Jul 18 2012

Sitar Indian Restaurant – Durham, NC

As many of you know, I completely favour Asian food, and tend to eat it as often as possible. Though not completely in the same genre as what one typically considers “Asian cuisine,” Indian food is also some of the tastiest to me. Since moving to North Carolina, I have looked and looked for the best Indian restaurant in the area, and I found it. After having been there once a week for the past few months, I can safely say that their food is consistently fantastic, always nicely prepared, and that the service is wonderful. That restaurant is Sitar Indian Cuisine.

Indian buffets are essentially the only types of buffet that I like, and I like them because of the myriad flavours of Indian cuisine; each dish tastes radically different than every other one. In contrast, I’ve found that most Asian buffets have a central theme around which each dish centres, and subsequently, there is a complete lack of variance between the choices. Sitar offers a very nice variety of dishes, ranging from the classic chicken tikka masala, to Saag paneer, to aloo gobi. They also have the traditional sides like naan, and dosa, as well as one of my all-time favourites, idli, (which is rather uncommon for Indian restaurants within the United States). Idli, by the way, are incredible with any sweet chutney, and I especially love them dipped in tamarind chutney.

Sitar Indian Restaurant - Durham, NC - buffet line
Click to enlarge

The weekend lunch buffet is very reasonably priced as well. At the time of this writing, it is $11.99 USD (~ €10), which is a great deal for essentially as much comfort food as one can possibly consume. The only items that I think could be better on their buffet are the desserts. Every week, they feature kheer, and gulab jamun. To me, their kheer is not the correct consistency. It should be somewhat thin, quite sweet (because of the coconut milk), and have some rice in it. This is much more like a standard American or English rice pudding. Not that it is bad at all, it is just not exactly what I think of when I think of kheer. The gulab jamun are essentially warm dough balls sitting in a very sweet syrup. While they aren’t bad either, they are not my favourite. However, sometimes they have bread pudding, which is phenomenal. Unfortunately, it’s not there every week.

Sitar Indian Restaurant - Durham, NC - my lunch
Click to enlarge

By the way, in the photo above, you can see the chicken tikka masala, a chicken kabob, some rice, their plain naan, and their amazing idlis (with the tamarind chutney in the small dish next to them). If you are ever in the Durham, NC area, I strongly suggest that you make your way to Sitar Indian Restaurant. I have been to several other places in the Triangle region, but they don’t come close to the quality or the consistency of Sitar.

Cheers,
Zach

Jul 17 2012

Introduction to Wine, part IV: Reading labels and storing

In the third instalment of “Introduction to Wine,” we covered the different growing periods for the northern hemisphere. In this final chapter, I want to briefly demystify some of the components of a wine label, and discuss optimal conditions for storing wine in your home.

To get us started, let’s talk about wine labels and all the pieces of information that you might find on one. First thing’s first, though, there are huge differences between the label format of a “New World” wine and an “Old World” wine. We’ll start with the “New World” wines, which are the ones that are produced in areas outside of the traditional wine-growing regions of Europe and the Middle East. In particular, many New World wines come from the United States (primarily the West Coast), Australia, New Zealand, South America (with emphases in Argentina and Chile), and South Africa.

Reading a New World wine label - Caymus Vineyards Special Selection

As you can see from the image above, New World wines feature the producer’s name most prominently on the label. The region (Napa Valley, in this case) and varietal (which is the type of wine [in this case, Cabernet Sauvignon] are not nearly as demanding of your attention as the producer. Also, the vintage (which is the year that the wine was produced) is not a focal point of the label. These four parts (producer, region, vintage, and varietal) are the main components of a wine label, but there are other pieces as well. Some of the other information includes the alcohol content, the founder of the vineyard, and the country of origin, and the quantity of the bottle (in this case, the standard 75cl or 750ml).

In contrast to New World wines, Old World wine labels shift the focus more to the region and varietal than to the specific producer. As you can see below, the varietal is at the top of the bottle and the region directly below it; sharing the largest typeset. In general, Old World wine labels emphasise the region and then the varietal, but there can be some overlap between the two. The producer is generally not as prominent, and is often toward the bottom of the label, or even on a separate label elsewhere on the bottle.

Reading an Old World wine label - Montalcino region, Italy

Will all New World and all Old World labels be set up in this exact format? No; different producers will stylise the labels in their own way. That being said, they tend to follow similar patterns of prominence.

Shifting very briefly to wine storage, there are a couple main points to consider when looking for that “just right” spot to house your wines:

  • Temperature fluctuation is bad.
  • Light is bad.
  • Ageing too long is bad.

Simply put, you will ideally store your wine in a dark, cool place (like a cellar) in which the temperature seldom changes. That last point is important as well. Many people think that wines have to age, and the longer that they do, the better they will taste. While there are some wines that develop flavour complexities and subtleties over time, not all of them do. Further, wines will hit an ideal age, and it is possible to let them sit for too long. What happens is that the flavours can mellow to the point of muddiness, or worse yet, dullness. Also, many New World wines are meant to be enjoyed shortly after bottling or purchasing. So, unless you are quite certain that the wine you have will improve with time, pop the cork and enjoy! 🙂

Cheers,
Zach

Jul 16 2012

Screen lockers xtrlock and slock

For many years now, I have used a very simple screen locker called xtrlock in order to stop others from accessing my systems whilst I’m away from my desk. Some time ago, I switched from using Gentoo on my Samsung NC10 netbook to using Arch. Though I prefer Gentoo, it just didn’t make much sense to compile everything on that poor Atom N270 processor (think Chromium or LibreOffice). Anyway, Arch does not have xtrlock in their repositories, likely because it has been abandoned upstream since 2010 (although the Debian homepage for the package shows an update to version 2.2 as of June 2012). So, I needed to find an alternative package for locking my screen.

Seeing as I am a minimalist, I wanted something incredibly lightweight without a bunch of features that I will never use or dependencies linked to the libraries of some particular desktop environment. Through some quick searching, I found slock, which is arguably even lighter and featureless than xtrlock. Xtrlock displays a little blue lock icon in front of the active desktop, only allowing for cursor movement until one enters the password of the user who invoked it. Slock, on the other hand, doesn’t even show the desktop or an icon. Instead, it shows a black screen. Similar to xtrlock, slock requires one to enter the password of the user that started the application in order to see the desktop again. So, both applications are very similar in nature and execution.

Both applications also have a similar “flaw,” which likely won’t have much of an impact, but is worth mentioning. When the screen is locked using either application, one can switch to a different virtual terminal (by using the CTRL-ALT-F# combination for the desired virtual terminal) without entering the password of the user that started the locking application. Now, that user can log in to the system, but cannot kill xtrlock or slock unless they can become root. However, it does pose a bit of a security concern in some use cases that don’t really apply to my situation. If you can think of some other possibilities, feel free to leave a comment here, and I’ll further investigate.

So, which application is better? Seeing as they both accomplish the same task, they are both lightweight and unobtrusive, and they are both available via Portage, it would seem to be a stalemate. However, the two each have one exclusive plus, respectively. Xtrlock still shows the display. That means that if you are in an environment where you need to have an application (like ping or watch -n 1 'netstat -tupan' running even whilst you are not directly in front of your computer, it will still run and you can still see it. That may also be an unlikely use case though. Slock, by only showing a black screen and not indicating any type of other activity, may be an added layer of security through obscurity. In either case, both applications are relatively similar.

Cheers,
Zach

EDIT: Be sure to view the update to this post for more information about a security problem with startx and screen lockers.