recommendations for Utah native plants

Brandon at J&L Nursery gave me these recommendations for native plants:

• big tooth maple (tree)
  
• mahogany (tree)
  
• zelkova (tree)
• rocky mountain maple (tree)
  
• mahonia (low)
• holly hocks
  

He said I should avoid these:

• mahonia -- obviously I've done something wrong because that's also on the top list... I'll find out...
  
• squaw bush
• golden rod
• yarrow

My Favorite Dishes at My Favorite Restaurant: Z'Tejas

Z'Tejas is my wife's and my favorite restaurant. There are a few dishes I highly recommend, including many appetizers; note that (in SLC) appetizers are half-price before 7 PM... we often go and just get a meal of those.

• Appetizers
  
  • Grilled Shrimp & Guacamole Tostada Bites
  • Cast-Iron Skillet Dumplings
  • Crab & Spinach Skillet - new on their"spring" menu, and ends on June 7


• Entrees
  
  • Diablo Chicken Pasta
  • Chorizo-Stuffed Pork Tenderloin
  • Ancho-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin - usually not available, so if you see it on special, get it!

Now, I don't know the deal with the Crab & Spinach Skillet, and why it's not a permanent part of the menu. I was blown away by the taste, and that's my new favorite dish... so I'm hoping others will enjoy it enough that we can make it permanent! At least, here in SLC. ;-)

A friend just recommended the Gorgonzola New York Strip, so I'll try that if I ever go out of my comfort zone.

Cheers!

BTW, @ZTejas on Twitter is very active, replying to people's comments, which reminded me that I wanted to wrote this post. Plus the fact that they post the recipes for some of their dishes... I'm impressed. (If they put their news items in RSS, I'd follow it.)

Tech Breakfast miscellany

Here are my quick notes from today's breakfast (along with the people who brought up the topic, in parens).

We started on UI...

• Actionscript, Blaze DS (Phil)
• GWT 2, Google Closure, Ext JS (Josh)
  

... then HTML 5, and the Ignite SLC event including a rap...

• Mobile App Dev RAP BATTLE (Trent)

... and security, how we in tech tend to be lazy when it comes to security...

• Web Security: A Big Case of ...OOPS... (Trent)

... so maybe these books will help us with the issues...

• Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (Dan)
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Trent)
  

... and luckily we have new tools for managing authorization...

• OAuth (Trent)
  
• Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP

... and maybe some verifiable anonymity?

• Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA
• pseud.ony.ms (Trent)

We discussed relationships, and tinychat.com and chatroulette.com came up.

Other... miscellany:

• Silicon Snake-Oil by Clifford Stoll (Dan)
• Archer Farm in Logan (... a historical farm here locally? Maybe someone can elaborate in the comments.)
  
• "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte (Phil)
  
• Fear the Boom and Bust, a rap battle between economists Keynes and Hayek (Trent)
  

command to join multi-line output with awk

This outputs a single line with a colon separating the files in the listing:

ls /usr/local/jira/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/* | awk '{ ORS=":"; print; }'


What are the OpenOffice Basic functions?

I just wrote an OpenOffice function and could not find the right documentation for Basic functions! Here's my documentation until I can find them.

• To convert a string (eg. "3") into it's numeric value, use ASC (not ASCII nor VALUE).

Why the anonymous spam comments?

I've been getting a bunch of anonymous spam comments on my blogs, and I cannot figure out their intent. I'm not talking about the ones that include a link back to some online pharmaceutical; no, these are written by Anonymous without any link to any external site. And I'm pretty sure they're just automated; I'm sure some are because they've been posted on other blogs, both owned by myself and by others.

What would be the purpose of doing such a thing? I've looked around but can't figure out what they accomplish.

Here are some examples (you can see them on this post or on it's comment page):

• It was very interesting for me to read the post. Thank author for it. I like such topics and everything that is connected to this matter. I would like to read more soon.
• Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
  
• Keep on posting such stories. I like to read stories like that. By the way add some pics :)
• Hi, very useful tip! Thanks [originating here]
  

PS: here is another interesting example of spam. The comments (originating here) seem relevant to the topic and were posted twice with slightly different wording while it was in my moderation queue, but they're suspect because they include links to shopping sites and the thought sequence is exactly the same with just a few phrases modified. It is pretty good; they triggered this post about the other ones. Here are both comments for easy comparison:

• My friend and I were recently talking about how modern society has evolved to become so integrated with technology. Reading this post makes me think back to that discussion we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.
  
  I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as the price of memory decreases, the possibility of downloading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about almost every day.

• My friend and I were recently discussing about technology, and how integrated it has become to our daily lives. Reading this post makes me think back to that discussion we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.
  
  I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as technology further advances, the possibility of uploading our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about every once in a while.

HTML 5 intro

Here are the highlights from an HTML 5 intro today (by Adam Welling at iCentris):

• The new doctype in its entirety (and probably usable today):
  
• Many new input types give us built-in browser functionality (obviating much JavaScript): date/time, sliders, email, search
• JavaScript library Modernizr will help old browsers get much of that functionality
  
• IE has no 'canvas' right now, but we can use the ExplorerCanvas (AKA excanvas) library
  
• XHTML 2.0 is dead
• No need to self-terminate tags; eg.
  is OK (I don't really like this one.)

Presentation PDF is here.