Bogart Recipe

Here's a recipe for a yummy cocktail served at the Big Picture in Redmond. I'm posting it here so that I can find it in the future when I forget the recipe - it's easy to make at home (assuming you have fresh sage leaves).

Ingredients:
1 measure Gin
1/2 measure Triple-sec
1 measure Margarita mix
2 fresh sage leaves

Put a few ice cubes in a shaker, add the gin and triple-sec and sage leaves, and muddle well. Add the Margarita mix, shake, and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with a sage leaf if desired.

New "7 Worlds Collide" album from Neil Finn et al

Last night I saw that there is a new album by Neil Finn and friends (who call themselves "7 Worlds Collide'), called Sun Came Out. There's more info on the ReverbNation website here, and you can listen to the album here.

This new album seems to contain all new songs. From the album page:

7 years ago, Neil Finn & friends first got together to perform some live shows – and release a resulting live album. In December of 2008 and January 2009, Neil did it again, only this time bigger and better! He assembled a group of his friends and fellow artists in Auckland, New Zealand to record a brand new album of all new & original material.
The cast list this time includes Neil, Sharon & Liam Finn, Wilco, Johnny Marr, KT Tunstall, Ed O’Brien & Phil Selway of Radiohead, Lisa Germano, Bic Runga, and others – all contributing to the performances and songwriting.

The previous "7 Worlds Collide" album he did "with friends" was 7 Worlds Collide - Live At The St. James. "Down on the Corner" and "Edible Flowers" are really good, as is "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" - plus a few live versions of Crowded House and Finn songs.

Excellent news!

French oysters

This is the 2nd year in a row that French oysters have been hit by a mystery "plague" that is killing young oysters. This year 90% of the young oysters have died.

Producers in Normandy are so worried that last month they handed out free
boxes of the shellfish near Caen chanting: "Take these oysters, they may be the last you'll ever eat."

Playing the Enemy

{A} mentioned a segment on NPR's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" which aired on KUOW on Friday. The segment covers the 1995 Rugby World Cup match between South Africa and New Zealand, and how Nelson Mandela's support of the Springboks helped to unify the country. I remember watching the match and the euphoria that swept the nation in the weeks following the South African victory. It was one of the many highlights in Mandela's term as president.

You can listen to the podcast here, skip to around the 38 minute mark for the start of this segment.

The show is based on the book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin - one I will add to my "to read" list. I hadn't fully appreciated how brave Mandela's support of the Springboks was.

Happy Hour in an Irish pub

You'd think happy hour in an Irish pub would be a great time to get some cheap(er) Irish beer, right? Nope, that's not the case at Bellevue's Paddy Coyne's.

Instead of discounts on Guinness or Smithwick's, they offer cheap Bud and Bud Light. A pint of Irish beer will set you back the regular price of $6. Somehow that just strikes me as lame - they'd be better off not having any beer specials during happy hour.

Giving Nigerians a bad name...

It seems that Nigerian officials are not fans of the movie "District 9".

While it's true that Nigerians are portrayed as crime lords in the movie, running the underground market cat-food and weapons market (not to mention prositution), I think the thing that really irked the officials is the naming of the main "baddie": Obasandjo sounds a lot like former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. And it doesn't help that he's a superstitious megalomaniac that wants to eat aliens to inherit their power and control over alien weaponry.

Sadly, this type of thing really happens in some parts of Africa, including South Africa. (It's called "muti killing"), so there is some real-world inspiration for the crim lord's behaviour. Add to that that a large amount of crime in today's South Africa is due to Nigerian gangs, and you can see that to a large extent the writer/director was just drawing on current events. You can read more about the director's reasons for making the crime lord a Nigerian and referencing muti, in the interview here.

Fidelity password fail

I called Fidelity customer yesterday and was asked to authenticate by entering my ID and PIN using the phone's keypad. At first my mind was blank - what was my phone PIN? It turns out you use the same user ID and password as you use on www.fidelity.com.

Convenient, yes? The problem is that this means the "secure" password I had chosen, which contained upper and lower-case letters and numbers, was actually being stored by Fidelity as a string on numbers.

For example, suppose your password is "MaGic8" . Using the phone keypad mapping for letters this becomes the number 624428. The sad thing is you can log in to Fidelity.com using 624428 as your password. You could also type in "NCHHCU" since this maps to the same numbers.
In this example, there are 4096 (4^6) different passwords that an attacker could enter and that would all allow them access to your account.

