Had a great turkey dinner today. The brined turkey really works well, although it makes the dark meat taste almost cured. The white meat really comes out super well. Did it on the Rotisserie that we got. Took 2 1/2 hours for a 12 lb bird.

Best tip of all. Connie cuts a little hole in the skin to put the wingtip in, then you can tie a string around the wings. With a rotisserie, the wings kind of wiggly around and it is hard to get them to stay together.

CSS Introduction. Ok, I'm finally going to make my sites look good and to do that I need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). AGain, thanks to google, here is the top CSS tutorial. Wish me luck!

blo.gs. This is the second biggest blog trakcing site. It is amazing, There are currently 54,661 weblogs being tracked for 886 users. Wow!

I like this site because it shows what is being updated in real time. And you can see the whole community there. Plus there is a neat ie5 pane that you can use to brows the entire world as it changes. Very cool.

Sage, Orange, and Clove Rotisserie Turkey BBQ Recipe
It's Thanksgiving Time, so it is time to try some new recipes, I've got a new gas grill. Never thought I'd cave on that, but now I can rotisserie, here's a recipe I'll adapt to the event. I'm doing a brined turkey with this, but the rub here looks great

One whiff of the orange, clove, and sage in this recipe is guaranteed to drive the neighbours wild. If you don’t have a rotisserie, grill this 12- to 14-pound turkey over Indirect Medium heat for 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 hours.
For the rub:
2 tablespoons granulated orange peel
1 tablespoon dried sage
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 turkey, 12 to 14 pounds
2 small oranges, washed and dried
12 whole cloves
6 medium garlic cloves, crushed
1 bunch fresh sage, tied with cotton string

To make the rub: In a small bowl combine the rub ingredients. Set aside.
Remove the pop-up timer, as well as the neck, giblets, and any excess fat from the turkey and discard. Rinse the turkey, inside and out, under cold water and pat dry with paper towels.
Pierce the oranges several times with a knife and insert six whole cloves into each of them. Put the clove-studded oranges, garlic, and sage into the turkey cavity. Truss the turkey with cotton string. Pin the neck skin flap to the body with two or three small trussing needles.
Skewer the turkey lengthways through the oranges and centre on the spit. Rub the entire exterior with the rub mixture, pressing it into the skin. Set the spit on the rotisserie and let the turkey rotate over Indirect Medium heat until the internal temperature reaches 170°F in the breast and 180°F i the thickest part of the thigh, 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 hours.

Turn off the rotisserie. Wearing barbecue mitts, carefully remove the spit from the rotisserie and place it on a cutting board. Loosely cover the turkey with aluminium foil and allow to rest for at least 20 minutes. Remove the spit and discard the oranges, garlic, and sage. Carve the turkey into serving pieces. Serve warm.

Makes 12 to 14 servings.

Thanks to www.weber.com

Using Blogrolling's PHP option on your PHP enabled weblog.
I'm converting to using PHP so that the blogrolling stuff can be read by google. This works on all the geekfishing.net related sites, but not for my current tongfamily.com since it doesn't have PHP :-(

If your blog supports PHP and allow_url_fopen you can call the data from Blogrolling directly bypassing JavaScript. This has the distinct advantages that it loads text into your page before display so it can be read by search engines and other robots that can't read the JavaScript code. To use this you must know your way around PHP. I won't answer any support questions on how to set-up your blog to use PHP or similar tech support requests. That's what you pay your ISP for.

Rss Readers. Another thing to study are RSS readers. Since all these blogs we now have generate RSS, it would be kind of nice to consume them as well.

lgf: the lowest of the low. A great site and also has a nice PHP script to show you dynamically where people are coming from to get to your site. I'll slam into tongfamily, geekfishing, etc. soon.

hitormiss.org : Daily Crawl. Another incredibly cool cgi script thing that I found on Anita's blog. This lets you know where you've been by the time that you visited. Blogrolling is great, but this is even cooler.

This is basically blogrolling, but happens on your server, not in some meta-server. The most incredibly thing about this program is that it is actually 14KB. I didn't know anything could be useful and that size.

