Tonight I cooked a dish with Belgian andive. I saw this vegetable at Whole Foods when I was there for lunch, and it reminded me of a delicious dish, witlof met ham, that we'd eat in Holland sometimes.

The ham was a little too sweet for my liking but the dish turned out great.

The plant that I had at work for a while but then brought home, was sick 18 months years ago, but it doing much better now. The other day we noticed it is budding a completely new branch.

Yesterday afternoon I helped someone move house.

When we lived in Haarlem, the Netherlands we had a beautiful cactus; a present from my grandmother. The full name is Stapelia Grandiflora, or Starfish for short.

Several years ago I found a starfish at a local store but it was sick. I bought it for $1 and tried to revive it for several weeks, but all the cuttings were infected.

I'm going to the Netherlands in a few weeks and when making my list of things I'd like to bring back to the States I regretted once again that I couldn't bring the starfish. I searched for starfish on-line and found it at the Tucson Gardener, a store in Arizona.

The plants arrived yesterday, with a very nice letter from Dave, the owner, and the plants are healthy and strong. I've put them in water for the roots to develop.

Today is a study day, and I'm reading up on HTML5. We do a lot of user interface development for my product, and I've always had a strong preference for industry standards above proprietary products such as Flex and SilverLight.

HTML5 has some cool features but the transition to the full spec in the industry will take a while. However, many aspects are already supported by major browsers. Incidentally Secha, a Javascript library we chose for my product at work two years ago, is making a major push into HTML 5/CSS3 and today released a new product to support their vision.

I'm reading "HTML5 for Web Designers" by Jeremy Keith, a great introduction. I'm at the car dealership today to get some major maintenance done. They're fixing the breaks, battery, the engine cooling system... a big job.

In a corner of a small shopping center in San Jose, not far from highway 101, you'll find "Ori Deli, Dutch and Indonesian groceries". Ori Deli, owned by Robert Tan, is a great place for an Indonesian meal and Dutch shopping.

Nasi rames

The left part of the building is the restaurant. The furniture is in diner style with 30 seats. There are Indonesian posters and decorations on the wall.

The menu consists of classic Indonesian dishes, all home-made. The Nasi Rames comes with steamed rice with beef opor, sambal goreng tahu, spiced potato strings, serundeng, mixed pickled vegetables and sambal, topped with satés and kroepoek (shrimp chips).

The nasi smells delicious, with a small whif of trassi. "We don't use too much", says Tan, "because most Americans don't like it". The sate is excellent and served with a great peanut sauce.

The store and restaurant offer a high level of personal service. The chef/owner takes your order and cooks your meal, using ingredients that he picks up from the store. "We cook the authentic way", says Mr. Tan, who enjoys talking about Indonesian culture and food.

The store has been in existence for over 30 years. Tan says business is slower than it used to be years ago since many of the older generation of Dutch-Indonesians are no longer around. He gets a fair amount of Dutch visitors, who come looking for Dutch items in his store.

The restaurant and the store are connected to each other, so while you wait for your food you can walk around and do some shopping.

Groceries

The groceries section has a large selection of Dutch and Indonesian products. There’s a large selection of drop and Dutch sweets, Honig soups and Delftware. There’s a large selection of Indonesian spices and condiments, and fresh made kroepoek is available for sale.

Ori Deli
5479 Snell Ave
San Jose, California
http://www.orideli.com/

I like to joke: "how can a country that put a man on the moon be so incapable of producing good bread?" An exaggeration, of course; there is plenty of good bread available if you know where to look, but in general Dutch bread is much better than American bread.

My yardstick is the bakery in Middenmeer: a small village bakery which creates amazing breads daily, like bakeries throughout the Netherlands.

This weekend I found a bread that is as good as the bread in Middenmeer: an honest whole-grain bread with seeds. Sure enough, it is produced in a German bakery (Guglehupf) and is called "Copenhagen multigrain".

I finished my French book today and in the afternoon visited Belen and Esteban. We went for a long walk in the late afternoon, just like yesterday.

I installed the second beta release of Drupal 7 on my OpenBSD server. Over-all, the beta looks very solid. This morning I spent some time testing and porting modules from version 6 to 7.

One thing I ran into is that Drupal 7 now requires PDO extension to be installed on your server. During the installation I saw this error message (I'm running OpenBSD 4.5):

"Your web server does not appear to support any common PDO database extensions. Check with your hosting provider to see if they support PDO (PHP Data Objects) and offer any databases that Drupal supports."

Here are the steps I took to install these PDO database extensions on my OpenBSD server:

As root, run this:

pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/packages/i386/php5-pdo_mysql-5.2.8.tgz

To complete the installation add the following two extension to your php.ini (for me, /var/www/conf/php.ini).

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so

Restart Apache and you're good to go.

Wired had a fun video today about a machine, made from Lego, that can build Lego objects.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/legobot:

"Here’s how the MakerLegoBot works: A feed system that’s about two-and-a-half feet tall and can hold about 35 bricks connects to the LegoBot. The object that the MakerLegoBot is to assemble is designed in MLCad, a modeling program. A Java app that runs on a PC takes the file from the MLCad software, determines a set of print instructions and sends those instructions over USB to the LegoBot.

The machine retrieves a brick from the feed system and places it in the exact location where it should be. It uses an axle-based release mechanism to leave the brick in place."