Grease fire!

Last night I experienced a BBQ grease fire and I must say, it was a scary moment. I was cooking chicken and the grease trap at the bottom of the BBQ caught fire. Unfortunately this is not an easy place to put out a fire since it's is below the grill but it can still draw in oxygen and it's quite close to the propane tank! Here's what I did:

• Shut off the gas and the burners. In retrospect, I should probably have taken the tank off then - I was somewhat concerned at the time that there might still be gas in the line that might catch. Probably the best thing to do would be shut off the gas immediately and let the burners run till the line is empty. But getting the tank off if the fire gets out of control is the difference between a fire and an explosion.
• Took a moment to think - there are lots of stupid things you can do and you need to consider your options which at this point were:
  • Spray the grease trap with the hose. Probably would work but it's a grease fire and I was concerned that this might just spread the fire around (in retrospect, this is probably true to some extent but I think it could be dealt with).
  • Spray the grease trap with a chemical extinguisher (if you have one!)
  • Call 911
  Since I had a chemical extinguisher, I chose to do that with calling 911 as a backup plan.
• Spraying the grease trap put out the fire (and made a big mess) but the fire re-started. So I sprayed again and it restarted again. Meanwhile the temp guage on the grill was at the maximum so at this point, my level headed wife called 911
• Continued to spray the fire - important point: the smaller chemical extinguishers are only good for about 6 - 10 small shots. Again, using the hose would probably have been a better choice at this point since it would have cooled things off more. Eventually the fire was out and the temp guage started to decrease.
• DON'T OPEN THE LID -- EVEN IF THE FIRE IS OUT. Tempting as it is, I left the lid closed to prevent re-ingniting the fire
• Fire truck showed up - I was standing in the driveway (having heard them coming) which they seemed to appreciate. They were pretty nice about the whole thing "That's what we're here for" so I would recommend you err on the side of calling them. They (carefully!) opened the lid to make sure the fire was out and looked over the BBQ to make sure it was not damaged. The fire was fairly constrained to the grease trap (the chicken wasn't even really burned).

Lessons I have learned from this:

• Always have a chemical extinguisher nearby if your grilling
• Keep a closer eye on the grill!
• Clean out your grease trap - mine had collected junk for close to a year. There's a reason they detach!
• Remove the tank if possible
• Spraying with a hose is probably ok
• If your on the fence about calling 911 - call them!

Info about BBQ Fires

Dead Couple to Be Married

A couple in South Africa will be married posthumously. Why you ask? The couple were engaged but the husband took it upon himself to kill his pregnant wife and then turned the gun on himself. In the greatest act of wallpapering over a problem ever, the families are going to marry them anyway - "family and friends wanted to remember them as a happy couple destined for a happy life together". OK then! For some reason, these weird stores always happen in South Africa (or Germany).

Dole to Bush: For shame!

Slate has broken a story (complete with a bootleg video) of Bob Dole on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. Basically they were discussing the swift boat veterans smear campaign which is replay of what the Bush campaign did to John McCain in 2000 (McCain has already conceded that Bush's tactics are as transparent as they appear). From the article:

Of McCain's charge to President Bush during a 2000 debate—"You should be ashamed"—Dole told Wolf Blitzer, "He was right." Dole made the remark off-air, while CNN broadcast the Kerry ad called "Old Tricks," the one featuring McCain's 2000 debate remarks. The campaign stopped airing it recently at McCain's request.

Fortunately, what he did or did not do in vietnam is not an issue for Bush although the means of how he got out of it is alive and kicking. It should not go unnoted that a lot more concern is being given to the stupid unwinnable war from 30 years and not enough on how we're going to deal with the stupid unwinnable war of right now.

Why Americans Suck...

Memefirst (who apparently is British) has an angry tirade with 10 reasons why Americans suck. You have to admire his spirit for bringing the inevitable flamewar this will bring on him. Some of the best parts:

8) . . . you're not actually very good at fighting Unless you've had outside help, you've pretty much cocked it up. Your first war to liberate yourselves because of high taxes on tea leaves was pretty much won for you by the French — for which I must say you seem profoundly ungrateful, and your next foray against the British in Canada in1812 resulted in your capital being sacked and burned. OK, you did well against Grenada and Panama, but any more resistance than that and you tend to fold, most recently in Vietnam, Falluja and Najaf. The only war I can think of against anyone serious that you did well in was your own Civil War, which I hardly need to point out, you also lost.

9) . . . you behave like whingeing victims 9/11 this, 9/11 that. You believe that because of the — totally understandable — trauma of losing 3,000 people in a horrible attack you are allowed to do whatever the hell you want. ... we don't quite understand the shift of emphasis from actually catching those responsible (and letting family members of the main perpetrator leave the country before letting the FBI interview them) to declaring an unwinnable "war" on "terror" — an emotion, like envy — and invading a country with very little to do with the actual attack, and getting upset with us because most of us didn't think it wasn't a good idea. And haven't we been proven wrong.