Converting to Movable Type

Just a note to folks, I'm converting this blog over to MovableType. I'm not going to be updating this as much over the next week before I do the full flip. If you want to see the upcoming blog, checkout New Tong Family.

For a while I'll run the posts in parallel, but not sure I'm going to be that disciplined about it. MovableType is just so much nicer.

Random Thanksgiving Thoughts

We all have much to be thankful for. My biggest this year is that I can sit and think with guys like Ludwig about what the next big thing is. Here are a couple of observations, just an outline, I'll fill in later, but wanted to get thoughts down.

1. The miracle of Sourceforge. Open Source drives modular code. You have to think about it from day one. The code is very small (gallery.sourceforge.net) is a 1MB program in total, but the desktop loader is 2.5MB. What do you make of that. Folks should have an internal sourceforge.
2. Building great consumer products. It's about hardware and software integration in consumer products. In personal productivity, it's about applications and operating system.
3. The great pillars of consumer products. For desktop productivity, it was spreadsheets, a narrow, but great need and word processing, a broader more diffuse one. For today's consumer, I think it is about gaming (like spreadsheets, same deep but narrow at 30% penetration) and photography of all sorts. The ether of the last revolution was email, in this world it is blogging.

Gallery :: your photos on your website. On geekfishing, we are using Gallery now for photos. Seems like a nice applications. Here's a note on how to password protect individual albums, so some can be public and others require registration and only certain people are allowed to see it. See the very last post as a nice way to do this

Geek Fishing. Finally got this master site up and running. For those of you who are wondering about the name. It refers to our boating trips on Lake Washington. Instead of fishing for, well fish, we go looking for errant 802.11 wireless signals. It is amazing what you can see on a cruise on the water. Hence the term Geek Fishing.

As, our little Calvin says, the geeks are winning!

More on getting photo gallery to work right: Gallery

Right now I'll stay focused on getting a decent photo gallery thing running. Went through the basic MovableType File Upload stuff. it is OK for a few photos, but it wouldn't really scale to larger sets. I need something that will take my c:\pictures directory and be smart about doing essentially a projection on this up to the web with thumbnails, etc. So, I'm off to get Gallery running on my non-standard, Apache on Windows installation. Here are the detailed notes:

1. PHP Gallery. Take the download from there and extract it into the main Apache directory. This is c:\program files\apache group\apache\htdocs on my server.
2. Follow the readme and edit httpd.conf with the directory override.
3. Follow the instructions when you execute http://yourhost/gallery/setup. BTW, this is a great way to do setup, actually have it check to see what is available.
4. Mod_rewrite.soApache for Windows doesn't have the rewrite_mod loaded by default, so download and edit httpd.conf and put it in the modules directory. BTW, if you net start apache and it fails, check the eventlog, it is pretty good about telling you what line of the httpd.conf failed. YOu have to add the lines: AllowOverride Options FileInfo LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so AddModule mod_rewrite.c
5. Netpbm. This is a download and then setting the path. You have to install from here as these are nicely tuned for Gallery and don't require recompilation.
6. JHead. These let you read the headers that digital cameras put on JPEGs. Very nice and convenient. It is just a DOS program, so you just copy it somewhere and remember the path. I used c:\program files\gallery\jhead.exe to be neat since I didn't want them in the htdocs file.
7. Unzip and . There are both unzip and zipinfo that it needs to process, so these are commandline DOS or Unix things that you have to download.
8. Cygwin. This is where unzip is as are lots fo the utilities that come with Unix, so that you can make Windows feel like Unix. A little confusing how it works, but it is pretty cool to install into c:\cygwin and have Unix with a BASH shell on Windows!
9. Gallery Remote. Install this Java desktop program to do drag and drop additions of photos.

Well, another late night, but it appears to work on my Windows/Apache machine. It is a better idea than Movable Type because it really is all about bulk photos rather than just one at a time. Only bummer is that it doesn't really have the notion of time and date and archiving like a blog. But, it is far more efficient for slamming massive pictures on the web and has a nice user interface too! Tomorrow I'll put it up on Geekfishing and then I'll have to spring for more disk space!

