My daily readings 07/30/2007

10 Ways to Speed Up Dinner-Prep Times | Meals : RealSimple.com  Annotated

Meat can sit in an oil-based marinade for about 24 hours in the refrigerator, so you can set up the next day’s dinner before hitting the sack; fish, with its more delicate flesh, should sit for no more than 4 to 6 hours, so this is something you might do at lunchtime. Place the meat or fish and the marinade in a resealable plastic bag, pop it into the refrigerator, and flip the bag once or twice during the day if you can; the food will be ready when you are. When you use a marinade made with an acid, such as lemon juice or vinegar, which actually begins cooking the food, pre-prep may or may not work for you, since meat should sit for less than 2 hours, fish for only 30 minutes or so.

• Chop vegetables. “Onions, peppers, broccoli, zucchini, squash — they can all be chopped ahead,” says caterer Peter Callahan of Callahan Catering, in New York City. “Just cover them with a damp paper towel to keep the cut ends from drying out, then refrigerate.” If you won’t need the vegetables for up to 12 hours, pop them, towel and all, into a plastic bag. (Onions and other frequently used vegetables can be chopped, then frozen in plastic for 3 weeks.) – post by joel

• egetables and fruits that brown when cut can be stored in the refrigerator in a bowl of ice water with a squeeze of lemon — “overnight for meaty vegetables, like potatoes and fennel; a few hours for soft fruits, like pears and apples,” says Kurt Beadell, the creative director of the Portland, Oregon, restaurant-caterer Salvador Mollys.
   – post by joel

Howto: Use rtorrent like a pro « Motho ke motho ka botho  Annotated

This time, instead of introducing you to rtorrent nice and easy, like I did with cplay, I’m going to give you a brief tour, and then I’ll show you something very cool you can do with it. rtorrent is an amazing, complex, powerful program that is at the same time sleek, clean, comprehensive and ultralight — and I’m giving you just one small idea of its potential.

• But first, let’s scratch the surface. Like a lot of console-driven programs, the startup screen for rtorrent is … rather dry. – post by joel

• To add a torrent, press return and navigate to the torrent file. In this example, I’m using the latest HYPE album, “Just a Catwalk from Heaven,” from Jamendo. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, but it’s a free and legal download and it makes for a good example. – post by joel

Sleep Your Way to Better Fitness – lifehack.org  Annotated

One of the biggest motivators to getting exercise is simply to be rested, healthy and energetic – impossible without enough sleep. This is simple and basic, like most of what the Zen masters taught. Science teaches that it takes a certain amount and quality of sleep to:

• Most people fall off the exercise wagon after about three weeks. Their motivation for it crashes when they do not maintain or change to healthy sleeping habits. – post by joel

The real cost of bottled water

George Orwell: 12 Writing Tips  Annotated

 George expressed a strong dislike of totalitarian governments in his work, but he was also passionate defender of good writing.  Thus, you may want to hear some of George’s writing tips.*

• 1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

   – post by joel

The end of e-mail: discover new ways to stay in touch – Independent Online Edition > Sci_Tech  Annotated

The problem with all those messages was clear. “Eighty-five per cent
were totally not important to my job,” Lennard says. His bank was well
aware of the statistics about e-mail overload, and that too much information
harms productivity. One study from Hewlett-Packard, for instance, found that
workers constantly distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a temporary
10-point fall in their IQ – more than twice that found in studies of the
impact of smoking a joint.

• Whether at home or the office, all of our inboxes are overflowing. Even after spam filters have removed the obviously unnecessary pest mails, many of us are reeling under the sheer weight of new messages. In a recent poll at the IT news site Silicon.com, 33 per cent of respondents said they receive between 51 and 100 e-mails a day. In a similar poll two years ago, that figure was 23 per cent.

   – post by joel

Architectural miracles of nature (//STATiC)

Chinese flip flop: so cheap, so dangerous (29 pics) (//STATiC)

Kitchen Soap » Blog Archive » Slides from ‘Capacity Planning for LAMP’ talk at MySQL Conf 2007  Annotated

This was a fun talk. I saw a lot of nods in the audience when I mentioned things pertaining to social

O’Reilly Radar > Web 2.0 and Databases Part 1: Second Life  Annotated

From my end, the worst MySQL moment was when, in the midst of a colo move we decided that we could bring the system back up before we had moved our slave database. After all, what are the odds of the primary going down in the 2 hours it would take to schlep the slave over and bring it up? Apparently the odds were 100%.

Like everybody else, we started with One Database All Hail The Central Database, and have subsequently been forced into clustering. However, we’ve eschewed any of the general purpose cluster technologies (mysql cluster, various replication schemes) in favor of explicit data partitioning. So, we still have a central db that keeps track of where to find what data (per-user, for instance), and N additional dbs that do the heavy lifting. Our feeling is that this is ultimately far more scalable than black-box clustering. Right now we’re still in the transition process, so we remain vulnerable to overload. As Cory mentioned, we’re moving to an HTTP-based internal communication model in order to improve our flexibility.

• Like everybody else, we started with One Database All Hail The Central Database, and have subsequently been forced into clustering. However, we’ve eschewed any of the general purpose cluster technologies (mysql cluster, various replication schemes) in favor of explicit data partitioning. So, we still have a central db that keeps track of where to find what data (per-user, for instance), and – post by joel