Agile Cod'ing? Another geek fish recipe.

I made this last night, but was too stuffed to type it up. It's better for serving two rather than one. Seasoning is based on the amount of sauce, not the fish, so don't scale up if you don't need more sauce.

Cod & pasta recipe:

• 1-2 Cod fillet
• Olive oil
• 15oz Tomato sauce
• 1/2tsp Onion powder
• 1/2tsp Garlic powder
• 1tsp Oregano (flakes)
• 1tsp White pepper (ground)
• 2tsp Ancho pepper (ground)
• Parsley flakes
• Pasta

(Measurements approximate)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees (F).
Pour tomato sauce into glass baking dish. Stir in onion, garlic, oregano, white pepper, ancho pepper.
Spray or brush olive oil onto fillets on both sides, then put into the sauce. Cover with the sauce thickly.
Sprinkle parsley flakes over the top of the fish lightly (this would also be where you might add cheeses if you prefer that), then put into the oven for 21 minutes (fish should flake easily with a fork when ready).

While this is cooking, boil your pasta. Preferably timed so that you’ve finished straining the pasta shortly before the fish is done baking. I used shells (conchiglie), but it would be better with flat noodles, such as linguini, mafaldine, farfalle (bow ties).

Once everything is cooked, plate the pasta, then place the fish on the pasta carefully with the sauce and any cheese or parsley you added still over it. Stir the remaining sauce in the pan, then pour it over the pasta.

Make a cute portmanteau of “cod” and whatever pasta you used (eg. “codinguini”) and serve.

Last American on the Moon

On the anniversary of the first moon landing, I'm again bothered by a quote that has always left a painful lump in my throat:

"I always knew I would see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed I would see the last." -Jerry Pournelle

On July 20th, 1969, mankind achieved it's first footprint on a world other than our own. The first baby step towards the vast universe beyond our atmosphere. On December 19, 1972, the last man to ever set foot on the moon returned to earth, but it wasn't the same earth that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had left three years earlier. Everyone to some extent knew the world would change once mankind reached the moon, but I doubt anyone predicted that the change would be boredom. After only six flights to the moon, the world, or more precisely, the American public was willing to let NASA fall into the background and do their work with only quiet news articles now and then. And so the ax fell on the budget for mankind's greatest achievement in exploration, and with it the hope of going farther.

In recent years, disasters which killed a handful of very talented astronauts have made people forget one very important fact - the brave people who choose to go into space do so knowing that they may not make it back. They are pioneers who believed the greater risk was not to their lives, but to the future of mankind if they did not go.

With further cutbacks, the nation that once looked into space and to a President who quite literally promised us the moon, now is a nation whose greatest collective aspirations amount to athletic events and socio-political shifts that seem so important at the time, but are largely forgotten by the next year.

Make no mistake, though. Mankind will be back to the moon. There will be a human outpost there. There will be habitable satellites and publicly accessible transportation to space in time. But Americans aren't the only ones with a history of looking upward.

This isn't a criticism of the current politicians, but a concern for the state of the public mindset. It is "we the people" who the nation stands for, and it is "we the people" who must -want- a future beyond what we have now.

If we are no longer a nation that dares to dream big, and invest in the futures those dreams provide, what will the first child born on the moon read of us in the history books? Will we be the nation that risked it's best and brightest to build a future, or will we be like the nations of Europe, giving up our manifest destiny in favor of social structures that barely address a single lifetime?

History records ascendancy of nations over the empires that came before them many times over. As the "new world", we are merely the most recent. At the crucial moment of history when mankind colonizes space, we do not want to be the shunned former world power who gets left behind. If we are not leading the charge into space, can we really expect passage when someone else boldly goes into the future we didn't budget for?

Successful dinner

As some of you might know, I experiment with food rather than cook it properly with recipes and the like. This one is simple enough that someone probably has already written it, but I didn't see it with a cursory Google search.

This is blogworthy because there was NO microwaving involved, and it wasn't a disaster.

1 Tilapia fillet (I bought individually wrapped frozen from Schnucks)

1/4tsp each of salt, lemon zest (peel), white pepper

2-3 fresh/frozen cayenne peppers

Foil & water

1 cup Bow Tie pasta

Salt & water

First, I thawed the fish. This took a while. They suggest thawing overnight in the fridge, but alternatively allow you to thaw it in cool water.

Second, I rubbed the salt, lemon zest and white pepper evenly over the fish and set it in foil, making a bowl shape with the foil.

Third, I slitted (cut, but not all the way through) the cayenne peppers and arranged them around the fish.

Fourth, I added about a tablespoon of water along with the juices from the bag the fish came in.

I closed the foil, leaving a vent hole in it, and baked that for about 17 minutes at 400°F.

While that cooked, I prepared Bow Tie pasta, putting that on the plate once it was done. I don't like mine al dente, but you might, and instructions vary by the pasta, so read the side of the box for how to cook that.

