There’s a storm coming from the Northwest, bringing dark clouds on the horizon over the sea; causing the waves to come crushing down on what rocks they have left here on Malta; spraying the salty water in my face and mixing it with the tears that the same wind is blowing out of my eyes. I’m looking for a dry rock to sit down and write some quiet lines about our arrival, yesterday night; flight 117 from Amsterdam, stopover in Milan. What a contrast between the snow storm we drove through on our way to Schiphol airport, hoping the snow wouldn’t delay our flight; and the humid, lukewarm sea breeze that stroked us in the evening when we got off our plane (the best way you can leave a plane: on a staircase, down to the concrete of the runway). Today I have been stroked by spring as well: as I found out after the short walk along the coast line, looking out over the rocks and the pounding waves, amidst already flowering daisies and borago and euphorbia: leaving yellow stains of pollen on my pants. Spring has come, and gone again, for the clouds are getting near, covering the sun, chilling the air and driving me inside.

Over the last two weekends, I spent numerous hours trying to install OpenSuse Linux on my laptop. Actually, installing it wasn’t the real problem; getting the built-in wireless network adapter to talk to my wireless network was.

I remember the days when Linux was still fresh and new, and there were only one or two distributions. It was 1994 when I first installed Linux, probably RedHat, on a faculty computer, because they wanted their own webserver (after I persuaded them that the web was going to be big. Anyday now. I remember being awestruck at the end of ’93, when I first saw an Australian museum’s website with photos on it, so I went and made a website for the Rotterdam law faculty where I worked at the time, with scanned photos of the city of Rotterdam on it.) Linux came on a couple of disks back then, and installed and ran happily on an old 386sx that was gathering dust in a corner. Text only of course, no fancy GUIs available yet. Fortunately I had just had a Unix course for the Convex number-cruncher that the university had just bought (does Convex still exist?).
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After marvelling over the idea behind Campfire, I wondered how easy Rails would make it to start my own campfire. After all, the concept doesn’t seem to be all that complex: log people’s messages and feed them back to all the other people in the same chatroom. There’s some bells and whistles around that, like logging in, creating your own room, inviting others to join your room, etcetera. But I think, if you’ve got the basic concept covered, the rest will follow easy enough. And that basic concept didn’t proof to be all that hard to build — with Rails.

First, I created a very simple database table to hold all messages with a timestamp and username for each message. Then I created my Rails application, with one model class for the messages and one ChatController. ChatController contains an index method that initially reads all messages from the database and passes them and a fresh new Message object to the view. There’s a create method that will store a newly entered message in the database. And finally there’s a refresh method for periodically refreshing the div in the view that contains the message log. The index.rhtml displays the messages using a _messages.rhtml partial that is also used for refreshing them, with a periodically_call_remote call. To add some more Ajax, newly entered messages are sent back with a form_remote_tag, so the visitor never sees the screen blank for server requests.

That’s it, really. Nothing more to it. For the basics, anyway. I could think of a ton of features I’d like to add. First thing I’ll do is to add authentication; then put it on DreamHost and tell my colleagues and friends. We won’t be needing Campfire’s services, thank you very much. Blame Rails for making it easy.

Download the source here: Kampvuur (Dutch for Campfire) 0.1 BETA

M. and I were just talking about how much the web has changed our lives. She can now find, read and print scientific articles for her work via large databases on the web; articles from bonafide, peer-reviewed magazines, that sometimes are not even published on paper anymore. In my own work, the web is indispensable as well: JavaDocs can be downloaded but are just as easily accessed online; and for most programming problems or weird error messages there’s an answer to be found via Google. We are all connected to an immense network of information and experience; connected to the world, it feels like. Next thing, I open up Bloglines, start reading the first post and wind up on this website (made in Holland I am proud to say) where the world map literally cries out its news flashes as they happen. Yesterday Campfire, today this; what will I find tomorrow? I love the web.



Screenshot from What’s Up. I guess, for Dallas, this is world news…

Sherry has never been my favorite drink. Not only does it have unpleasant connotations: of England, the 1950s, Agatha Christie, brown, dull, mouldy; or worse, in Holland: where in the 1970s desperate housewives got drunk on cheap supermarket sherry — but also I just never liked the taste of it very much.

The last time M. and I bought a bottle of sherry was to cook Delia Smith’s recipe of chicken in sherry (a chopped up chicken braised for 45 minutes in half a liter of sherry and sherry vinegar, with lots of whole shallots and garlics and tarragon). Per Delia’s instructions we asked the shopkeeper for amontillado sherry. The shopkeeper looked at us in awe; it seemed we had instantly become connoisseurs to him. With great care he unlocked a special cabinet behind him and took a dusty bottle out of it which he put on the counter. I was expecting an equally special price, so I was surprised when it only cost about 15 guilders (8 dollars), which only confirmed our prejudice that sherry is nothing but a cheap way to get drunk. We didn’t dare to break the spell and tell him we were going to use it for cooking. Of course we did taste it before pouring it into the pan, but fortunately it tasted a lot better after 45 minutes of cooking with the tarragon.

So I wasn’t too eager when my dad, the last time we visited him, suggested we drink a glass of sherry with the Coulommiers cheese and goat’s Brie we were about to eat. “No, no, this is special, you’ll like this,” he said; and I know by now I should trust him in these matters. He’s been cooking most of his life, professionally for part of it, and is currently working as a culinary consultant. He taught me long ago to always taste everything, before deciding if I like it or not. And so I trusted him and agreed to try a glass. With great care he brought a dusty bottle out of his wine cellar and put it on the table, just slightly hesitating before opening it, showing that it really was a special bottle. I tasted. He watched me closely. This was not sherry! It had all the sweet and subtle taste of sherry, but without any of the sharp vileness of alcohol that I was afraid to find. It was served cold and fresh, and tasted more of an aromatic dessert wine; a wonderful combination with the salty cheeses. He told me the sherry is made by constantly mixing in older sherry through an elaborative system, the details of which I cannot remember very clearly for some reason. The end result is that every bottle of this sherry contains a tiny amount of very, very old sherry (up to 60 years, the average age is 25 years).

After he saw I really liked it, my dad brought up another bottle as a parting gift (we were leaving the next morning). That bottle is now safely tucked away in our own little wine rack (they don’t build cellars anymore), waiting to be opened, for a special occasion, or just because we feel like tasting that exquisite flavor again. We won’t be cooking chicken in it for sure; we’ll buy a bottle of real sherry for that.