who think this stuff is boring!

The hack was also very subtle, or it didn’t really accomplish a whole lot. I am not entirely sure what to make of it. But the exploit basically involved using the WordPress upload functionality to drop a PHP script into my /tmp directory, and also to ensure that it would always be run when a WordPress page was rendered.

Fortunately, when this happened, it broke certain parts of my website, so it became obvious pretty quickly. Also, fortunately, I keep a week’s worth of backups around, so if I catch a problem right away then I can roll back my installation to the day before the problem.

So that’s what I did this time; I rolled back my website software to before the hack, then I applied the latest and greatest upgrades, and finally I went through some of the “site-hardening” guides for making it much harder to hack these pieces of software.

We shall see if it actually solves the problems! And I for one will be much more diligent about applying upgrades when they come out…

I went ahead and got one of the APC battery-backup systems, a Back-UPS ES 750VA model. (This model is discontinued now; APC has a new, more streamlined version with the same general features.) The UPS has a port that allows you to connect it to a USB port, so that the power supply can tell the computer that things are about to get ugly. I still need to set up the power-monitoring software on my Linux box, but after that, I should be all set.

The last time I did anything with that beast, I think I had just finished the 320-grit grinding. The surface looked great; reflections from the wet mirror were really beginning to look sharp. But, there was one little problem: the mirror’s focal length was awfully long. I was looking at a telescope that would probably be 6-7 feet tall, and for a 13.1″ mirror that is a little silly. I didn’t want to have to stand on a stool just to look through my little telescope. For an 18″ aperture, that might be completely reasonable, but for a 13″ it’s just silly. Going back over my mirror-grinding e-mails, I think my technique was causing the problem. Regardless, at the time I was pretty frustrated with the thing so I wrapped it up and put it in a box for a future time.

Nearly five years passed… and in the meantime I decided that what I really needed to do was to just go back to the beginning and deepen the curve of my mirror, then go through the intermediate stages again with a little more care. It took a while for me to warm up to the idea though. Mirror-grinding is hard and painful work. I think I needed to forget how bad it was before I went back to try again!

So, I finally got around to ordering more mirror-grinding grit from Newport Glass Works, a pretty cool company that I definitely want to use again once I get this telescope done and begin working on the next one. I ordered a grit-kit that contains all of the different grit-sizes, along with cerium oxide and pitch. The grit-kit showed up today (my last day of lectures, quite convenient), so I should be able to get back into the mirror-grinding pretty quickly. This should be a lot of fun!

You are on Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall. You have three doors to choose from. One of the doors has a NEW CAR behind it. The other two doors have goats.

1. You choose one of the three doors.
2. Then, Monty Hall opens another of the three doors, revealing… A GOAT!
3. Then you have the opportunity to either change your choice to the remaining closed door, or to stick with your original choice.

Is it in your best interest to stick with your original choice, or change your choice after finding out about the location of one of the goats?

Unless you are well-versed with basic probability theory, the correct answer is actually pretty counterintuitive. I won’t go into that; Wikipedia has a great article about it.

But I do have one complaint - who decided that you lose if you get a goat? I think it would be pretty awesome to have a pet goat. You could name him “Chewy” and keep him in the back yard. Now how could anybody call that “losing”?

Every time I think of peanut butter, I remember this one episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood where he made peanut butter. Or, at least, he tried to make peanut butter. His operating premise was that the name “peanut butter” was based on the actual ingredients for peanut butter. So, he threw a bunch of peanuts into a bag, added a stick of butter, and then proceeded to bash the crap out of it. The result wasn’t exactly peanut butter. I distinctly remember the scene - that big traffic light and the aquarium… I seem to recall him saying, “Well that didn’t work very well…”

I am glad that Mr. Rogers never tried to make butterflies.