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Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Perhaps you are a programmer; perhaps you use gdb to step through the programs you have written, looking for bugs; perhaps you have wondered why gdb will not let you examine the contents of the errno variable. Here's the deal: if you are typing print errno and getting the message Cannot access memory at address 0x8, it is because errno is not an actual variable; the compiler has replaced references to errno with *__errno_location() -- print *__errno_location() will give you what you're looking for.
posted morning of August 20th, 2009: 5 responses
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Sunday, August 16th, 2009
I had some friends over last night for jamming and a cookout. It was a great time; the combination of chicken thighs and franks from Piast is a keeper, a crowd-pleaser. I overstocked meat for the occasion; the kielbasa did not get used at all -- I'm trying to think of some kind of stew I could make with it this evening that will serve me as lunch for the week... Here is a recipe for pork and beans which went very nicely with the cookout (and with my salsa cruda) -- it is adapted loosely from this recipe which ran in the Times magazine a few weeks ago. Pork and beans- 1/4 lb. or more slab bacon, diced
- 1 large yellow onion, diced
- minced garlic to taste
- flavorings: use your judgement. I used about a tablespoon of cumin, a teaspoon of mustard, a head of cilantro and 3 moderately spicy dried chile peppers*.
- a can of beer -- I used Budweiser, which is cheap and does not have a lot of flavor; a darker beer would probably be good too.
- 4 cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed.
Sauté bacon, onion, garlic and spices until onion begins to caramelize. Deglaze with beer. Add beans, bring to a boil while stirring; cover and reduce heat to a simmer. You can let it simmer for a few hours prior to serving; occasionally you should give it a stir scraping the bottom, and adding more beer if it looks too dry.
 * Here is how to used dried chiles in case you do not know: Boil some water and turn the flame off. Cut the tops off of the chiles and throw them into the pot to soak for a minute or so. Take them out, cut them open the long way, spread them out on a board, and scrape the red paste off the inside using a butter knife or similar. You can keep or discard the seeds according to how much heat you are looking for. Mash this red paste up with your garlic or spices.
posted morning of August 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Here is a chicken salad recipe that I came up with today and brought along to a potluck supper, where it was a hit. It is a good use for leftover chicken.
- All or part of a roast chicken, cut into bite-size pieces.
- 1 head fennel, chopped into bite-size pieces
- 2 or 3 carrots diced
- 2 green bell peppers diced
- 1 red onion diced small
- a head of spinach cleaned and picked
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add carrots and fennel. After about a minute add peppers -- immediately drain and rinse with cold water. Combine all ingredients in a salad bowl and toss with whatever dressing you like -- I used balsamic vinaigrette.
posted evening of July 19th, 2009: 1 response
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Saturday, July 4th, 2009
Today I made a raw tomato salsa that came out pretty well. Here is the recipe:
Note: part of the target audience for this is Sylvia, who does not like spicy food, so there is only a little bit of heat in it from the garlic. Add spicy peppers according to taste.Salsa Cruda
Spices: (all measurements extremely approximate)- 1 tbsp. fennel seed
- 2 tbsp. cumin seed
- 1½ tsp. rock salt
- 3 cloves garlic
Vegetables:- 2 large tomatoes
- 1 red onion
- 1 bunch cilantro
Wash vegetables; pluck leaves off of cilantro. Roast fennel and cumin until the seeds start to pop, i.e. about 2 or 3 min. over a high flame. Grind spices in a mortar; add and grind salt, then add the garlic and mash it all together. This is easier if you slice the garlic fairly thin first.Dice the tomatoes and onion fairly small, and chop the coriander fine. Put all ingredients in a bowl with a pinch of salt, toss together. This is ready to use right away but improves with an hour or two in the fridge.
posted afternoon of July 4th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
To expand on a comment in the previous post, I just can't understand this choice by Pontiero: the Portuguese ...no interesse desta editora e da harmonia das nossas futuras relações, Profissionais. Espero que não lhe tenha passado... is translated as...for the sake of the publishing house and harmony in our future relationship. Professional, I trust you're not suggesting... Now I'm just really confused as to why Pontiero would have transposed the comma preceding "Profissionais" and the period after it. My initial thought when I read the English sentence was, this would "sound right" in Portuguese because the adjective follows the noun, so Raimundo is "completing the thought" of his interlocutor, whereas in English he's inserting a word in the middle of her thought. But the punctuation issue is separate. In the original, Raimundo adds his adjective directly in reply to her -- she is a little taken aback and pauses before replying. In the translation as it stands here, Raimundo pauses before replying, and she comes back with a quick riposte. I'm sort of flummoxed as to why this would be done -- it changes the sense of the passage and for no good reason that I can see.
