Christmas Turkey - Episode IV - Roasting (Recipe)

Now the final stage, roasting your turkey:
You can say this is the easiest part :D

Since I don't have a meat thermometer, then I will provide guidelines to get the turkey well done without using one. Moreover because we, egyptians, like our meat very well cooked, this recipe will get ur turkey very well cooked. If you don't like that, you might want to follow something like these guidelines.

Ingredients:
- some butter (same as from seasoning)

Recipe:
- Put the turkey in a roasting pan, or on the oven rack and put a pan under it to collect the dropping juices.
- cover the seasoned and buttered turkey with a tent of alumunim foil (donot let the tent touch the turkey, this might cause the skin to stick to the tent and tear on removal).
- preheat the oven to 220-230 deg C.
- put the covered turkey in the preheated oven.
- leave the turkey for 40 minutes, then turn the heat down to 180 deg C.
- calculate the cooking time, 40 additional minutes for each kg of turkey, this is the minimum time for cooking. for my turkey it was 40+40*5.6 = 4.4 hours
- for a well done turkey, calculate it based on 50 additional minutes for each kg, for my turkey 40+50*5.6 = 5.33 hours
- now leave the turkey alone for all except the last hour of cooking.
- when 1 hour is remaining, take the turkey out, remove the tent, and paint it with butter. Now put it back in the oven without the tent.
- redo the last step every 15-20 minutes until your turkey looks exactly the way you want.

Guten appetit.

Christmas Turkey - Episode III - Stuffing (Recipe)

Okay, so here you go for the stuffing. Take care that the stuffing has to be ready when the turkey needs it, especially if your turkey was in brine, because right after you take your turkey out of the brine, it starts loosing the water it took in, so better get the turkey in the oven 20-30 minutes after taking it ouf ot the brine.

Ingredients:
- 6-8 cups bread, cut into 1-2 cm cubes
- 100 gm walnut
- 100 gm almonds
- 3 big chopped onions
- 2 chopped colored paprikas
- 6 tbsp butter
- 1 green apple, finely chopped
- 1/4 cup raisins
- Stock from turkey giblets (boil them for 30 minutes with some salt)
- 2 tbsp dried parsley (substitute 1/4 cup chipped fresh parsley)
- some salt and ground pepper

Recipe:
- Take the bread to the oven on medion-low heat (160-180 deg C) for 10-15 minutes, till dry and golden red.
- roast the nuts on low heat in a pan (without adding any butter or oil). Afte roasing, break them with your fingers.
- melt 3 tbsp butter in a pan and add the onions and the paprika and fry for 10 minutes
- melt 3 tbsp butter in a pan and add the bread, fry for 2 minutes or so.
- add the onions and paprika to the bread, and add all remaining ingredients
- add 1 to 1&1/2 cup of stock, make sure not to make the bread very moist, the bread should be half moist half dry.
- cook on low heat for 10 minutes.

Ready :D

Now you can stuff your turkey, in the cavity, between the skin and the meat, between the thighs and the breast, in the neck cavity or any other place you like.

Christmas Turkey - Episode II - Seasoning (Recipe)

Now time to season your turkey:
Ingredients:
- 1 orange
- 1/4 cup salt
- 1 tsp thyme (za3tar)
- 1 tsp all spice (baharat)
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- 3 bay leaves, break it finely with your fingers
- 1 tsp rosemary, break it finely with your fingers
- some molten butter (substitute some olive oil/normal oil for that)

Recipe:
- Rinse the turkey with normal tap water after removing from the brine.
- insert your hand between the meat and the skin (separate them along the way) from the neck and go over the breast, and from the cavity opening and go over the thighs.
- mix all ingredients in a small bowl.
- cut the orange, and juice it all over the turkey, inside the cavity and between the skin and the meat.
- take small quantities of the mixed seasoning and put it between the skin and the meat in the separated places. Also season inside the cavity. You should use half the amount for this.
- Spread the other half over the skin of the turkey from the outside, make sure the seasoning is spread evenly.
- Now you can stuff the turkey if you want.
- the left over from the orange is used to plug the cavity to keep the stuffing in place.
- after seasoning, paint the turkey with molten butter (should solidify when touching the turkey because the turkey should be just out of the fridge).

