Saag Poutine

Poutine goes to India, Indian poutine comes to Canada

Cory Doctorow at 4:18 AM Sunday, Mar 6, 2011 

Poutine is a Quebecois delicacy made by combining french fries, gravy and cheese curds; when I was growing up, poutine was strictly Canadian, and you could always amaze foreigners by describing the salty, fatty, starchy goodness to be had from the poutine trucks. But gradually, poutine spread across the world -- first I saw it for sale in LA's Sunset Junction, and then I found it on the menu at a cafe in Mumbai's Juhu Beach (optional toppings included corn, pineapple and chicken frankfurters!). Poutine in India! What could be more global?

Turns out that the poutine-subcontinent fusion is bi-directional: yesterday, in Burger Bar in Toronto's Kensington Market, I spotted "Saag Poutine" on the menu -- "paneer cheese simmered in spices, cream and spinach, served over fries." I don't know what unlikely magic has brought Indian food and Quebecois food together, but it is magic -- albeit of the high-carb, salty sort.

At least this article had me learn just a bit more Hindi. I'd figured out that paneer is the cheese in Saag Paneer, the Indian buffet staple that most seem to call "Indian Spinach Casserole." The Wikipedia says Saag is a spinach and/or mustard leaf-based dish eaten in India and Pakistan with bread such as roti or naan, or rice (in West Bengal). Saag can be made from spinach, mustard leaves, or other greens, along with added spices and sometimes other ingredients such as paneer. No spinach, mustard leaves or any other greens in the Saag Poutine, however.

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Press to test.

[click]

Release to detonate.

Brad Morrison, sysadmin to the stars

Tracy Jordan nails it

Hats off to Harry Shearer [once again] for calling attention to something I completely missed with his weekly Apologies of the Week feature.

Surely all y'all heard about Tracy Jordan's blatantly honest remark last Thursday about Sarah Palin on ESPN's Inside the NBA pre-game show before the Knicks beat the Heat 93-88. If you haven't, I recommend that you go directly to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmYAYBgDIo.

So how was that? Awesome, right? There are advantages to having a crazy image in the press, especially if you're also starring on a TV show that's doing well, whatever that means. In Harry's report of the incident, it was TNT who apologized, not Tracy. Whu-u-u-ut??

That's because he wasn't done yet! IMHO there's nothing sillier than apologizing for something that you're not finished doing. In fairness, Tracy may have simply been freestyling last week, but I think it had to be a feeling of positive reinforcement that caused him to elaborate on his observations of Ms. Palin at the SAG Awards (talk about your organizations with unfortunate acronym pronunciations) yesterday.

I think the problem here is that not enough Americans have seen Larry Flynt's Who's Nailin' Paylin? (sic). Or perhaps too many of us have seen it and have collapsed Sarah with Lisa Ann in our collective subconscious.

Wait -- is that a problem?

I think Tracy Jordan really is crazy. Crazy like a fox.

Fwd: Bruce Schneier RSS is now following you on Twitter!

So I just put a twitter widget on my phone and I decided to start following some people on my long forgotten twitter account to make the widget useful, and then:

The world's foremost expert on security, Bruce Schneier, re-follows me. 

Totally cool! Except I don't really tweet.  And even if I did, I would have nothing of import for such a person to read.

Now I feel impotent and unimportant.  Seriously, the most I could offer this man is a waste of his time.  Surely he has better things to do than read any of the dick jokes that I might tweet.

Holy shit, there are only 700 other people in the world following him?  Why isn't the entirety of the TSA following Mr. Schneier?  Or the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, or every other law-enforcement/intelligence agency in the world?

What the fuck is wrong with everyone?  Do they get secret twitter feeds where they're not counted in the subscriber listings? 

I don't think I know anyone who doesn't know who Bruce Schneier is (or who doesn't own a copy of Applied Crytography, or who isn't subscribed to the Crypto-Gram), so where the hell are all his followers?

C'mon, even @oldwhitemansays has 42k followers.  

Now I really hate twitter.

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Dave Maez
You got a Benz, I got a busket: Gimme a dollar!

70s AOR DJ waxes ecstatic, briefly

Totally analog, circa 1978.

8:45 into http://brad-morrison.com/KEXL-part-one.mp3, the studio version of Country Joe & the Fish's Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag winds out its weird ending that couldn't decide between SFX with extra cheese and a classically classic rock ending. Then the late Allen Grimm lets go of the LP he's cued up, and track #4, side 2 perfectly syncs with the final chord of Country Joe's single, right at 9:00, and at 9:04 or so you can hear him vocalize his approval in stereo.

-- 

Come on mothers throughout the land / And pack your boys off to Vietnam / Come on fathers, don't hesitate / and send your DAUGHTERS off before it's too late / And be the first one on your block to have your KIDS come home in a box.

~self-revised lyrics to the Country Joe song

Shit Just Got Old School

Using HTML5 canvas tags as framebuffers with JavaScript.

I saw a post on Buzz with some dude playing around with HTML5's canvas tag.  And I noticed he was accessing the pixel data just like I used to do on my 80286's VGA card!  AWESOME!

So I quickly coded up some color bars for old times sake.



Neato. 

It's kinda lame that Javascript has no means of quickly duplicating arrays of objects, so the only way to handle virtual frames is to use extra canvas objects and push/pull the buffer data to/from them.

Then I went for some classic shade bobs.



Chrome's Javascript interpreter is lightning fast.  Unfortunately Firefox's is slower and has mixed behavior depending on versions.  For example, some versions of Firefox handle the pixel data as unsigned char's correctly, and incrementing a red value that's 255 will set it to zero.  Other versions handle pixel data as integers (even though the allowed range is only 0-255) and decrementing a pixel that is 0 will cause it to become -1.  Chrome handles the data as 0-255, but doesn't allow rotational incrementation without using a modulus on it so incrementing a value that's 255 simply stays at 255.

Finally I whipped up some multicolor plasma.




This effect was a lot easier than on MCGA mode 0x13, since we're not limited to 256 colors, but to a full 24 bit pallette (plus another 8bits of alpha channel data).  I don't have to combine sine tables in one pixel, just in different color channels.

The only reason I ever learned to program was to make my computer make pretty things.  I'm so happy!  And since I'm not on a 12.5mhz CPU anymore, I don't have to do things like inline assembler or pre-computed trig tables.  JOY!

I got my 286 back!  Now to ditch enough work to code up a Mandelbrot roto-zoom...

--
Dave Maez
Helping to code a better tomorrow.