All posts by bean

Cooking, Photography

Wiener and kale and cream cheese bagel

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I do lots of weird cooking things. I so happen to have made a really “strange” bagel. Well, I won’t be too embarrassed. I made this bagel several months ago when purple kale was obtainable from the farmer’s market. I then put on cream cheese and added wieners. It was quite tasty. Although the wieners and cream cheese are not the healthiest, this is a tasty meal that one can have probably occasionally.

Cooking, Photography

Chili with fresh farmer’s market vegetables

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Here are some pictures that correspond to a chili that I made several months ago, during the summer. It was a Saturday and I had just bought many fresh ingredients, such as kale, Swiss chard, onions, and banana peppers from the farmer’s market. When I got back I made a fabulous chili discussed more below.

There is a nearly endless variety to the kinds of chilis you can make. I put just about anything in. Nearly every chili I make is different in some wah. During the summer months when the ingredients are available from the farmer’s market, my favorite things to put into chilis are chopped greens, such as kale and Swiss chard. The meal shown below has both kale and chard. Putting a few slices of (Kraft singles American) cheese is also great for chilis, and another fantastic variation would be to put in a can or two of cream of mushroom soup in place of the tomato sauce and beans. Adding a chopped garlic clove always helps, too. (I did not happen to have one at the time of this cooking.) I frequently “spice up” chilis, and the dish below has some chopped red banana jalapeno peppers; this warms it up nicely. I also spice up chilis with several chopped hot Thai chili peppers.

The chili shown below has chopped fried vegetables consisting of:

  • two kinds of onions
  • kale (purple)
  • Swiss chard
  • red banana peppers
  • mushrooms

There is nothing in this chili here that is high in cholesterol or unhealthy (that I know of). Putting in a few slices of cheese or a can or two of cream of mushroom soup would add an interesting taste but would diminish the health aspects.

See many nice pictures of this chili

Cooking

Nice roast with lumpy mashed potatoes

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I cooked a roast a while back and did not record a lot of details, but there is a picture of it below.

The meat was a little overcooked, but still tasted great. (I was probably busy blogging and did not check the meat as often as I should have.)

I never peel potatoes. I leave the skins on when making mashed potatoes. Of course I scrub them first. The potatoes aren’t mashed real well (I’m not a good masher), and you can see the butter and milk on them, along with the brown potato skin. To me, lumpy mashed potatoes taste just as good with the meat.

Technical web pages

Autogenerating HTML tables – some help

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Doing complex tables in HTML can be frustrating and challenging. There is quite a bit of help on the internet including tools for helping to build tables. Some of my previous posts discuss other help that is available.

In this post, I briefly discuss a tool I have written that helps to compose HTML tables. It can take quite a bit of time but the end results can be nice also.

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Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

I really like the art sketch that I just posted, so I will include it again to see how it works out in this table.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Having a good cutie pie fish background is important for doing web pages with complex tables with complex attributes and style elements.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

I have just created a tool that helps build tables. The details of setting up the td attributes in large tables can be tedious and error prone. This tool does some of these layout functions that can help reduce errors and tedium.

You can specify attributes and style attributes for 1. the entire table, 2. each table row, 3. each table column, and 4. any individual td cell. The latter values will override any former value both for attributes and for style subattributes.

Web scripting and web auto-generation tools. HTML table generator.

Well, actually this is a tool written in c/c++ which will generate a table from a given input data file. It is hard to use, is incredibly unforgiving of errors, but once you get the input file set up (properly) you can edit the individual files that are included, and not worry any more about the table details. This can be useful for example in creating a layout or design. After that, you just edit individual input files.

This is an auto-generation tool, which I also call web scripting, in that it computes the web page table layout and includes the specified files into the individual td cells.

I first created this tool is 1994 and have worked on it in an on/off fashion since then. I have recently added a set of changes pertaining to the parsing of style sub-attributes.

The style parser is what is new here. It is implemented as a single character token parser in a state machine (switch statement in c). There is one case where a single character putback is done and otherwise it is all forward scanning of character tokens. I decided to implement this in a semi-pure sense, and I debated this implementation detail a while. It involves scanning for ';' and ':' characters and building a dictionary of style attributes that match the style names.

It does not handle errors very well and an error in the input file, such as an error in a style specification, can cause the program to crash. Usually you begin with a simple file and then work incrementally, adding more items, such as style elements, in a slow fashion.

The input file for the 2 x 2 table looks like this. It begins with a table definition, the attributes for all rows, and then the attributes for all cells. Next there are two entries for row 1 and row 2, and then two entries for columnn 1 and 2. Then style elements are specified for each row/column value and after the *end* block the matrix of files to include in each cell is specified. For example, this entry, the 1,2 table entry is contained in the file wa.txt. Well, ok, it's not that hard.

2 2
border="4" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="10" style="width: 100%; background-color: #f00000; background-image: url('http://www.georgeschils.com/ph07/css/darkpurplepat.jpg');"
style="vertical-align: top;"
style="height: 30px;"
style="background-color: #aa66ff;"
style="background-color: #fa66af;"


1 1 style="background-color: #a00000; color: #ffffff;"
1 2 style="background-color: #f00000; color: #ffffff;"
2 2 style="background-image: url('http://www.georgeschils.com/w1/sty/smv_32_r1.jpg');"
*end*
1 1 one.txt
1 2 wa.txt

I'd make this tool for sale but there won't be one person on the planet who is interested. It might not be impossible to get a no cost binary windows build if you ask (send an email). I will give out a few free copies to people who ask.

If you Google for "html table generation tools" or something similar, you will find around a ba-zillion tools, many of them free, for doing this. For example, see this on-line table generator.

Take 1, update 1.