Michael's musings

Thu, 25 Jun 2009

BBQ Pizza Recipe

My wife wrote this in a facebook post... while we were watching TV, and I thought it was worth sharing. We first learnt this recipe from a LCBO magazine.

In a jug with 3/4 cup warm water, dissolve 1 packet yeast and 1 teaspoon sugar let it become frothy when it is frothy, add 1/2 Tablespoon of olive oil (extra virgin) spoon not scoop out 1 1/4 cups Tipo 00 flour (found at Italian shops) pour it onto a board and make a well, add a pinch of (sea) salt.

Pour the yeast mixture in to the centre bit by bit working it in moving flour in to middle to incorporate work with flour dusted hands knead dough a few minutes place in a flour dusted bowl & on the top of dough cover with a cloth and let sit in a dark corner of counter 1/2 hr or so.

Divide dough into up to 3 pieces ( you can do 1, 2 or 3) and roll out to desired thickness without it breaking. You can go very thin (2mm or so) if you use the Tipo 00 flour.

Heat grill both sides hot. Very hot. Crank it. When my temperature gauge says 700F, it's ready. We actually had one of the (plastic) handles on the side of our BBQ melt off.

{You will later turn one side down to low when putting pizzas with ingredients on on to the grill}

Brush the rolled out dough with olive oil on one side, and immediately place oil side down 60 seconds. You will have to experiment as different BBQs are different, so have extra dough, or have a back-up meal plan.

Remove from BBQ, (pop on another dough if you have one), and oil the side that was not oiled, (it should be already up), flip it oil down, and grill 15 seconds just to set it.

(In the original recipe, where you aren't using Tipo flour, then flip it over to the cooler side, and let it hang there)

Remove from BBQ, when side 2 (the one currently cooking), just starts to cook. You will finish cooking it later.

Do not flip the dough. Put on your sauce or oil on the side that is cooked the most, the least cooked side will go back on the low heat side.

Put on your ingredients, place back onto the grill on the low heat side with the other side on high cook until the cheese begins to melt (don't pile on a lot) make sure crust is not burning. You need to keep the lid closed, and you need to keep the hot side cranked to keep the heat above up. You can cook more doughes on the hot side, but keep the lid closed as much as possible. If you have help, have someone else open the lid just enough to slide the new dough in/out.

Wed, 17 Jun 2009

Gizmo5 SIP client

Preferring open standards (SIP) to closed systems (Skype), I have been trying the Gizmo Project "Gizmo5" SIP client. It didn't work for along time due to some bugs in the Pulse/libao that were fixed upstream, but debian never considered a bug to release a patch for etch. It started working again in lenny.

I haven't figured out how to properly set my audio device in kphone to be my USB headset. aplay -L says:

marajade-[~] mcr 1102 %aplay -L
front:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
front:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

but I'm unclear what to put into the kphone box, and it does not give me a list of available devices like Gizmo does.

Well, gizmo lets me register to my office's Asterisk PBX, and it does give me a nice list, but I just discovered two problems:

* I can not get DTMF ("Touch Tones") to work through the SIP interface. No setting (inband) or outband (RFC2823) seem to work when I tried to call Porter Airlines, or one of the free conference call systems.

* I started to investigate, and was surprised to see that the registration for my extension did not come from my desktop's IP address. Rather, it came from the GIZMO project! Specically I was registered from:

cirrus*CLI> sip show peer 403
..
  DTMFmode     : rfc2833
  Addr->IP     : 198.65.166.131 Port 5060
  Useragent    : LinGizmo/1.7.07 (Gizmo-s2n1)
  Reg. Contact : sip:17471318555@proxy01.sipphone.com:5060
..
marajade-[~] mcr 1103 %host 198.65.166.131
131.166.65.198.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer northamerica.sipphone.com.

This really surprised me, and may well also explain the DTMF problems. I tried to call Porter Airlines via the GIZMO project, but the call did not complete, so I couldn't tell who was at fault.

This also concerned me because it means that GizmoProject can potentially listen in on my company calls, as they are a registered proxy. They also may get to see (and record?) my SIP passwords which otherwise should not be passing in the clear. (Of course, they could do this anyway as they provided the program I am running, but this is a new tack that I didn't realize)

I shall be building kphone from source, to see if perhaps I can figure out how to properly set the audio I/O device properly.

Mon, 08 Jun 2009

LeftHand networks - not a useful answer

I generally prefer freely available (in the sense of beer and speech) open source solutions that I can tinker with, but I recognize that sometimes a complete, well packaged and well supported solution is a win. I find it especially nice if I know it is really well packaged open source. As a friend says, "I do not do my own dentistry"

I came across LeftHand Networks <http://lefthandnetworks.com/> last fall, and was excited that they were doing a sales presentation in Ottawa in March. What they offer is a virtualized SAN. You run a special virtual machine on each of you diskful physical machines, give them the bulk of your local disk space and these Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) communicate together than present an iSCSI target. The contents of the disks are replicated (RAID'ed) between machines, so even if one machine goes down, then disk contents continue to be available.

You then point your virtualization infrastructure at this iSCSI target and spin up more virtual machines as guests. This solves an annoyance about the various "live migration" or "vMotion" facilities: you need to have a SAN to make it possible, and the SAN is now a single point of failure, and can be really expensive.

LeftHand supports ESX(i) at present, but my guess is that you can run qemu-img on the vmdk files and boot the thing under XEN. It's clearly a Linux system inside, and they might even have para-virtualization support in (2.6.26+ kernels have that available), so it might "just work" under XEN, even without HVM (VT/Pacifica).

You can download the appliance and run them, and then you tell two of them to join the same group, and they can replicate disks, and you get 30 days of demo license to do this... I'm at day 15, and it was time to find out what the solution will cost.

I got a quote: $5839CDN. Wow. You can buy physical SANs for that price. You can hire consultants to setup Openfiler for you for that price.

I think LeftHand/HP has missed the boat here. I expected to pay $500 to $900 per system and/or site. (I can see many licensing options here).