NOTE:
- You should start with Episode III - Stuffing before even taking the turkey out of the brine. But the actual stuffing comes after most of the seasoning is done.

Christmas Eggnog (Recipe)

Again, one amazing Christmas Recipe, here you go:

Ingredients:
(yields 4-5 cups)
- 350 ml cold milk
- 3 cold eggs
- 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
- 3 cloves
- some vanilla (I use 2 packs of vanilla with sugar)
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup cold whipping cream (substitute 1/2 cup of milk if you don't have whipping cream)
- 3/4 cup dark rum (you can use your favorite alcohol here)
- 1/2 tsp salt

Recipe:
- Separate the eggs, put the whites in a pan and the yolks in another
- Add the salt to the whites, and whisk them, you need continuous, hard, fast whisking for may be 3 minutes. The whites will start to foam, keep whisking until stiff peaks form (lift a litte of the foam with the whisk, it should form a peak, now rotate the whisk, if the peak doesn't lean to any side or move, that's your stiff peak).
- now, add the sugar to the yolks, and beat them till they get a softened butter appearance.
- add the rum to the yolks little by little while stirring.
- add the nutmeg, the cloves and the vanilla.
- add the milk again while stirring.
- now add the egg whites.
- and at last, add the whipping cream.
- stirr for 1 more minute.
- garnish with a little ground nutmeg

And it's ready :D, Enjoy

NOTE:
- after whisking the egg whites, the foam will start to diminish, so if you need to make the eggnog well before serving, then do everything except for whisking the eggwhites.. then 30-20 minutes before serving, whisk the whites and add them to the mixture and you're ready.
- If you are concerned about foodsafety, and/or don't like eating raw eggs, please don't use this recipe.

Christmas Turkey - Episode I - Brine (Recipe)

After this turkey was cooked, it turned out to be very well seasoned till the deepest meat inside. Here's how you go for this:

Ingredients:
- 1 cup table salt
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 lemon
- 1 orange
- 1 medium onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 4 bay leaves (wara2 lawra)
- 1 tbsp dried thyme (za3tar)
- 1 tbsp ground black pepper
- 6 litres of cold water

Recipe:
- In a large bucket (more than 10 litres big), combine the salt and the dry ingredients with the water first, and stir well until the salt is completely dissolved.
- Now, juice the lemon and the orange on the water, and then cut the remaining into wedges, then add them to the water.
- Cut the onion into wedges and add all the remaining ingredients to the water.
- Stir well.
- Put your turkey inside, breast side down, and cover the bucket.
- Put the bucket in the fridge for 8 to 24 hours.

NOTE:
- Leaving the turkey for more than 24 hours will result in a little oversalted turkey, do that only if you like your food salty.
- Remember to wash your turkey well before putting it into the brine.
- Remember to wash your turkey well after removing it from the brine.

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This Blog features a Blank Page according to the recommendations of the TPILB-Project.

Who are Copts??

Well, I just wanted to explain this. Mostly, I won't be using my own words.
Wikipedia says, quote "Copts are Egyptians whose ancestors embraced Christianity in the first century. The word "Coptic" was originally used in Classical Arabic to refer to Egyptians in general (see etymology section), but it has undergone semantic shift over the centuries to mean more specifically Egyptian Christian after the bulk of the Egyptian population converted to Islam." unqote. And thus, Copts (Egyptian Orthodox Christians) are indeed the only successors of the pharaohs whose roots are well established.

After the Arabic invasion of Egypt in the 7th century, again I quote from Wikipedia "The Arabs imposed a special tax, known as Jizya, on the Christians who acquired the status of dhimmis, and all native Egyptians were prohibited from joining the army. Egyptian converts to Islam in turn were relegated to the status of mawali. Heavy taxation was one of the reasons behind Egyptian organized resistance against the new occupying power, as well as the decline of the number of Christians in Egypt." unquote. Quote "The Arabs in the 7th century seldom used the term Egyptian, and used instead the term Copt to describe the people of Egypt. Thus, Egyptians became known as Copts, and the non-Chalcedonian Egyptian Church became known as the Coptic Church." unquote.

