Now that's slow food...

Last night as an experiment I decided to make Chinese hot-pot, creating a large spread of briefly seared but otherwise raw steak and chicken sliced very thinly, along with another of zucchini, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower heads, and a couple of sesame-based sauces, one sweet, one salty. For Kouryou-chan's sake, I also threw in a traditional honey mustard-- although not as good as usual; I didn't decrystallize the honey beforehand, and I used mayonnaise instead of sour cream. She didn't seem to mind. The broth I used was a quart of my home-made chicken stock, lightly salted with Thai fish sauce.

It took forever to eat, and everyone got to dip their spears into the hot pot. We were at the table for an hour, with plenty of time to talk about school, or work, or whatever. Which makes for a very nice family ritual. I may try for something more esoteric next time, and a better selection of sauces. I'm big on making sauces and dressings myself these days, especially since I have mastered the fine art of emulsification.

Republicans want to cut government. But they can't name a single specific program that they'd cut.

Enjoy!

[Hat tip: Sully]

A significant Django tool: storages

If you work with Django for any period of time, the day comes when you’ll be accepting outside data from your users: files, images, and the like.  Django provides only two places where you can store these items: in memory, or to a file.  Django storages provides for two more critical locations: BLOBs in your SQL database (which you may want to do– never know), and most importantly, Amazon AWS S3.  For my current work with a film library and catalog, having S3 be the storage solution has always been a bit of a kludge: producers would upload films to the server, and we’ve eventually get it into S3.  Now, with AWS S3, Django Storages backed with the incredible BOTO library makes the entire process unbelievably easy.

Storages also supports storing content in the database, CouchDB, FTP, or anything else you can imagine. And the source code makes for excellent examples.

Also, if you use django-storages, consider looking at many of the branches on bitbucket, because there are variants of it for S3 that disable the HTTPS default for Cloudfront, which was important for us at Indieflix. Not everything coming out of Cloudfront has to run through SSL.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com