 Thinking about this a little further: I guess it's possible that the change in punctuation is a way of addressing the word-order issue -- that the quick "professional" following "relationship" sounds right in Portuguese, but in English the longer pause is necessary because the "correction" is being inserted prior to the end of the previous sentence. This does not seem right to me -- I think the flow of conversation would still work even though there's a slightly false note introduced by the word order -- but it makes some sense as a reasoning behind this change. (And/or, another possibility is that Pontiero is having a little fun with me by getting me to proof-read a novel about proof-reading.)
posted evening of June 24th, 2009: Respond
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Clerical errors, like mirrors and fatherhood, tend to multiply creation. When I applied for my medical insurance, I gave the insurance company my date of birth and my social security number; I gave the same information to my automobile insurance company, and likewise the insurer of my life. But come to find, three different people hold these three policies, all of whom share my name. The man who drives my car, who listens to my mix tapes in its stereo, was born a day later than I. The man who stands to be reimbursed for my hospital stays, who is the same age as I, has a social security number which if its 5th and 7th digits were transposed, would be mine; whether this is due to sloppy handwriting on my part, or a mistake in some link of the chain of transcription leading to the insurance company, I don't know. And the person against whose death I am insured -- she shares all of her vital statistics with me except for gender. Somewhere the wrong box was checked. I'll have trouble when I try to collect the benefits due me, assuming I cannot produce the particular alternate persona to whom each insurer considers itself indebted.
posted afternoon of June 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
I'm surprised by how quickly all of the vines in our garden are growing -- every day I go outside and I can see the growth since the previous morning. Must have something to do with all the rain we're getting. So: In front of the house are a climatus and a hyacinth, both planted just last year; on the side of the house are a 3-year-old grape vine, a climatus of about the same age, and a vine I don't know the name of. I'm hammering together a new piece of trellis for the side vines this morning. And when I finish that, maybe I'll work some more on a carving project I gave up on a few months ago! Pictures later...
posted morning of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
John Holbo's recent posts about "The Squid and the Owl" have been making me think about composition, and specifically about writing in meter. I don't seem to want to write metered poetry right now, but I think it is going to be useful to keep in mind the meter of my sentences as I write prose. Here is a fragment I came up with this morning:
The murky, sticky sediment of thought has not begun to calcify -- not yet, and I believe it can't while I still live. Fossilization takes millions of lifetimes, my Editor is scribbling, is why an archæology metaphor for investigation of your own consciousness cannot work -- and god forbid you should be so presumptuous as to picture actual future archivists tunneling down through your crystalline neural pathways! -- Don't take everything so damn literal I plead, and don't throw my rhythm out like that. Each discarded thought -- each day thousands -- some small rodent's skull, some hunter's artefact, some chitinous exoskeleton cast off and sunk into that dark, pre-conscious stew. As ages of decay and settling pass, this marsh is buried and will turn to rock, and I will no longer have anything to say. -- My current thoughts will crumble and be destroyed utterly (the Editor asserts). Future self, it's on you to dig into these layers of silt and to find these bones and graven images, if there is to be any evidence of me -- so it's on me to dig up and exhume young Jeremy, to see if any of him is worth preserving.
posted morning of April 25th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, April 24th, 2009
Neat-o, I found a new tool for testing stuff out! It is called netcat and it is essentially what I've always wished telnet would be. You can basically open up a socket and listen as the server or attach as a client, and see all the traffic from the other party, and type in the traffic from your side. Be sure to read the (brief) man page as the tutorial pages I've found on the web this morning all omit important information and leave you scratching your head as to what is going wrong. The two things (at first glance) that nc has over telnet: primary point is that you can listen on a port, and thus emulate a server; telnet does not do this at all. Secondary advantage, the whole thing is much cleaner and simpler, and easier to run as a batch job; you don't have to learn escape characters or anything like that. Drawback is that error reporting is pretty minimal; but I can live with that.
posted morning of April 24th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, April 5th, 2009
So the first thing I am reading by Roberto Bolaño is the new book of poetry, The Romantic Dogs. The poems are delight, sparsely elegant, the author's voice clear and engaging. I find that I have not yet constructed an authorial persona to associate with this voice, so a lot of my reaction to the readings so far has been seeing who this voice reminds me of -- for instance there are some lines in the title poem that sound very distinctly like Robyn Hitchcock; "El Gusano" is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's poetry (as I said before); the structure of "La Francesa" (especially its ending) is most similar to Ferlinghetti. I expect I'll find plenty of other referents as I continue to read, eventually they should gel into a new author for me to carry in my head... Here is a passage that's puzzling me a little. See what you think. The poem "Resurección" begins and ends as follows: La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
...
La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios. Healy translates this as:Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
...
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who's dead
in the eyes of God.
But this seems to me to miss the parallelism. "Dead in the eyes of God" is a lexical unit -- it is making the phrase "en el ojo de Dios" into a modifier for "muerto" -- but what I was thinking as I read the Spanish was, the "eye of God" was what the dead diver was entering into -- it was playing the same role that the "lake" was playing in the first sentence -- so I would have translated it more like Poetry slips into the dream
like a dead man diving
into the eye of God. (Also I would have said "into a lake" in the second line.) Is this a misreading?
posted afternoon of April 5th, 2009: 2 responses
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