Oh no you didn't

I made donuts.

I've been wanting to since this fall. I had some pumpkin baked, pulped and frozen, waiting for the right moment. Today, with Désirée home I thought "what a great activity to keep her occupied." Mixing up the batter together was fun, but I realised I didn't have enough oil so we headed down to the store to fetch it and she fell asleep in the stroller on the way home.

Which is just as well; hot oil and 2.5 year olds probably don't mix well.

The result: donuts which taste AWESOME! However, their texture is foul.

I blame 2 things: letting a batter containing baking powder wait on the counter for an hour. But mostly, my deep fryer. While it claims to up to 190C (~375F) during cooking I only highest I read was 135C (~275F) on my IR thermometer. So now we know why my fries take years to cook and are never crispy enough.

So, what should I do? Shell out $$$ to buy a new better deep fryer? Alton Brown claims none of them can get high enough temps. Fry in a pot on the stove and risk a spill and oil fire? While I am paranoid enough not to take my eyes off the pot, and my stoves hood and the granite counter top would probably prevent my house from burning down, I think I'll pass.

There is of course the third, geek option: modify the fryer. The problem is that the rheostat in it is sucktastic. Maybe I could add some resistance in series so that it would have a more favourable duty-cycle.

Or I could do what this guy did: short-circuit the controls in the fryer and use an external control, say a Lutron C-2000. What's more I could repurpose this for use with the heat plate, if ever end up building a smoker. The tech specs say "lights only, no appliances" but at 2000 watts, it should be more then enough to handle a fryer and would be WAY overrated for the hot plate, which is 600 watts according to my Killawatt.

Third option is of course a thermocouple, a relay and an Anduino.

Turns out a new fryer might be the cheapest option.

Now, about the title of this post. While googling I came across the KFC forum. It seems a bunch of people are obsessed about what Colonel Sander's original 11 herbs and spices were. Very few people knew. Until the Internet, a PR goof and many (I assume) test batches of chicken. And now everybody may know.

Why I hate the CPAN

(OK, actually I love the CPAN, but that now that I have your attention.)

Every time I write and upload a new distro, I dream of how it's going to make some toiling programmers life wonderful, the way POE, LWP and other bits of the CPAN give my life meaning. IKC and then POE::Component::Generic where my bids at taking over the world. Or at least a certain part of it.

However uploading a distro to the CPAN is something of a commitment. My code is going to live for several years/decades, if not forever. I also do not want to be like the CPAN authors that annoy me, with inadequate test coverage, poor doco and annoying holes in their feature set.

These three points intertwine.

I'll be revising the doco and come to a point where I write "doing X is not advised/not yet implemented." Or I'll write "doing X and Y together has not been tested."

But then I kick myself with "Why isn't it implemented? Why don't I write a unit test for that edge case?" The implementation would take 20 minutes, the test cases for that new feature 30 minutes. A new paragraph of doco and now I've lost my place in my original task of revising the documentation.

What's more, I won't do it just once, but 4 times. 8 times. Before you know it, I've spent 2 days improving a module that originally took 2 hours to write.

These aren't just random numbers. The initial draft of POEx::HTTP::Server took 2 hours Monday morning, of which 30 minutes were wasted because I didn't adequately remember how POE::Session::Multiplex works. I spent the rest of the day improving on that start, then 2 more days adding features, tweaking POE::Session::Multiplex and POE::Component::Deamon because of misfeatures I'd discovered.

But backing up further, I wrote POEx::HTTP::Server because last Friday I thought to myself "Now that Sphinx integration is nearly complete, what will I work on next." And the answer was of course SPEED SPEED SPEED! So I went to look at lighttpd as a front end, with a FastCGI or SCGI call to the app server for dynamic content.

So while my real goal was to get version 2.5 of the Document Warehouse newly known as Quaero ready as soon as possible, I ended up spending a week implementing some technology from 1990. Or 1997 depending on how you look at it. And it's not over; today I realised there was a race condition in my code. A race that IKC probably shares. So a day or three tracking that down.

Still, Firebug shows 19ms response times from POEx::HTTP::Server. Of which only 5ms are waiting aka POEx::HTTP::Server generating the content the other 12 being DNS and network overhead.

Which is damn sweet.