DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I spent last night reading about all the candidates: US Senators, state Senators, US Representatives, state assembly members… I scanned position papers… I read endorsements… I flipped an occasional coin… And I marked up my sample ballot with all of these choices so I wouldn’t be fumbling for names in the voting booth.

Today I found out that California’s primary elections don’t work the way I expected. I thought we had open primaries, meaning citizens can vote across party lines. I didn’t register with any political party; I don’t like any of them well enough to claim affiliation. But that means I don’t get to vote for any of their candidates!

My ballot consisted of one lonely little card with four state propositions on it. There were no candidates at all.

So I’m working on my first song. I’ve never composed anything before, except for a few really bad drum solos, but now I’m thinking verse, chorus, bridge and falling asleep with chord progressions bouncing around my brain. It’s good.

The unexpected thing is that I listen to music differently now. I’ll be idly listening to something I’ve heard 30 times, subconsciously playing along with the music in my head, and I’ll think, Hmm, there’s not even a melody there; the band is just bashing out a rhythm together. I didn’t realize that was OK. And then I wonder if I can work the same trick into my song. I’m deducing the art of songwriting.

But I guess if I want to be a good songwriter, I should be listening to Beatles tracks instead of this obscure progressive stuff that only sold 1000 copies…

Nah!

It may be true that smart quotes are a detail appreciated only by design geeks and typography nerds. But it’s equally true that I am both a design geek and a typography nerd. Call me nuts, but I like my quotes curly.

Last December’s version of the code that powers this website included my second attempt at a “quote educator.” It, too, suffered a fatal flaw: about 30% of the time, quotes curled the wrong way.

It’s a lot more complicated than you might think. “Realize,” for example, “that you’ll want ‘nested quotes.’” You’ll want to answer in straight quotes when someone asks your height (6'1") but in curly quotes when someone asks what year your old Camaro was (“69”). And although you can’t see the problem from your side of the browser, the presence of HTML markup makes the task even more difficult.

Enter John Gruber, who like me had worked through at least one less-than-ideal solution. Unlike me, he had attacked the problem again and came up with an excellent solution, which he released as open-source software: SmartyPants — which by the time I found it had been public for a year, and improved through user feedback during that time.

Using SmartyPants in my Monaural Jerk code seemed infinitely more sane than spending time on a 3rd attempt of my own. There was only one problem: SmartyPants was written in PERL, which although wonderful in many ways, would not coexist very effectively with Monaural Jerk, which is written in PHP.

So I ported it. It took all weekend. I thought I knew about regular expressions, but I can honestly say, now I know about regular expressions.

Anyway, the result is here: SmartyPants-PHP

SmartyPants-PHP is, in one sentence, an HTML-savvy quote-conversion library. In another sentence, it is a derivative product of John Gruber’s original code, and he deserves all the credit for the invention. I only translated it, and tried not to break it too badly in the process.

I nearly always bring bread when I’m invited to dinner. I figure it’s sort of a prepayment for whatever idiotic thing I’ll say during the meal. If I get in the hosts’ good graces in advance, perhaps they’ll be less offended later when I inadvertently mention something inflammatory about politics or religion or fashion or education or (hold on!) SUVs.

I think friends don’t have to agree on all these issues. I don’t want all my friends to think just like me. I’d be happy if they’d vote like me, but otherwise I’m content to let them keep their irrational fantasies about, say, politics or religion or fashion or education or (hold on!) SUVs, so long as I still get to come over for dinner.

Anyway, two consecutive nights of dinner invitations meant four consecutive days of baking.

Wednesday I began feeding one of my sourdoughs, a levain made with the technique described in Artisan Baking. Next I made a batch of pâte fermentée, which is a simple French bread recipe intended not as a bread itself but to bring some maturity and complexity of flavor to a younger dough.

Thursday I warmed up the pâte fermentée, which had overnighted in the cooler, and mixed it into a large recipe of pane siciliano, an Italian semolina bread dough, using a recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Pictured is the dough after its bulk rise, ready for shaping.

I’ve made this bread numerous times before, although not from this recipe. My usual recipe is the pre-publication version of this one, provided by Peter Reinhart in a baking class several years ago. I was surprised to see the book’s version call for more yeast and less salt. I guess the test-kitchen folks had some undersized loaves. The stink of yeast was overpowering. Next time I’ll revert to the original recipe, unperverted by media-conglomerate recipe testers who don’t know how to make bread. Phew!

