Lonely Lion

I’m interested in trying to bake some Sour Dough again. We had a colony a while back, but let it die. I found a good primer on starting your own Sour Dough colony (our first was from a packet). As del.icio.us is down, I’m linking to it here. John Ross on Sour Dough

Jason made a Planet for Chicago Open Source Hackers

Nice. Chicago represent.

The Chicago Ruby group met up on Tuesday to hack festively on Selenium. I just started using Selenium at work, so it was a good opportunity to jump in and learn while doing. Jason, Eric, Garret, and myself worked on validating a submitted patch that improves iframe support.

After messing around for about two hours, we couldn’t get the patch to work in a consistent way. Since frames support is essential to our use of Selenium for testing, we’ll be picking away at this patch until we can get it up and running.

The Hackfest, in general, went pretty smoothly. It was held at Thoughtworks, and was well attended. It was interesting to see the Thoughtworks style of sprint management. They kept things on track and moving forward. We started with a brief overview by Jason Huggins, one of the authors of Selenium, and then white boarded issues we thought we could work on in the given time. Then we volunteered for issues, split up, and started working.

After two hours, we reconvened and presented what we’d done. Then we recommended what needed to be done next. It was very similiar to Scrum, which we’ve just recently adopted at work, but on a smaller scale.

I added pictures to Flickr from this past weekend’s Super Bake Sunday. I ended up baking a “Rustic Italian Loaf”, Molasses Spice Cookies, and Peanut Butter Cookies. Everything turned out really well. The bread was especially good. The whole “sponge” pre-ferment process was new to me . Despite the time involved, an hour on Saturday, seven hours on Sunday, the bread really wasn’t that difficult to make.

That’s the loaf. It links to the set that I put up on Flickr. Camri made a big batch of honey butter and garlic butter. We sliced the bread up with an electric knife at the Johnny Roast Beef Christmas Party. I think it went over well.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to try baking Buttermilk Biscuits. Buttermilk isn’t in our fridge as a rule, so it took a little bit of pre-planning. Saturday was the first attempt.

I used the recipe from Baking Illustrated which was somewhat different than the Good Eats recipe, mostly in how the dough is handled. In BI, they roll it in balls, AB rolled it flat and cut out circles. The thing they both agree on is using very cold butter (I even popped it in the freezer for a few minutes) and handling the dough as little as possible.

Everything turned out well, despite the fact that I got my teaspoons and tablespoons mixed up (it was early in the morning) which led to somewhat salty biscuits. Last night at the grocery store I picked up another carton of buttermilk, and plan on giving it a second go this Saturday.

I’m also thinking about trying a big “rustic” loaf of bread during the day Saturday. The BI recipe is pretty involved. You make a “sponge”, which is a little bit of flour, water, and yeast, and let it sit for five hours. Then you add the rest of the ingredients and let them rise, punch them down, rise again, and then (finally) bake. The entire process is ~ 8 hours. I’m not sure if I have the time on Saturday or not. We shall see.

In related baking news, Camri and my tasting log (written in Rails) is progressing nicely. I’m hoping we’ll have something online before the end of the month.

The Washington Post released their first powered by Django app, which has been reported by bloggers way before me.

I subscribed to the feeds for Rahm, Dick, and Barack which was been been fun to watch.

Rahm’s latest vote: “Reaffirming the Friendship Between the People and Governments of the United States and Hungary.”

In my mind, I picture every vote to have Jimmy Stewart significance. The reality, is sometimes they just vote to be friends with Hungary. Which is nice. No one voted not to be friends with Hungary.

For me, seeing “Snakes and Rubies” ranked number 8 on the Technorati search list is better than being Slashdotted. Awesome.

The Snakes and Rubies mini-conference went really well yesterday, despite some minor(ish) technical details. I’m looking forward to seeing how the video works out. It was fun being a question-asker. I really enjoyed working with John, he brought a level of professionalism to the event that I typically don’t shoot for. I think the whole thing went a lot smoother because of John’s organizational pushes. I think that everyone agrees that more of this sort of event would be a great thing for Chicago developers.

I found a few blog entries about the event through technorati this morning. So far, things seem pretty positive.