The Blog From Hell

Eisbein as everyone knows, is a German classic. Properly done it is crispy on the outside, and soft on
the inside. I chose to make mine my own way however, which was soft all the way through. Not very
German I guess, but very tasty for sure.

Ingredients:
1 smoked Eisbein
2 giant black mushrooms
2 cups of wild berry fruit juice (make sure it’s real juice – not sugar water)
2 large onions
6 small potatoes
2 baby marrows
2 garlic cubes
2 bunches of parsley
2 table-spoons extra virgin olive oil.
3 chives

Method:
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees.
Slice the garlic cubes in thin slices about 2mm thick. Stab the eisbein with a pairing knife and stab
the garlic slices into it. Because eisbein is elastic it can hard to stuff, so I suggest keeping the knife in
the hole and then pushing it sideways and sliding the garlic in behind the blade.
Clean and slice the baby marrows into chunks about 4cm long. Cut the onions into quarters. Slice the
mushrooms into strips about 2cm wide.
Put the extra-virgin olive oil into an oven pan breadpan worked fine for me) and stack the onions,
potatoes, marrows and mushrooms strips around the Eisbein inside the pan.. Sprinkle with fresh-ground
black pepper, ground cloves and barbeque-spice mixture.
Pour the fruit-juice in a bowl and microwave for 2 minutes on high (this is important, never put cold liquid
on meat as it makes it tough). Pour the semi-boiling juice over the content of the pan, it should be it
about 1cm deep at the bottom.
Chop up the chives and parsley and sprinkle over the top of the meal.

Cover the whole thing with tin-foil, shiny-side on the inside.
Place in the oven and leave to cook for 2 and a half hours. At this point change the temperature of the
oven up to 220 degrees and cook for 1 hour. Finally switch the heat down to 100 degrees and cook for
another half-hour, serve hot. Be carefull taking it out – when you lift the foil, you can expect a lot of
steam.

Technorati Tags: Eisbein

Thus far, I have deliberately not said anything about Novell’s partnership with Microsoft. I am after all a distro developer myself and I consider it very bad form to criticize other distro’s – I have always rather chosen to focus on what I believe OpenLab does right instead (whereas the founder of another distro actually sent a mail to the opensuze mailinglist announcing in effect ‘now that your distro sucks even more, why not try ours’).
Nevertheless, something with such a massive impact on the entire community cannot be completely ignored. Rather then, than my own opinions, I share with you the following letter, sent by Professor Derek Keats of the University of the Western Cape to Novell SA CEO Stafford Masie.
Professor Keats shared the mail with the South African anti-software patent mailing list, and gave permission to share it further.

Dear Stafford,

This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC.
However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full
investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from
the University of the Western Cape.

As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our
Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding
the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of
our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a
decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect
us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education
domain to do the same.

As noted by Bruce Perens, it is abundantly clear that Novell and
Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing
covenants to each other’s customers, rather than licenses to each other,
in order to circumvent Novell’s earlier agreement with the community of
GPL software developers.

UWC both produces and depends on GPL licensed software, just like
Novell, and as the custodian of our work in this area, I find the
approach taken by Novell to be devoid of merit in relation to us as both
customers and producers.

As customers, you have failed to consider you ability as a company to
supply us with a quality product in the face of a significant percentage
of GPL licensed software owners moving from the GPL in its current
version to GPL Version 3, which will leave Novell products such as Suse
linux without access to upgrades and new versions of the software. This
includes important software like SAMBA, on which we rely for some key
operational functionality. Given that many other software producers are
stating their intentions to move to GPL V3, the quality of Novell
software will be compromised. As producers of software, you have forced
our hand. You leave us no choice but to consider the GPL version 3 for
our own software as well, in order to protect ourselves from
unscrupulous companies willing to betray their customers as Novell has
done.

I cannot guarantee that I will be able to extricate UWC from Novell, but
I can guarantee that I will try.

Technorati Tags: Novell, Microsoft, OpenLab

Here's a recipe that, unlike most of what gets posted here, is more cuisine than quick, but the taste is well worth it – especially for a Sunday lunch. It works best when served with steamed veggies or on a bed of rice.