Report: 75% of Patent Applications are approved

A new report from Lawrence B. Ebert indicates that 75% of patents are approved - the US PTO claims it is closer to 62% but because of the way that patents are processed, there is some ambiguity. Even the 62% approval rate seems at odds with patents being new, unique and non-obvious. Personally I would hope that the failure rate would be a lot higher. This seems in line with Tim Bray's comments on Linux Patents:

In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can’t build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone’s patent.
Of course, a very high proportion of those patents could quite likely be invalidated by prior art, from both the patent space and outside. But that’s expensive; a patent is an extremely potent offensive weapon in the hands of a smart attorney, because most companies don’t have enough financial slack to fight intellectual-property litigation.

Cubism filters

Now any idiot can paint like Picasso - researchers at the University of Bath have developed a filter that converts images into a cubist representation. You need a series of photos (taken from different angles):

The researchers fed the computer a series of pictures where they had identified the aesthetically important elements, such as a nose, eye or mouth. Gradually the computer learned how to recognise these important elements and overlook the more obvious contrasts between edges or borders, which is the limit of what computers can do at the moment.

More details:

• Thesis.
• Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends

FeedBurner

I've been using Feedburner for a while to convert the ATOM feed that Blogger supports (don't get me started...) with the RSS feed that people actually want. There's a lot more to it though - you can have FeedBurner collect usage stats and it provides a form of bandwidth insurance for your feeds. Say a bazillion people subscribe to your feed and are requesting it once an hour - it will be a little expensive. If you use FeedBurner then they will get stuck with the bill! Also FeedBurner can provide gzip support and handle IF-MODIFIED-SINCE/ETAG support to make aggregators more efficient.

Toogle

Okay, this site will be up for about 3 hours before Google shuts them down so enjoy it while it lasts. Enter a query and it find a single image and turns it into ASCII art.

Places I have been

I don't really get World66.com but it is different. It's a travel blog - you tell it where you've been and it makes maps and allows you to write about them and interact with other people who have been there. Or something. I imagine that eventually they will have pictures etc to share.

All Roads lead to Rome

From Tim Bray's blog, I learned about Rome: a library for parsing and generating RSS / ATOM documents. Not exactly earth shattering but it will be nice for server side work and if it's properly written (which it probably will be), it should mean better generated and handled feeds. Which is good. The article that refer's to Rome on Tim's site is about a topic close to my heart. Basically he differentiates between the respectable technologies that come into organizations through the front door (usually buzzword complaint stuff like J2EE, CORBA, SOA etc) by appealing to the CIO and "backdoor" technologies which are a hit with the techies and developers. Backdoor technologies (Scripting languages, RSS, Java, POJO etc) just sort of happen and no one ever figures out the ROI or it synergizes the strategic initiatives because they just make sense and they just work. I'm firmly in the latter camp (caveat: when it makes sense!) because often times people "know" what solution they need before they understand the problems they have and (more important) the problems they will have.

BloggerCon III

Since BloggerCon III will be in my own backyard (Stanford) and is free I really have no excuse not to go. So I will!

Atlas OnePoint: We opt you in!

Jeremey Zawodny has been opted-in to a mail list by a company at a conference who are basically a spammer. For shame!

Mac Laptop Batteries back from the dead.

I've been having problems with Mac laptop batteries lately. This page had a lot of interesting ideas (which pretty much didn't work for me). The gist of it seems to be:

• Boot into Open Firmware by doing Cmd-Opt-O-F at startup.
• Type reset-nvram
• Type reset-all
• The machine will then reboot and previously bad batteries will now work fine

YMMV.

Memcached

Linux Journal has an interesting article on Memcached - it's a distributed in memory caching system. The article details how it is used to drive sites like LiveJournal and Slashdot and the article is full of other useful performance tuning advice. For example:

In the end, though, it's all a series of trade-offs. Because processors keep getting faster, I find it preferable to burn CPU cycles rather than wait for disks. Modern disks keeping growing larger and cheaper, but they aren't getting much faster. Considering how slow and crash-prone they are, I try to avoid disks as much as possible. LiveJournal's Web nodes are all diskless, Netbooting off a common yet redundant NFS root image. Not only is this cheaper, but it requires significantly less maintenance.

Memcached is really just a distributed hash table - the hashing is two levels deep. The first hash is done on the client to figure out which server to go to and then the second hashing is done on the server. It's all straightforward but in any type of cache, the devil is in the details.

Each Memcached instance is totally independent, and does not communicate with the others. Each instance drops items used least recently by default to make room for new items. The server provides many statistics you can use to find query/hit/miss rates for your entire Memcached farm. If a server fails, the clients can be configured to route around the dead machine or machines and use the remaining active servers. This behavior is optional, because the application must be prepared to deal with receiving possibly stale information from a flapping node. When off, requests for keys on a dead server simply result in a cache miss to the application. With a sufficiently large Memcached farm on enough unique hosts, a dead machine shouldn't have much impact on global hit rates.