Ingredients

1. One whole chicken
2. Shiitake mushrooms (dried)
3. Black mushrooms (dried)
4. A carrot
5. Bamboo sprouts
6. Two eggs
7. Soy sauce
8. Rice vinegar
9. Sambala sauce
10. Tapioca starch
11. Salt
12. Whole black pepper
13. Chicken bouillon cube

Preparation of ingredients

Hint : I recommend reading the whole recipe first as some of the steps can be done at the same time.

It is best to begin by dipping the mushrooms in warm water (shiitake and black mushrooms separately) as it takes about 30 minutes for them to soak well. The longer the better. After they have soaked cut the shiitake to small pieces.

Cut off the legs and breasts of the chicken, put them aside we will not be needing them for this meal.

Clean the carrot and cut it to small pieces. Cut the bamboo sprouts as well.

Crack the two eggs into a bowl and scramble them.

Cooking

Heat about 1.5L of water, salt it, put in a dozen of grains of the whole pepper and put the chicken inside. Cook for about 45 minutes.

Take the chicken out and put the bouillon cube as well as the mushrooms (both), carrots and bamboo sprouts inside.

Cut off all of the meat from the bones of the chicken and put it back into the soup (the meat, not the bones).

Cook for about ten minutes, then add two table spoons of vinegar, three table spoons of soy sauce and two spoonfuls of Sambala sauce (or more, if you wish the soup to be more spicy).

Cook for another 10 minutes, afterwards add in the eggs and stir well. Finally prepare two spoons of tapioca starch in a bowl – add a bit of water and mix until all of the starch has diluted. Then add the mix to the soup. Cook for about 10 minutes and you are done.

Afterword

The soup is to be eaten very hot. If you do not have chicken you can use more bouillon cubes instead (still, it is much better with real meat).

Since I did not bring a wide-angle I had to do a little trespassing to get a shot at the cathedral. No big deal, by the amount of beer bottles on the ground it must have been a fine spot for parties.

It would seem that Hate is quite free in this part of France (translation "Die Artist")

Cathedrail in Marseille

I have snapped this picture while walking back home. I really enjoy the shadow play on this house’s roof, hopefuly you will too.

House and its shadows

This particular problem is due to lack of dedicated drivers made by Creative. It seems that they only make OS X drivers for cards specially targeted at Macs.

Luckily there is a way to work around this limitation using a piece of software called Soundflower. The procedure is very simple, just follow the four steps here:

1. Download and install SoundFlower (this might require a restart)
2. Set Soundflower (2ch) as your audio output device (hint: you can option (⌥)-click your volume control icon in the menu)
3. Launch Soundflowerbed (it was installed along with Soundflower)
4. In the 2 channel device output options select your USB card.

And it is done, you can happily use your volume control buttons once again.

Set system output to Soundflower (2ch)

Set Soundflower output to your USB card

Here is a screenshot of a theme I have created and, because of the lack of creativity, named Gulf:

Gulf Qt Creator Theme

And here is the link for download:

So, as a quick hint on how to get all of this right:

1. Use EasyTAG (can be downloaded using your package manager in most distributions)
2. In Settings → Preferences go to the ID3Tag settings and do the following
   • Check Automatically convert old ID3v2 tag versions
   • Check Write ID3v2 tag → Version 2.3
   • Uncheck Write ID3v1.x tag
3. Edit tags of your files, be sure to re-save all files which appear in red in EasyTAG as they have probably different versions of ID3 tags

A screenshot of the EasyTAG settings window

If you want to use images from the tags instead of the per-folder cover.jpg files you can use EasyTAG to include them in the tags as well. Bear in mind though that only jpeg files will be taken into account and only in mp3 files (no love for ogg users). Also for best effects use images of 272  x 272 pixels large.

#!/bin/sh
DROPBOX="$HOME/Dropbox"

dropbox puburl "$DROPBOX/Public/`ls -1 -t $DROPBOX/Public | head -n 1`" | xclip

Now, on OS X I have a folder action which does the same thing automatically when a new file is uploaded. I will have to tinker with inotify and get it to work on Linux as well.

Glade Interface

First of all create your widget in Glade and assign it a signal handler. We are going to create a very simple application which has a single button which exits it.

The Glade interface should look something like this. It is basically a Main Window (main_window) widget with a Button (exit_button) inside. We define a handler for the signal “clicked” for the button and call it exit_button_handler.

The UI inside Glade

C++ code

Now let’s create the source file, it looks like this. As you can see our signal handler is just a basic void returning function.

#include

extern "C" G_MODULE_EXPORT void exit_button_handler(GtkObject* caller, gpointer data)
{
 gtk_main_quit();
}

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
 gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
 GtkBuilder* l_BuilderInterface = gtk_builder_new();

 gtk_builder_add_from_file(l_BuilderInterface, "ui.glade", NULL);
 gtk_builder_connect_signals(l_BuilderInterface, NULL);

 gtk_widget_show(GTK_WIDGET(gtk_builder_get_object(l_BuilderInterface, "main_window")));

 gtk_main();

 return 0;
}

The important thing to notice is that the declaration of the callback function is preceded by extern "C" G_MODULE_EXPORT. These two bits of code ensure that the produced object will have a C-compatible table-entry for this function even though we are using a C++ compiler and that it will be accessible under Windows as well. Indeed, the G_MODULE_EXPORT macro expands to nothing under Linux.

Compilation

Now, we need to compile the whole thing. Let’s say we have called the file above main.cpp. The line to call on Linux would be :

g++ `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0 gmodule-2.0` main.cpp -o test

Let’s look at the output of the pkg-config file for a while :
-pthread -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/gio-unix-2.0/ -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/pixman-1  -pthread -Wl,--export-dynamic -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lpangoft2-1.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lcairo -lpango-1.0 -lfreetype -lfontconfig -lgobject-2.0 -lgthread-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -lrt -lglib-2.0

That’s a lot of stuff! Depending on the system your mileage can vary, but the important bit is : -Wl,--export-dynamic. This piece of code ensures that you will be actually able to find the symbol once it is needed. On Windows, there is no need for the –export-dynamic flag, just be sure to load the gtk library as well as the gmodule.

And that’s it, done and done!

Introducing Services

Snow Leopard has this great thing called Services, which is a very simple to use way of creating very powerful actions in no time. Now, usually these are bound to a specific application or context, but they can be global.

Since it is much easier to explain something on an example, let us use a simple example. Following this article on how to pause iTunes for a short period of time.

Step 1:

1. Open up the Automator.
2. Create a New Service.
3. In the ‘service receives selected’ drop-down box select no input in any application.
4. In the left sidebar find Run AppleScript and drag it into the workflow
5. Paste the code below on the place where it says (* Your script goes here *)
6. Save the service as “Pause iTunes for 5 minutes”

tell application "iTunes"
    pause
    delay 300
    play
end tell

In the end the whole Automator window should look like this.

Automator service example

If you go to the current application’s menu now you should see your service in the Services sub-menu.

Step 2:

Now the only thing that remains is to add a keyboard shortcut for this service.

Open up System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts. In the left panel click on Services and then click on the + button under the right panel. In the following dialog choose:

• Application : All Applications
• Menu Title : Pause iTunes for 5 minutes
• Keyboard Shortcut : F10

Following shortcut illustrates the result. Note that it is vital that the Menu Title chosen is exactly the same as the name under which you have saved the service.

Snow Leopard keyboard shortcut assignment

All done, you can now enjoy launching your script anywhere, anytime by pressing F10.