I took the tilapia out and carefully lifted it out of the foil and onto the "bed" of pasta. It fell apart on me, so I should have been more careful.

As an anti-vegetarian, this was a very successful medium effort meal. More effort than the microwave (sorry), but tasted so much better and was so much more moist.

I'm pretty sure this can be done over a campfire as well, though you're probably not going to catch frozen tilapia while out camping, and keeping your campfire at 400°F is a little tricky. ;)

Support for Our Users - Windows 7

As part of the Windows 7 Houseparty promotion, I received an early copy of Windows 7 to demonstrate at the party. Like so many who tried the beta and release candidates before me, I got to see what everyone else will soon see.

First impressions are mixed.
Pros:

• Not quite as fast as I'd hoped, but still faster than Vista (not on par with XP as others stated).
• Relatively easy install (less tedious than most other OS's I've installed).
• Readyboost still works and is still a big help.
• Windows Vista drivers still work, meaning the disaster of the Vista release won't be repeated.
  

Cons:

• Pretty. When someone develops for pretty, they've sacrificed performance to do so.
  
• Toolbars have been taken out. Another fine example of MS thinking they know how we work better than we users do.
• Lot of useless fluff - a clear "Desktop" button in place of the old toolbar button, rotating background images, and even more abuse of transparency than Vista

But what got my attention most was the Problem Steps Recorder, or PSR. This is a simple looking "Record" tool that allows a user to record exactly what they did to recreate a problem, then send the resulting zip file to their support staff to see what happened. No mucking about with insecure remote desktop controls, just a straightforward recording. The result, once you unzip the file, is an MHT file that shows screenshots of each "step" and lets you walk through what your user did to recreate the problem AND if you don't see the same problem, it's in screenshots, so you can see what happened. For those of us acting in support roles, the death of "could not reproduce" status is upon us!

I'm also a user, though. I've had to submit bug reports to companies that blithely say "could not reproduce" when the problem starts to look difficult. I won't mention names, but yes, we all know those vendors. Even with good vendors, it's often hard to get them to understand what you mean when you say "I clicked on the thing that looks like a wrench and it blew up". Rather than taking out a camera or installing a third party app, this puts the functionality in easy reach.

And that easy reach benefits us in two more ways. First off, it makes it something support techs will be familiar seeing soon, and will even know to ask for or create easy-upload features for. Second, it's three letters that you can tell your end-user to type over the phone and a very simple interface that anyone who can work a VCR can figure out.

The major downside is that it's only screenshots. I also noted that it didn't pick up mouseover events or anything done to the PSR itself. You can't open a second PSR window, so problems with the PSR can't be reported with the PSR. There's also some confusing language that results.

For example, I had selected some text on Firefox on the NUnit download page and dragged the text, then dropped it. This is what it said with a reduced version of the screenshot it attached:

Problem Step 4: (10/11/2009 1:45:56 PM) User mouse drag end on "Download NUnit .Net unit testing framework from SourceForge.net (document)" in "Download NUnit .Net unit testing framework from SourceForge.net - Mozilla Firefox"

So definitely some work left to be done with this. I'd like to see a film version in the future, but for now, this is a huge leap forward from having users take single screenshots and manually putting this history together, or worse, summarizing and glossing over what they did as they describe it to you over the phone. I look forward to having Windows 7 deployed in the environment I work in.

Musings after returning from STL Day of .Net

So I went to the St. Louis Day of .NET conference this weekend with most of my co-workers in the development group. All in all, it was a good experience, though there's apparently video of me asleep on the drive up that I haven't seen yet. The main complaint I have about the conference is that there's too many things I didn't get to see because I was in another session at the time. I'd love to have a video of each session that I could go back and watch. Particularly the Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio, since that one apparently was fast paced and I might need to pause it to take notes.

My favorite demonstration would have to have been the presentation on creating games with Silverlight. I'm not a game programmer, but the interface created by the methods used could be re-used in applications. As with many of my fellow geeks, programming started with games, not the "hello world" we all know and loathe.

The first app I remember writing was a maze game much like the Tron lightcycles, but with the bike as a single pixel with a line trailing behind it on my TI82. It was an adaptation of someone elses game that I reverse engineered and extended to have a map loader, a method of actually winning, and the beginnings of a map designer. I also wrote a TIE-Fighter FPS for it. Kind of cheesy looking back, but the drawing functions on the TI82 made it a lot easier to write a game in TIBasic than, for example, in C++ or C#. Those interfaces, though, were how I learned to create an intuitive and effective interface for later apps, some that I actually used for homework.

My first blog post

Ok, I've been ranting on forums, rambling on bulletin boards, bantering on mailing lists, leaving long winded comments, and even microblogging on Twitter. I keep running across these blogs that already know me from my Gmail account, so I figured it was time I made my own.

I'm an application developer and project team lead working for the Missouri House of Representatives (primarily in C#.NET), an avid Star Trek fan, and an otherwise geekish person. I also have a beard. That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect to see me blogging about.