Thomas S. Nielsen's blog

Yes, all the statements above are now facts. My iPhone app is happily waiting to be reviewed by the Apple fairies, my homemade inventory system is now working hard remembering all the hardware serial numbers at work, and just about an hour ago, a pack of pigs flew by my window. An awesome day, in other words.

Okay, one of the above might be a little questionable. But whatever. Let’s celebrate this great day in history by watching a great movie.

Inventory system

Thought I would add a screenshot from my inventory system. Text is in Norwegian only for now. I will translate it if I consider uploading it somewhere.

What you are seeing is the search function, where I just performed a search with a barcode scanner (which by the way works flawlessly on Ubuntu Linux, and not at all on my XP machine at work).

Currently the inventory system has the following features:

• Add, edit and delete items
• Add, edit and delete users/owners
• Add, edit and delete owner groups (people, storage rooms, etc)
• Add, edit and delete item types (PCs, laptops, printers, etc)
• Add, edit and delete models (Dell optiplex GX280, HP 1740, Wyse S50, etc)
• Add, edit and delete conditions (In use, Discarded, In for repair, available, etc)
• Search by barcode, owner, type or model
• See statistics of number of items, owners and changes (changes are displayed for past day, week, and total)
• List all owners
• List all items
• Each item is registered with barcode, date of purchase, date of last edit, model, owner, type and condition
• Dropdown lists are used where possible/reasonable

If you are interested, please ask. If I get any response, the chance of me open sourcing it is far greater.

Stage 1

Did you love my potato gratin, or maybe you haven’t tried it yet? Here is another gratin, which is a full dinner in itself. I made this dish myself, so I would love you to try it and give feedback. It tasted great in my opinion.

Ingredients (for two)

• 2 dinner sausages
• 2 potatoes
• 4-6 dl milk
• 1 egg
• 1 shallot
• 1 garlic clove
• spice (salt, pepper and oregano)
• Sliced cheese to cover
• part of a broccoli
• part of a cauliflower

Finished sausage gratin

Recipe

Slice the potatoes in 1cm slices. Cover the bottom of a casserole dish with a single layer of potato slices. Slice the dinner sausages in half and put them on top of the potatoes. Add the rest of the potatoes around the sausages.

Mix egg, milk, chopped shallot, chopped garlic and spices in a bowl. Pour the mix into the casserole dish until it nearly covers the potatoes and sausages (see first picture). Put it in a preheated oven at 200C for 15-20 minutes.

Take the casserole dish out of the oven and add slices of cauliflower and broccoli. Add a layer of sliced cheese on top. Put back in the oven for 20 more minutes.

Enjoy.

I am sorry I left you for almost a week, Firefox

Yes, I gave up on Safari. Two days ahead of time I am switching back to Firefox to get some real work done, faster.

Even though Safari is the faster browser, I work faster with firefox. The bookmark handling, the awesome bar and other features are just so much better. Firefox even has better drag and drop functionality, which really is a bit surprising given how Apple promotes that feature in it’s applications.

Here are the things I want Firefox to adopt from Safari:

• Speed
• Smart page for new tab (I like Opera’s speed dial even better)

Short list, I know, but Firefox really is ahead on most of the features I use. What I really would love though, is a browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine, but is compatible with Firefox extensions. That would be awesome.

Now I will probably stay with Firefox until Chrome is released for Mac, unless I decide to try Camino first. I am open to new browsers, but I feel like I will stay with Firefox for a long time, maybe until someone can match or beat the awesome bar.

Creamy Potato Gratin

Time for food again. This is one of my favorite ways to cook potatoes. It tastes delicious, and it is really easy. It takes a bit of time though, almost an hour from start to finish. But it is worth it.

Ingredients:
- At least two small/medium potatoes per person
- Milk
- Whipping cream
- Garlic and/or onion
- Spices (pepper, salt, whatever else you feel like)
- Grated cheese

Recipe:
Peel the potatoes and cut them into slices (about 1/2 cm). Ad a layer of potatoes into a casserole dish, then ad spices and finely chopped garlic and/or onion.

Pour milk and whipping cream (about 50/50 mix, more milk if you are afraid of fat) until you cover the potatoes. Continue adding layers of potatoes, spices and milk/cream until you are out of potatoes.

Let it cook in the oven at 200C for about half an hour. Take it out, ad a decent layer of grated cheese, and put it back for another 15 minutes. Serve with any kind of meat. Great together with beef or pork chops.

Warning: This may very well become the main dish of your meal, so remember to make enough!