DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We’re live on the new server. Argh. We’re working out the kinks, slowly.

Not 12 hours after I posted an item in this space about how DSL sucks because the hardware freezes up every few weeks, requiring me to drive across town to do a manual reset… my DSL modem froze up, requiring me to drive across town at 10:30 PM to do a manual reset.

No, I was not pleased.

This site has been hosted on a consumer DSL line for the past year or so. I’m happy and relieved to say that that will soon change.

DSL is a great enduser technology. But it’s a lousy hosting solution. The upstream bandwidth, which is the only direction that matters for serving a website, is limited to 128 kb/sec. DSL’s great downstream bandwidth is 99% idle in this situation.

The bigger problem is the hardware. My Alcatel DSL modem has locked up a half-dozen times over the past year. The only solution is to drive across town and power-cycle it. (No, this DSL line isn’t at my house, but in the closet of a building down the block from the phone company’s central office.)

In June, the modem puked when I was out of town. My server was offline for 12 hours. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I did. So did my father, who called me in Oregon to ask why he couldn’t download his email.

On Monday I installed a rackmount 1U server in a local colocation facility. I’d spent much of the previous week configuring software. My evenings since then have been dedicated to transferring DNS and other services. I’ll start migrating websites tomorrow, and finish over the weekend.

The new server is a powerhouse: 2.8 GHz “hyperthreading” P4 with the new 800 MHz bus… 2 10k RPM Ultra-320 SCSI drives in RAID-1… in a case 1.75'' tall with sliding rails mounted to the sides. The blowers on this thing sound like Discount Rinse Day at the hair salon. When I had the server running in my office, I couldn’t talk on the telephone; even with my headset, the fans were too loud.

Sound doesn’t matter in the colo, of course. My server joined countless noisy others, each in its 1.75'' slot, anonymously stacked like the gel pods in the Matrix. Just add a few lightening bolts and you’d have, well… lots of dead servers. Bad analogy. Never mind.

The point is, updates are likely to continue being sporadic.

California’s Senate on Tuesday passed the toughest financial privacy bill in the nation by a vote of 31 to 6, a day after it sailed through the state Assembly, 76 to 1.

As early as next week, Gov. Gray Davis is expected to sign the bill, which requires banks and other financial institutions to obtain customers’ permission before they can share or sell information about them to other companies.

This is great news, and there’s a great story behind it too. In brief, state senator Jackie Speier had been working on a financial-privacy bill for four years, but the banking industry managed to beat it every time. Finally, the CEO of E-Loan, a guy named Chris Larson, spent $1M to get the issue on next March’s ballot — to let the voters, not the politicians, decide.

As I understand it, the ballot initiative would have been much more restrictive: it would have required consumers to opt in. If you’ve never dealt with opt-in/opt-out decisions from the business’ side, take my word for it: nobody ever opts in. So an opt-in model would practically kill the banks’ ability to market to their customers.

Speier’s legislation is based on an opt-out. It gives consumers the right to opt out of information sharing, without making that the default choice.

Once the signatures for Larson’s ballot initiative had been gathered, Larson and Californians for Privacy Now were able to threaten the financial industry: come to terms on the legislation, or we’ll let the voters force you to use opt-in.

According to the Chronicle, “Opponents [of the opt-in ballot initiative] had vowed to spend millions to defeat the initiative, which would have almost certainly ended up in court.”

I’m not certain, but I assume Larson’s group will drop the ballot initiative now. That’s disappointing, in a sense, but I can see that having lesser, but uncontested protections in place is a better result than fighting for stronger protections which may not ever be enacted.

My wife and I made a double-recipe of pita bread for a Greek dinner. In one recipe, I used 50% whole wheat — a finely ground flour chosen so the bran shards wouldn’t poke holes in the gluten membranes. (Successful pita breads depend on the dough’s ability to contain air, because the pocket forms in the oven due to captive steam.)

The other recipe used 25% wholegrain spelt, which I ground myself from berries on the finest setting my KitchenAid can muster. The spelt version also included about 10% oat bran, which I ran through the mill in hopes it too would be rendered less jagged. Why did I use only 25% spelt in this recipe? You might think that because spelt flour contains less gluten I feared compromising the dough’s ability to contain air. But in fact, I just ran out of spelt berries.

Pita bread requires an unusual oven technique. We rolled 100g lumps of dough into thin discs, maybe 1/8 inch thick and 6-8'' across. Placed directly on a hot baking stone, they balloon within three minutes. Ideally, they balloon and then rupture, and settle back down somewhat as the steam inside the cavity rushes out. If they stay inflated, they are susceptible to crisping, which is the death of pita. Better to be flat and pocket-less than crisp!

The finished breads were really nice. Of course it helps to bury them in homemade tzatziki and humous, provided by our hosts and other guests. I think I ate my weekly allowance of wheat last night in one sitting.

Our host, who lived on Crete for several years, said “You won’t get pita this good in Greece.” It’s a sad comment on the decline of traditional culture that, if what he says is true, I can best a Greek baker within a few hours in my own kitchen. And I’m so far from Greek, I might as well be Turkish. The closest I’ve come to Greece is repeated viewings of Animal House. What I know about Greek traditions wouldn’t fill the hole in the olive where the pit came out.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The stuff they call bread in Italy is crap. The stuff they call beer in midwestern America is crap. The stuff they call food at McDonald’s is crap. I think I’m getting off topic though.

The pita recipe we used is from Crust & Crumb, one of my standby bread references. I’ve only made it twice and it worked well both times. I recommend cutting the yeast amount in half; just give the dough an extra hour to ferment before you put it into the cooler. This cuts the yeast stink in the finished bread.

By the way, I’m sure great beer can be bought everywhere in America, even in the cultural blight that spans from Sacramento to, erm, Philadelphia. My comment above refers specifically to the stuff we drank in college and the starving-artist days that followed (Burgie!).