Instead of 62 or more possibilities per character (uppercase, lowercase and digits), you're effectively using 10 possibilities per character. That's a drop in entropy of 10 bits (or a factor of 1000) for a 6-character password.

What's odd is that they don't seem to do the same thing for the user ID - typing in the numbers your ID maps to doesn't work.

The Ultimate Yuppie Gym

I was amused to see an advert for a new gym in Bellevue that is due to open in the new Bravern building soon. The gym, the first West Coast location in the David Barton Gym chain, makes most five-star hotels look shabby. Not surprisingly, it will share The Bravern with Neiman Marcus (a.k.a. "Needless Markup"), and Microsoft.

Barton was quoted saying , “My new gym will be so inspiring that even techies will start looking like their fantasy characters.” For a look at what the new gym will look like, see the gallery on their website.

The terms "ostentatious" and "poor taste" come to mind, but I'm sure nouveau riche Seattleites will be keen to show off by going to this gym. Just another sign that some people have more money than sense.

Tea at Butchart Gardens

Victoria Trip 2009
Originally uploaded by Mr Snootyhamper

This is the spread *for one person*! Way too much food - we tred to slowly make our way through this over the course of an hour or two, washed down with copious amounts of tea, but alas some things had to go unsampled (like to chocolate truffle).

The ginger and cucumber sandwiches were especially good.

BC Parliament in Victoria

Victoria Trip 2009
Originally uploaded by Mr Snootyhamper

I like the way they light up the building at night!

Victoria Sunset

Victoria Trip 2009
Originally uploaded by Mr Snootyhamper

Here is a nice shot of the sun setting over the inner harbour in Victoria, BC. You can't really tell from the photo, but it was actually raining a bit when we took this.

Good times in Victoria, BC

{A} and I recently went up to Victoria, BC in a seaplane to celebrate our 1-year anniversary.
Here are a few highlights from our trip:

• We had dinner and brunch at one of our favourite places in Victoria, ReBar. We first went to ReBar on our first Victoria trip several years ago, and their food is as good as always. Their fresh fruit and veggie drinks are also great (try the Sundance Kid!)
• The Royal BC Museum had an exhbition from the British Museum titled Treasures, that was amazing. Worth the trip just to see this stuff...
• We got to visit Butchart Gardens (finally!) Summer is definitely the time to go, although I hear the gardens are worth seeing in all the seasons. Some pics from the gardens are in the set on Flickr
• We had an amazing tea at the gardens. From what I've heard, the tea at the Empress hotel is more expensive and not as good. (I've not been to the Empress myself though). Good things about tea in the Butchart Gardens: you can sit on the veranda and enjoy the garden views, great tea and yummy food, and it's reasonably-priced!
• This list on Yelp.com pointed us at a few food places, which were all good. Notably...
• Decent brunch at MoLe (worth another look), a place with lots of veggie options and some yummy smoked tuna eggs benedict.
• Amazing cocktails and service at Solomon's. These folks take their drinks very seriously and have some fantastic, unique concoctions as well as making a great Sazerac. They also had great food, from tapas-style small plates to some interesting-looking main plates. A large table of chefs was there enjoying a tasting menu (it looked like they were tasting 10 courses!) - apaprently a regular gathering that I'd be happy to try duplicating next time I'm in town.
• A delicious Italian meal at Pagliacci's with live gypsy/Yiddish music. It looks like this place is a real institution and has been going for decades. A cosy, lively atmosphere and some of the tastiest Italian food I've have had for a while!

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

I was reminded today of the great comedy duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. One of my favourite sketches (which I was sure I had posted here before, but it seems not) is the pub sketch. Here it is:

The next Iron Chef America could be from Seattle!

I spotted an interesting blog post today on the "Eat All About It" blog:

The Food Network released the names of contestents for The Next Iron Chef, and Holly Smith is on the list. Smith, of Cafe Juanita and Poco Carretto, joined nine other top chefs in five weeks of worldwide taping, flying ‘from Los Angeles to Japan to New York to compete in the food fight of their professional lives.’

"New Orleans is drinking better"

This is one of the interesting news snippets you get for friending New Orleans on Facebook: An article in the LA Times titled "New Orleans is drinking better lately". And the obligatory teaser:

Anyone invoking the world's great drinking cities has to place New Orleans pretty close to the top.It's the birthplace of Peychaud's bitters and Southern Comfort, of the Sazerac and the Ramos gin fizz. And it has a long-standing absinthe legacy, including in 2007 being the first port of entry for the liquor since it was outlawed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1912. Not a bad inheritance.