BTW I found blogdex - the weblog diffusion index. I need to start looking at RSS feeds and so forth at some point.

Tong Family gets a slight update

Did you notice that lots of the starter junk is gone from the front, And also search moved to the menu pane. Most current blogs have a tighter format than mine, so I'm gradually switching over. Next step is to start using (and learning CSS), so that I can move the menu pane to the right and also reducing font sizes. Most current webs look like 10 point at most. This site is 12 point.

Also, I'm going to remove the navigation bar that FrontPage creates and use the right pane instead for that to be like most blogs, then I'll be ready to move off of a FrontPage extensions required system to one that just needs PHP or Perl and Mysql.

Installing MovableType on Windows
MovableType Installation. This is a good list of things to do, although at 2 AM, things get a bit blurry. Main things are to get Apache loaded, then ActivePerl, then to hook Perl up with Apache by editing httpd.confg.

Instructions for Apache and Perl on Windows: Installing Apache. OK, on the way to inOn the way to installing MovableType on this machine, so I need to follow these directions. The tricky part is actually hooking up Apache and Perl together. Requires a couple of tricks. The most important is to install ActivePerl in the c:\usr directory so the path directive to /usr/bin/perl works properly in most scripts. Very clever!

boardom :: View topic - b2wap.php hack. Ok, a cool way to get the last set of posts from a b2 blog via a wap interface.

boardom :: View topic - [Request] People Who Are Not Logged In See Nothing. A good description from the author himself on how to get B2 to be private. Good for personal and family photos and news. Lots of different ways to do it. You could:

• Use .htaccess with apache
  
• Use the new filters command. The code is noted in the above post so that a there is a private tag to mark a particular post as private.
  
• There is setting categories correctly so that only certain people can see certain categories.

Getting a local Apache server to work on XP

I'm going to create a development server that mimics what is GeekFishing so here are some notes on how to make it all work similarly. This will also let me install things like the PHP DBG module that require major hacking that an ISP normally doesn't allow.

.htaccess on Windows. This is how to add .htaccess to Windows Apache.

Password protection

This has come up several times. So, here's quick tutorial. HTpassword generator. This is an all in one generator of htpassword which is a file you put in a web server to protect a particular directory.

Creating .htpassword. This is how you create a file.

Htpassword Line Generator. This is how you create a hash for the file itself, so there are no clear text passwords in .htpassword

PHP Editing and Debugging Freeware

I'm tired of using wordpad and sticking in echo and print_r statements in PHP to figure out what is going on, so here is a search for a good debugging environment for PHP. I spent hours tonight trying to get the debugger to work. Let's just say the freeware stuff is much less advanced than even sdb was during the early Unix days. Oh well:

Keith's PHP Editors. The top hit in google. This is the place to find a good editor. It is too large a list for me.

PHP Edit. The top google hit for PHP Editing. Google is so nice in that it orders things for you by popularity. I'm giving it a try now. I spent hours trying to get this to work. I finally got singlestepping to work but only by using the latest development release 0.7.86. The "stable release" 0.6 doesn't appear to have anything that functions properly. There is essentially no documentation on how to get this to work except for a Word document that is part of the help files. It only talks about setup. I only got the local version to work, not the version that let's you talk with a remote web server. Also, there are strange error messages and things that make it unclear. The worst part is the windowing behavior is very strange for the output windows. So, I'm still on the search. OTOH, it has a nice help function for writing code and a helper function for filling in arguments, etc. So, it is a darn nice editor, but not a great debugger.

PHP DBG. The top hit for a PHP Debugger. I noticed it is included in PHP Edit as well. This is the backend to phpedit and also phpcoder which I also tried with little success a month or so ago. The main issue is that you have to edit the extensions directory of PHP which is something I'm not sure Tranquil Hosting will let me do. So, perhaps I'll just have to debug locally.

Ide.php. The top google hit for PHP IDE ide.php. It is a web-based editor for quick development of server-side code. It offers a rapid prototyping environment, letting the user test and save snippets of code with minimal overhead. It doesn't have any debugging capability built-in.

