☃ Contrary to last year, it’s white christmas in Cologne. Merry Christmas!

For the christmas season, let’s put cinnamon and apples into our muffins. You could leave them aside, then you get generic muffins. Of course, you could add other ingredients, like blueberries, for variation. Ingredients (for 12 muffins): 360 g flour 15 g baking powder 1 tea spoon salt 140 g sugar 90 ml vegetable oil (preferrably rapeseed oil) 200 ml milk 2 eggs 2 small or one large apple 20 g cinnamon, ground Calories: It’s winter.

Nice harvest: I’ve grown four varieties of chilis, Jellybean, Fatalii, Bih Jolokia (also known as Bhut Jolokia or Naga Jolokia), and Royal Gold. All four are very hot, Bih Jolokia extremely so. Time to prepare some spicy-hot dishes. Recipes to follow …

Just for the record, first snowfall in Cologne on the morning of 2010-11-26.

Die Piraten haben auf ihrem Bundesparteitag Folgendes beschlossen: Der Zwang zum geschlechtseindeutigen Vornamen ist abzuschaffen. (nebst viel weiterem Irrsinn). Ich kann dabei nur an eines denken: Ich möchte, dass ihr … dass ihr mich von jetzt an Loretta nennt. Es gibt wohl nur noch eine ernstzunehmende Oppositionspartei: Die Partei Die Partei. (Was einigermaßen schade ist – im Bereich Netzpolitik hätte es wirklich viel zu tun gegeben.)

Working on bad legacy code damages your brain. Encountering too many global variables without any use made me think about how an evil person (not me, of course) could make the life of his fellow programmers into hell. I think I found an especially mean-spirited way. Suppose you’ve inherited an inscrutable mess of code that you are expected to modify. While trying to make sense of it, you encounter lots of global variables; some of them are used (although you’re not sure why your predecessor chose to do it that way), but one of them is not.

Somehow, I couldn’t find a decent JS op-pred cheat sheet for printing out and pinning to the wall. Therefore, I made one pro bono. Without further ado, here it is: JavaScript operator precedence cheat sheet [PDF, 18 KiB].

A somewhat unconventional pasta salad. Ingredients: Pasta, e. g. Fusilli Prosciutto di Parma Gorgonzola cheese Pistachios Olives Fresh basil Olive oil Aceto balsamico Salt Freshly-ground pepper Calories: Quite a lot. I’ve discovered an alternative way of burning calories: long-distance cycling. Perhaps you want to try it, too. Preparation: Boil salted water, put pasta in it, let it boil gently. Cut ham into strips, dice Gorgonzola cheese, chop pistachios, tore basil leaves, halve olives.

I once hated JavaScript. I do so no longer. It is actually a quite decent language, a combination of Scheme and Self. But this heritage is buried, and not easily visible at first. But once you get the hang of it, working in JavaScript can be fun. You just have to throw some misconceptions overboard, and learn to work with the grain of the language (I wholeheartedly recommend Douglas Crockford’s book JavaScript: The good parts.

This is a very simple recipe, and quickly made. But it’s very delicious (cream and bacon, hmmmm …). Ingredients: Pasta, e. g. Fusilli Bacon Peas (canned or frozen are fine) Cream Parmesan cheese Calories: A lot. Think about it: cream, bacon, added carbohydrates … so go running while the winter is still a distant threat on the horizon. Preparation: The pasta takes the longest, so boil water, put pasta in it, let it boil gently.