To shape these loaves, roll out to baguette length, then form into S shapes. The shaped loaves go back into the cooler, slowing down the yeast to make time for enzymes to break down the starch molecules in the flour. (Time is the most important ingredient in good bread.)

Finally, I mixed up a “soaker” of assorted whole grains for the sourdough. This spent the night on the bench next to the fermenting starter.

Friday I combined the soaker and the starter into a double batch of my “house bread,” a multigrain sourdough conglomeration. While I wasn’t looking, this sticky dough crawled out of the mixer and enveloped the motor assembly. The thermal overload switch tripped, stopping the motor. Baking tip for the day: don’t leave your mixer unattended!

The sourdough got a 5-hour bulk ferment (an hour too much), after which I shaped two boules and put them into bannetons to rise.

Meanwhile, the pane siciliano was unexpectedly under-risen. I put the dough into a warm (80°) oven to come up to size. Finally it was ready — too late for us to make it to dinner on time. I phoned in our apologies as the bread was going into the oven. We’d be late, but the bread would be fresh.

I usually bake these on a stone, but following the revised recipe, I cooked them on a sheet pan and suffered an oven mishap: uneven browning. I was happy to have five loaves, so I could pick the two best to bring to dinner. They were decent, but not spectacular; the crumb was too tight, and I should have pushed the bake a bit harder to retain some crispness in the crust.

Saturday, the sourdough loaves came out of the cooler for another few hours of rise time. I couldn’t tell if they were under-risen, or undersized due to the fact that a big handful of dough had had to be tossed (motor grease is not generally considered an accepted dough enrichment). Finally I scored the loaves and baked them on a stone. The white powder in the picture is rice flour, essential for keeping the dough from sticking to the baskets.

I got a nice oven spring, surprising given the length of fermenting. I brought the nicer of the two to dinner, where it garnered numerous nice comments for the modest baker. But it ended up on the table right in front of me, so I think I ate about half of it.

So now I have five (more) pounds of sliced bread in the freezer. I’ve spent about 12 hours over the past few days in the kitchen, endlessly mixing and measuring and stirring and washing and wiping and waiting. I am so sick of baking, I can’t even tell you.

Which means it will be about two weeks before I do it again.

A friend recently reported that he was unable to send me email. He received bounce messages that were not helpful at all — the message was generic, like “your message could not be delivered.” Apparently that’s a technical term from Microsoft; the meaning is “Exchange Server blows big chunks,” or possibly “Due to our contempt for users, who we think are too dumb to be exposed to anything so scary as an SMTP error message, we’ll hide the cause for this failure and instead give you a bland and useless note that discourages you from finding out what’s really happening, much less fixing it.”

After several hours of research, I discovered the problem: my server was configured to refuse inbound mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

“Broken reverse DNS” means that a computer’s address has no corresponding name in DNS, the Domain Name Service. I know of no reason why any public mail server would be configured this way, except through ignorance.

So, basically, the reason my friend couldn’t send me email is that his employer’s IT department screwed up their DNS configuration.

I called the company’s help desk to report the bug. This caused no small amount of consternation, for I’m not an employee. They have no procedures in place for handling bug reports from non-employees. But to their credit, they took the report… and then sat on it for two weeks. I called back weekly — long distance! — to check status. “We’re still working on it” is all they’d say.

Finally I got a call back. The tech told me they would be unable to fix their broken DNS because their security software prevents it. This sounded to me like a brush-off. Certainly it’s possible that some sort of Windows security software would prevent established Internet standards from functioning… that’s no less plausible than Exchange Server’s crappy bounce handling.

I asked the technician if he realized that that meant nobody at his company would be able to send mail to AOL. He was understandably mystified, until I explained that AOL’s inbound mail servers, like my own, block mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

We set up a test. Lo and behold, his test message never arrived at my AOL account. This had the desired effect; my original bug report was amended and kicked up to a higher-level tech. It seems that not being able to send mail to me is not a concern. But not being able to send mail to 35 million AOL users is a problem worth fixing.

Three days later, they’d fixed their DNS and asked me to help them verify it. I was so pleased, I laughed out loud. “Our security software prevents it,” indeed.