Anglerfish in almond sauce

Excellent seafood recipe. The fish looks ugly as hell, my wife was protesting to choose it instead of the usual stuff ;) – but at the end she agreed that the fish tastes great.
anglerfishes
* 700g anglerfish
* 4tbsp olive oil
* flour
* 30 almonds (without skin)
* 2 cloves of garlic
* 1 slice of bread (without crusts)
* 1/2 tsp saffron
* 1 small glass of white wine
* 1 small onion chopped
* 1 medium tomato peeled and chopped
* 100ml water or fish stock
* salt and pepper
* fresh parsley
1. Cut the fish into chunks, salt it and set aside for 10 mins
2. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and add the fish to the oil and fry it quickly until it browns on both sides then remove from the pan
3. Add the almonds, garlic and bread - fry until golden over a medium heat
4. Place the garlic, bread, almonds, saffron and white wine in a blender and mix until smooth
5. Fry the chopped onion and tomato until softened then add the sauce from the blender together with the water or stock - stir well
6. Finally return the fish pieces to the pan and simmer in the sauce for about 20 mins
7. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve

The recipe itself was taken from:
http://www.euroresidentes.com/euroresiuk/Recipies/fish/anglerfish-almond-sauce.htm

Some good news about Latvia

Since recently Latvia has been famous for storming the bottom-line of the country-comparing lists (even bad PR is still PR?), it is a good feeling to occasionally make it to the top of some.
1. Second place worldwide with regard to internet upload/download speed, according to speedtest.net results:
http://www.speedtest.net/global.php#0
2. Latvia has “lowest retail prices for mobile voice services in the EU with just €0.04 average price per minute compared to an EU average of €0.13″ according to an European Commission report released yesterday.

Bunny suicides

Didn’t know a book dedicated to bunny suicides exists…

My personal favorite:
bunny_suicide_tv_remote
see more

Natan, thanks for the link ;)

Prima guide pdf password crack (encryption key crack)

If anyone has trouble with the awful Prima PDF reader (it’s incredibly slow), just locate the PDF file from the program files entry of the guide. It is open-password protected. Fortunately, for now they use 40-bit encryption, which is no problem for
“Advanced PDF Password Recovery v5 0 Pro DOA rar”
Pass key found in ~12 hours of processing on my PC. Enterprise version of the soft could do it in some minutes, ElcomSoft claims.

Btw. – the developers/sellers of the password recovery programs maybe should rethink their selling model. Now they try to sell a program that does crack passwords, for a relatively high price (price range 49eur – 399eur for this particular product). As most users (like myself) need to crack just 1 document, or some documents at most, it would be nice to have an option that cracks a password/key for a given document, for a smaller price (5 euros or so). I mean they can now use cloud computing solutions like Amazon EC2
The only problem with the model is that password protected documents are usually sensitive – which was not the case here.

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Google search screen usage – FAIL

The way Google Search looks on a widescreen, is a FAIL. Don’t know if this is due to the recent redesign or not, but I noticed the annoyance yesterday.

There are of course solutions like http://www.digitalalchemy.tv/2007/05/searching-google-in-widescreen-two.html , but that’s still hacking which should not be necessary.

Simpsons S21E20 – ke$ha tik-tok

The Simpsons S21E20 is the nicest one since a long time – a must see ;)

Myths and typos

It appears this guy and his powers resulted of a typo or probably a joke gone uncontrollable:

Read the other stories about typos, it’s quite interesting
http://www.cracked.com/article_18517_the-7-most-disastrous-typos-all-time.html

Facebook graph API, open social network & linked data

I am very excited about the recent announcement of Facebook: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api . It is very close to what I imagined writing the linkedPIM specification. I have some remarks though:

  • semantics still need to be better captured, using JSON does not solve anything – I would use an OWL model to define the standard
  • the model will need to be extended, another argument for using RDF/OWL
  • Facebook seems to be preparing for competing with linkedin, which is very natural imho I base this assumption on example dataset:
  • "work": [
    {
    "employer": {
    "id": 20531316728,
    "name": "Facebook"
    },
    "position": {
    "id": 111595812193665,
    "name": "Director, Product"
    },
    "start_date": "2009-08"
    },

  • profile model is really poor, it should be much more like in the address book (telephones etc) – base it on the vcard
  • they still try to keep the social web in frame of their own portal. it would be better to claim ownership of a protocol and semantic model which every portal can use (become the main layer in the service architecture)

P.S. The old “Chinese” curse is fulfilled. We are living in exciting times.

Crazy drivers

Some guys seem to try to get into next years Darwin awards, I suppose ;)

A Latvian guy brought an undetonated mine to the police station with his bicycle (article in Latvian).
http://www.diena.lv/lat/politics/hot/kads-ridzinieks-ar-riteni-uz-zemessardzi-atved-minu

A father of four has been banned from driving for three years after he was caught behind the wheel of a toy Barbie car while drunk.
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/posted/archive/2010/04/19/father-banned-from-driving-after-being-caught-drunk-behind-wheel-of-toy-barbie-car.aspx

Ryanair electronic equipment policies

Frak you Ryanair.
Going to Riga and back this weekend, I was twice denied to use my HTC Hero in airplane mode to play Sudoku (the flight attendant was aware that it’s in flight mode, he just referred to a policy).

  • if there are working phones not in flight mode in your pockets – no problem
  • if you use a laptop with WIFI activated and/or built in GSM module – no problem
  • if you consume as many alcohol as possible because of the boring flight (that was not me, FYI, but just because had to drive a car afterwards) – no problem

other complaints (this included) nicely compiled, totally agree to all
http://puckstownlane.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/i-want-to-be-proud-of-ryanair-but-they-make-it-impossible/