MovableType Tips, Tricks and Traps

Continuing the search for incredible tips on MovableType. There are an amazing number of things to wade through. In order of discovery, these are: MOvable Type External Resources. Where my search first started. There are some very nice hacks here mainly by Kevin Shay and Brad Choate and Adam Kalsey. Plus some good site refereances and also things on desktop client tools. Still can't find a email2blog utility. There is im2blog but not email. Could be hacked but I'm amazed there isn't interest.

Brad Choate dot com. He seems to be an important guy in the MT blog world. Also has a very nice site. Like the design and the hacks he has.

Staggernation. A nice collection of plugpins not mentioned on Movable Type.

MovableBLOG. A really cool support Blog for MT.

[the girlie matters]. A very nice looking blog, plus some great tips and tricks on MT.

PDA Your Movable Type Blog
If you run a weblog using Movable Type, then you can easily make it available for PDA readers. It takes under 30 minutes to set it up.

Wow, Movable Type sure is beautiful. The only thing really missing is mail2blog, but here is blog2avantgo2pda

Wiki, Wiki

Wiki. Yet another strange technology for collaboration. Will it never end. This is some kind of content collaboration system.

Earthweb on Blogs. A good article about how IT should handle blogs and what they might be good for.

Scoop || What is Scoop?
Now that the search has begun, it is incredible how many blog and near-blog tools there are. There are photoblogs (see previous entry), there are bulletin board like things like PHP NUke and then there are things like scoop, which I'm just understanding...

Scoop is a "collaborative media application". It falls somewhere between a content management system, a web bulletin board system, and a weblog. Scoop is designed to enable your website to become a community. It empowers your visitors to be the producers of the site, contributing news and discussion, and making sure that the signal remains high.

A scoop site can be run almost entirely by the readers. The whole life-cycle of content is reader-driven. They submit news, they choose what to post, and they can discuss what they post. Readers can rate other readers comments, as well, providing a collaborative filtering tool to let the best contributions float to the top. Based on this rating, you can also reward consistently good contributors with greater power to review potentially untrusted content. The real power of Scoop is that it is almost totally collaborative.

Photolog in MovableType

FIVE STEP PHOTOLOG. Ah ha, this is how you do a photolog using MovableType. It is amazing how clever people can be. You basically overload the fields in MovableType so that the main image is in the main entry, description is in additional entry and the Thumbnail goes into the Excerpt. This technique should work anywhere where you have three fields like this. Too bad, b2/Cafelog doesn't, there is no excerpt, but I bet I can find three unused fields and then generate the right template.

I had a chance to study this and it is a good way to overload things. The main issue is that it is far from automatic. If this works OK, then I'll have to see about writing or finding a batch loader, that snarfs everything from a local folder, then shrinks them to web friendly (e.g., 100-200Kb) and creates the right entries.

Web Services are real

OK, I admit it, I don't understand the gigantic .net initiative at all, but I do get it when certain sites really do begin to act like services I can call. Here are a few:

1. Google Web APIs - Home. This is very cool, you can programmatically call Google via an XML RPC. Just need to register here and then see how it is used. MovableType uses this and I'll want it on tongfamily.com, etc.
2. Amazon Web APIs. A similar story with Amazon. These are now a MovableType plug-in as well.

Movable Type Installation Help. These are great instructions for how to turn blog templates (called blogplates) into MovableType compatible layouts. You can find these kind of layouts at Blogplates or from Miz Graphics

Blog Templates

Ludwig has given me the mission to become an expert of MovableType. There is alot to learn. I've through a.lifeuncommon.org which is probalby the most well designed site I've seen in a long time and stumbled onto these blog template sites:

1. Miz Graphics!. A general purpose site for templates.
2. . This is a webring of weblog/journal designs plus some information on how to implement them for your own personal journal.
3. Simple MovableType Templates. The basic choices from the authors of MovableType. It is neat to see how these are really just a set of style declarations unlike b2 Cafelog which mixes the content layout with the styles.