However, the cocktail revolution sweeping New York, San Francisco and Chicago -- the speak-easies and fedora-sporting bartenders alchemizing booze into transcendent mixology -- has been slow to come to town. But a new crop of bars and bartenders are giving the Big Easy's drinking scene a decidedly upscale flavor.

LBJ Can Haz Pants?

A friend on Facebook posted a link to this classic recording of a phone call made by then-president Linden Johnson: Linden B. Johnson orders some new Haggar pants

In this telephone call, which has become one of the more famous exchanges LBJ
recorded, the President asked a leader of the Haggar clothing company for some
custom-made pants, providing specific (and sometimes graphic) instructions on
how they should be customized for him.

Never let it be said that I don't post educational information on this blog!

Chris Walker cameo in "Inked"

Chris Walker, of the Contemplative Programmer blog, recently was involved in the 48 Hour Film Project in Seattle, getting to act in one of the entries, titled "Inked". You can watch "Inked" here, and see prior films from various cities around the world here.

He has a single line in the film, a single word in fact, and it's very apt if you know him. In the security team at Microsoft, Chris had a knack for spotting bugs in code, and would often send out gems to the team with the email subject line "Code du jour". I miss those mails...

"Nothing up my sleeve" numbers

I just came across the term "nothing up my sleeve number" today, and it made me smile. Sometimes geeks chose pretty cute names for things :) See the Wikipedia entry here.

The related entries on differential cryptanalysis and S-boxes is interesting too. I am not a crypto geek, so the intricacies of this stuff is beyond me, but the higher-level descriptions and the history are fascinating.

Spam, spam, spam, bacon, egg and spam

One wonders what the advertising folks were smoking when they came up with this new TV advertisement for SPAM.

Attaching a VHD to a Windows 7/Server 2008 host from managed code

This past weekend I had "fun" working on a project to attach VHD files to a Windows 7/Server 2008 host machine. My aim was to have a C# app be able to do this and then read the files off the VHD...

It turns out the easiest part was opening and attaching the VHD file. The VHD APIs are pretty straight-forward, and a simple managed wrapper lets you call these from C#. (I chose a Managed C++ wrapper, but there is a C# wrapper here)

By default AttachVirtualDisk will mount all the volumes on the virtual disk, which is what I wanted. (You could also tell the VHD API to not mount them and do it yourself for the partitions you cared about, but that sounded like a lot of extra work to me...)

Now came the fun - which drive letters were assigned to the mounted partitions on the VHD? It turns out the VHD API doesn't provide this information - the most it will give you is the physical path for the drive device (see GetVirtualDiskPhysicalPath)

I looked around and found some examples of people using Powershell to mount VHDs and figure out the drive letters. Some folks were using the Virtual Disk Service (VDS), which has a managed wrapper in Server 2008 (Microsoft.Storage.Vds.dll) - Taylor Brown talks about this on his blog.

That wouldn't work on Windows 7 though, so I was left considering writing a managed wrapper for the VDS COM interface. My head was beginning to hurt... :)

Luckily I found some hints at using WMI to get the info - using WMI from .NET is not too complicated once you figure out which objects and queries to use. Here's the resulting code (Managed C++) which retrieves the logical drive for the first partition on the VHD:

// Return the logical disk for the VHD's first partition
property String^ LogicalDisk
{
  String^ get()
  {
      String^ physicalPath = this->PhysicalPath; // Calls GetVirtualDiskPhysicalPath API wrapper
      String^ logicalDisk = nullptr;
                       
      // Use WMI to get the logical drive for the first partition on the VHD disk
      RelatedObjectQuery^ q = gcnew RelatedObjectQuery(String::Format("\\\\.\\root\\cimv2:Win32_DiskDrive.DeviceID='{0}'", physicalPath), "Win32_DiskPartition");
      ManagementObjectSearcher^ searcher = gcnew ManagementObjectSearcher(q);
      String^ firstPartition = nullptr;  
      for each (ManagementObject^ o in searcher->Get())
      {
          firstPartition = o->Path->ToString();
          break;
      }
      if (firstPartition != nullptr)
      {
          // Now see which volumes are related to the partitions
          q = gcnew RelatedObjectQuery(firstPartition, "Win32_LogicalDisk");
          searcher->Query = q;
          for each (ManagementObject^ o in searcher->Get())
          {
              logicalDisk = o->GetPropertyValue("Name")->ToString();
              break;
          }
      }
      return logicalDisk;
  }
}