urwhatu

Mostaccioli and Halloween in the Castro

Halloween...Natsuko made a nice light italian dinner: a Caesar salad variant and mostaccioli with a tomato sauce based on fresh sage sausage and capers. We had two trick or treaters and spent an hour and a half trying to drive to the Castro for the Halloween festivities. We eventually gave up, but saw some great costumes while we were waiting: Rocky, salt & pepper shakers, etc. We went as the chicken and the egg. Cleverest costumes I heard about this year: a jellyfish (umbrella with glitter taped underneath) and a pair of lego bricks.

Fast DNS, Kuleto's

Natsuko and I went to dinner with my buddy Jason Robbins at Kuleto's in Burlingame. We like the one in Union Square better. Today's obsession is with building a super-super fast system for DNS...by assuming away multiple IP per hostname support, using a suffix trie for compression, resolving CNAMEs at insertion time, ignoring TTL intra-day, and a switchable recursive/non-recursive mode, I believe it's possible to build a resolver that locally services queries on 40 million+ hostnames at 10k per second and up (given a 100MHz NIC, 4GB of RAM, and a medium-speed CPU). Should make an interesting project...

Pork bellies

A lovely soup with shiitake, butabaara niku (sliced uncooked pork short ribs), kabu (Japanese turnip)...also, tamago with mira (scrambled egg with garlic chives).

Sausage, sau-sage, sau...SAGE!

Unbelievably yummy fresh sage/ground pork sausage on baked zucchini topped with tomatoes, basil, and panko. And french onion soup with Emmental and a baguette slice. I can't believe I eat like this everyday.

Eternal Egyptian Exhibit

Flu got worse after the yesterday's exertion. We were still able to make it to the Eternal Egyptian Exhibit at the Legion of Honor, albeit late in the day.

Eating in North Beach

Mo's for breakfast, followed by a Caffe Trieste latte and an inspection of Linux's proposed /dev/epoll interface. Mo's cannot possibly compare to Mama's. If you're in North Beach, the places to go for espresso are Caffe Trieste, Caffe Roma, and XOX Truffles. They all use freshly roasted beans. A not-too-bad place to start if you're looking for somewhere to eat is North Beach Magazine's list of restaurants. A common mistake is to go to North Beach Pizza instead of Tommaso's Ristorante Italiano.

GeoIP

Checking out ways of looking up country of origin by IP address. Maxmind's GEO-IP looks like the way to go. CountryHawk also looks interesting except for the per-server licensing fee.

Grub and Greek

Learned more about grub.org's distributed crawling effort. Ate at Kokkari Estiatorio at MacArthur Park - best Greek in the city, best I think I've ever had, period.

/dev/poll and tako salad

Long day at work going over product strategy at an offsite. Today's interesting read was an article about Solaris 8's /dev/poll mechanism. There's also a note about how to use /dev/poll with UDP. Handy reference for Solaris info after the release of Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture : Sun Technical Notes at the Solaris Developer's Connection. Natsuko made a borscht-like onion/beef/potato stew with a tako (octopus), tomato, and basil salad, and a pasta salad. Very tasty :).

Everyone's favorite snake

Today's fascination was with Python which looks much nicer than the perl I've been writing for data extraction and notification to operations. Two good pages: Peter Norvig's comparison of Python and Lisp and a concise comparison of some interesting programming languages at MIT. Natsuko made stir fry with butaniku (pork), takenoko (bamboo shoots), nira (garlic chives), ninjin (carrots), and moyashi (bean sprouts) which was, of course, meant to be enjoyed with a little gohan (rice). A simple, clean miso for the day, with just a little soft tofu. Finally, a little mochi and tea for dessert.