MSN Hotmail - Message
AT&T Broadband is an amazing company. They cut off my service two weeks ago when they silently updated their system. Had to spend a couple of hours figuring it out, then a journey to their service center in north Seattle. Told me I should have gotten something in the mail. Now it looks like I'm going to end up with two cable modems, given the email I just got. See below...and it will take them a year I'm sure to figure out they have spent more dollars on me...

From: "AT&T Broadband Customer Care"
Subject: *Important* Please read to ensure your cable modem service is not interrupted
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 14:14:16 -0700

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. IT WAS SENT FROM AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM AND REPLIES WILL NOT BE ANSWERED

Dear AT&T Broadband Internet Customer:

AT&T Broadband is dedicated to providing you the best in broadband services. As part of our ongoing commitment to service, we'd like to notify you of an important technology upgrade needed for your AT&T Broadband Internet service. To provide you with improved service capabilities and continued network stability, we are upgrading your cable modem. This new AT&T Broadband approved modem is the first step in offering you the next generation in high-speed cable Internet access. It will allow us to offer you a wider range of services and features that are not available with your current cable modem technology.

You will soon be receiving a new Motorola SB4200 cable modem in the mail, along with step-by-step self-installation instructions. Installation of the new modem is straightforward and will not require us to send a technician to your home. However, should you require assistance, a specialist from our Customer Care team will be available by phone to help you. Your new modem should arrive within 2-3 weeks. If you do not receive your modem within this timeframe, please contact Motorola's Customer Support at 1-800-436-2025.

As a token of our appreciation, you will receive a $5 credit to your AT&T Broadband Internet Service bill if you replace your cable modem by December 31, 2002. The credit should appear on your bill within two billing cycles.

We are committed to delivering the high standards of service and quality you've come to expect from AT&T Broadband. Thank you for your continued support.

Rain Tire Recommendations
From the Roadbikerider.com web site, some more winter tires to look at

HEY UNCLE AL: I've decided to start criterium racing a little early in the season. I live in California, so the weather is usually just wet, not icy or snowy. I'd like a recommendation for a tire that would have good traction on wet pavement. Just for reference, during the regular season I use Michelin Pro Race tires on a pair of Ritchey WCS wheels. -- Matthew B.
UNCLE AL FIRES BACK: Well, you just got a glowing recommendation for Vredestein Fortezzas from Tim in his letter above. I haven't tried those tires and, in fact, I don't ride much on wet roads here in high-and-dry Western Colorado. You should remember that when you ask for my all-wet recommendations.
But I do know of two tires specifically designed for cold-temperature and wet-road training and racing. These are the Michelin Axial Winter and the Continental 3000 4 Season. An ex-Motorola pro tells me the Michelins stick great in the rain.
Both manufacturers claim to use different, softer compounds for a better grip in wet/cold conditions. But this also causes these tires to wear pretty fast if you leave them on for riding in dry/warm conditions.
Both tires come in 700x20C and 23C. I recommend the 23s so you can run lower pressure, say 90-95 psi, for even better traction.

Bicycle Tires Updated

Here's an update from the bike tire explorations:

TUFO | Product Line. Saw this first on Sdeals. This is a tubular tire that fits on a clincher rim. Interesting idea. Weighs 335 grams but this includes the tube, so it compares with say 180 grams for a Veloflex Pave plus 70 grams for Michelin A1 tubes that I run and rim tape (my Ksyriums don't have these, but normally these are 20 grams). So, it is quite a bit heavier, but you can inflate it to 200 psi. The Elite Road is 315 grames and 25 pounds, so worth a try sometime.

Veloflex Pave. I've been running these for about two weeks now. Boy, are they fast. Much faster than the Continental GP 3000's I was running. Hopefully, these will last longer than 1500 miles as well. But, they are very, very slippery on the road in slick Seattle. These are 22mm tires not 23mm so are much smaller, weigh 180 grams (wow, that is light!) and can be pumped to 105-120 psi (wow!).

Vittoria Open All Weather. According to Brad, Lance Armstrong likes these an awful lot for when it is bad out. I might try these are some cyclocross tires. These are $70 from