Jalapeño Margarita Sorbet

Jalapeño Margarita Sorbet

• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• ~1/2 - 2/3 cup lime juice (4-6 limes)
• lime zest (couple of limes worth)
• 1/4 tequila
• 1/4 triple sec
• 3 jalapeño peppers, deseeded & deveined (use gloves!)

Puree the peppers & water well
Make the simple syrup: boil sugar & peppers/water for a minute or two then pull off the heat.
Beat the egg white, mix in the remaining ingredients (not the syrup yet)
Temper the lime/egg white mixture by adding a little bit at a time of the warm pepper syrup & mixing.
Mix everything, cool completely, then put in your ice cream maker.

This is really tasty... the peppers give it just a teensy bit of "wow" and some great flavor but nothing too overpowering. if you've done a good job deveining them.  I adapted this from a several different sorbet recipes online.  The egg white is supposed to help keep this smooth, creamy, and help it last a while in the freezer.  Not that this will stick around long enough :)

Converting Entrust Certs

Just a quick tip -- you can convert the PKCS#7 certificates that Entrust exports in a binary format (*.p7c) to an ascii format *.PEM file:

C:\OpenSSL\bin>openssl pkcs7 -in c:\bens_cert.p7c -inform DER -outform PEM -out c:\bens_cert.pem

References:
http://forum.pgp.com/pgp/board/message?board.id=46&thread.id=1148
https://www.sipit.net/CertToolsInstructions

iPhone OCR

There are most likely several applications for the iPhone that already do some of what this idea covers, but probably none that can pull it all together.

With all the power of the cloud/grid/global-supercomputer available via web api's, why not tap further into it with our mobile devices?  I was thinking along these lines earlier in the shower, mulling over Amazon's announcement of the Hadoop/MapReduce service and... eureka!

The iPhone could use a nice optical character recognition system.  But something more than just basic OCR.  Most OCR systems are far from perfect.  Just like most speech-recognition systems aren't perfect.  But imagine, if you will, an application that combined the two.  If you were able to use the phone's camera as a real-time video-feed while you read along "out loud," and pushed a stripe of the video frames, audio data, and accelerometer data (as you move the phone along while reading) to the cloud, it could feasible do a very *very* nice job of text recognition.

But why leave it at that?  Since you're 70% of the way there, why not add 2D barcode processing?  And since those barcodes have embedded information (and often so does text), why not give the application some convenience features while we're at it?  If capturing a URL, it could offer to launch Safari, post it to Delicious, or tweet it via bit.ly.  Phone number handling would be obvious.  In fact any captured text snippets could be pushed to several applications on the phone (somehow?) or Web 2.0 services.   Tie in geolocation and you'd have a great idea of what people are reading where, perhaps making this monetizable (if aggregated anonymously, of course).

Facial recognition might be stretching it a bit, but not a thought that's completely unreasonable.  Tie it in to Facebook and wow...  (business card capturing, anyone?)

So there you go code monkeys.  Get to work :)  And since I'd love to see something like this, consider the idea public domain (duh, it's on a blog) and All Rights Released -- although I'd it would be dandy if you'd mention me in the credits if this inspires you to go build your own.

Energy Efficient Elevators

While not anything necessarily "groundbreaking," I think that a building with several busy elevators could see a slight drop in power usage if they tweaked the settings so that the elevator doors stayed open slightly longer when it was lighter (less full).

Existential Moment

As I drove in to work this morning, with my wife and sick child at home behind me and my as-of-yet unfullfilling and more than a little frustrating job ahead of me... with the morning sun shining directly into my eyes... I had a somewhat existential moment. On a side note, I wish the taco trucks opened early so I could get huevos ranchero y chorizo in a warm tortilla.