Android goodness

We're now fully up with the android! Both of us have an Android handset, I've got the old school HTC Magic, and Jen has the HTC Legend.

I've written a GPS Speedo app for android, works well and was good fun to code up. Go find it at

http://code.google.com/p/gpspeedo

Gluten Free Cake recipe!

Basically a pound cake,

1 Cup Gluten Free Flour (see: http://pawarren.blogspot.com/2010/06/useful-gf-flour-mix.html )
1 Cup Butter, approx 250g
1 Cup Sugar, raw or caster
1 Cup Milk
1 Tbs Baking Powder
1 Egg

- Cream butter and sugar
- Add flour, Baking Powder and Egg
- Mix up a bit
- add Milk while mixing
- Beat until fluffy, doesn't take too long.
- Batter is quite thick!
- Spoon/scrape into a lined or oiled tin
- bake at 150 C for around 40 minutes, until the outside is golden.

The cake will be very floppy and flimsy. I leave it out overnight which lets the Xanthan gum set nicely and give a firm cake.

Useful GF flour mix

2/3 cup Rice flour
1/3 cup Potato Flour
1 Tsp Xanthan gum

I'll experiment with a bit of Tapioca starch in my next attempt, but the above works really well for just about everything. Needs a touch more raising agent than wheat flower.

Simple Gluten Free Bread Take 1

1 cup rice flour
1 ½ table spoons sugar
1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
½ cup milk
1/8 cup vegetable oil

Mix dry ingredients, beat egg, add wet ingredients to dry. Mix thoroughly by hand. Pour mixture into a lightly greased loaf tin, let it rise for 30 minutes or so, bake for around 30 minutes at 180C, until the top is lightly browned and it's baked all the way through.

It comes out really crumbly, but very tasty. I'll have to research what to use to make it less crumbly before I can really use this bread as toast or sandwich bread, but it's quite good to crumble into soups.

openssl invocation for self signed certs.


openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt


Something I can never seem to remember

Gluten Free Ale recipe

Roast Buckwheat at 190 C for 1 hour. Leave lightly covered in tray overnight.

Heat 10L of water to 80 C, put buckwheat into a steeping bag, and into water for half an hour.

Remove grain bag from water. I managed to keep a stable 78C, made the wort a nice dark colour, I don't think it's going to be a dark beer tho, need to roast until the smoke pouring out of the kitchen is too much, not just the smoke out of the oven ;)

Bring water to boil, add 2Kg of sorghum syrup, wait for hot break (which isn't big with sorghum!)

Add 10g SuperPride (15% AA) hops start timer

At 45 Minutes, add 15g of Kent Goldings

At 45 Minutes, add 1Kg Sorghum Syrup, 500g Dextrose, 1 Whirlfloc tablet.

At flameout, add 15g of Kent Goldings

Place in tub of iced water, setting up a vigorous whirlpool, and let stand for half an hour.

Pour into fermenter, aerating vigorously. cool to pitching temperature by filling to 23L with cold water.

Add S-04 yeast.

Fermented for 15 days, then racked to bottling bucket with 3/4 cups dextrose in 2 cups boiled water. At bottling, tastes very sweet, nice light hoppy aroma.

OG: 1045
FG: 1012

This ended up being a very mild beer, a little sweet, but eminantly drinkable with subtle flavour and aroma from the hops. A little more of a stronger hops taste for the enxt one I think!

Solaris Express samba vs sharesmb

I've found that Solaris Express CE has been particularly crap at keeping my ZFS bucket shared out via smb. using


zfs set sharesmb=on bucket/Media


worked for a while, but every now and again I wouldn't be able to mount it from any machines on the network, and logging in to the solaris box and doing


sharemgr list


would hang, as would any zfs set things, a reboot would fix that for a while.

So I got sick of that and decided to use SAMBA instead. The tricks with this were to create the config file at


/etc/sfw/samba/smb.conf

stop the zfs sharing:


zfs set sharesmb=off bucket/Media
svcadm disable smb/server


add a password for the relevant user:


smbpasswd -a strageattractor
blah blah


and finally, start the samba server:


svcadm enable samba


Done, and it's been up like this for months now without trouble!