Coptic life kept deteriorating throughout the centuries until the rule of "Muhammad Ali" in the early 19th century, but that didn't last for long though.

Quote from Wikipedia "In 1952, Nasser led some army officers in a coup d'état against King Farouk, which overthrew the Kingdom of Egypt and established a republic. Nasser's mainstream policy was pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. The Copts were severely affected by Nasser's nationalization policies because, although they represented about 20% of the population, they were so economically prosperous as to have held more than 50% of the country's wealth. In addition, Nasser's pan-Arab policies undermined the Copts' strong attachment to and sense of identity about their Egyptian pre-Arab, and certainly non-Arab, identity. As a result, many Copts left their country for Australia, North America or Europe."

I think this little history concludes somehow, Who are Copts?

irssi, very nice and neat IRC client and TERMINAL BASED

Juggling

So, it was a hype, I decided to learn juggling, and it turned out to be quite a success. I juggle tennis balls for over 100 throws and catches, and I seem to juggle anything else that I can throw in the air. I juggled soccer balls for at least 15-20 throws and catches :D.

Am7aya fi forn afrangy -- A book by Christine Amir -- قمحاية في فرن أفرنجي

Unfortunately, I haven't got the chance to read the whole book, though i've read almost all the introduction. The book is in arabic. It talks about how and why a 21 yo girl chose to travel out of Egypt to study in Europe. Sorry to Egypt, but I really like the book.
Check the links below:

Book's Blog,
Book Signing Facebook Event

gstreamer0.10-good-plugins-ossv4

Little patch for the PKGBUILD of archlinux AUR package gstreamer0.10-good-plugins-ossv4 to upgrade it from version 10.10.8 to 0.10.15. Here is the patch.

This is one VERY GOOD Egyptian song

Web-Accelerators slow down the web !!!

Web-accelerators are a nuisance, they are counterproductive and they are a danger to some web servers and the infrastructure of the web itself. The more people use these products the slower the web will become and web surfers will perceive a need for more of these snake oil products.

Read the full article here.

Vegetating

For some reason everybody seems to be in the vegetative state... nobody wants to use their minds, their hands, their legs... Now only watching a movie is considered fun... anything else that involves moving or thinking suddenly became not interesting anymore.

Green your e-mails

E-mail printing can be VERY paper consuming.. especially that you can just read it on ur computer..
Add this line to your signature, and I am sure that it will remind some people not to waste paper.

P Please consider the environment before printing this email.

Music

Guys, Let's build some very GOOD playlist. One that contains all the best songs ever made.
Please add a comment on this post, including what you think are the best 3 songs of all time. Please use this format "Song Name_Album Name - Artist Name". Also provide a link to the version/remix you like the most on youtube or something.

Renault Website.. What a shame

Young Kids, dancing ballet

click the title of the post, this is, EXTREME

COMMENTS!!!

I know from my google analytics that a LOT of people visit my blog, and I know they spend some time on it. What I don't know is, why people feel afraid to comment.....
I will really appreciate it if you let me know ur opinion.

Mandelbrot

Guys, I wrote the mandelbrot algorithm myself, and I make it generate a bmp file. You can check the result down here.
The program is composed of 4 files
mandelbrot.cpp
utils.cpp
utils.h
Makefile

Save the 4 files in the same folder and type
"make" to compile
"make run" to run
"make clean" to clean
pretty obvious ha :D

Best Robot dance I've ever seen

You should totally watch this

Photography

Some photos I took at the Middle Ages Christmas Market in Esslingen.

196 Algorithm

This is one of the Open Math Problems..
The problem is simply is "Determining if the 196 algorithm will halt on the number 196". The 196 algorithm is very simple, reverse the input number, add it to the original input number, and halt if you have a palindrome, if you don't re-execute the algorithm with the new number. I wrote the 196 algorithm in java, and I just gave it a try by running it for a while, and writing the results to a file, I got a 39 MB file in 1 minute approx. and the algorithm didn't halt of course. Now am thinking about approaching the problem with a pen in my hand. If you think about it, the 196 algorithm will directly halt if you give it a number where all digits are less than 5, or otherwise, if every 2 opposing digits sum up not to yield a return ( > the output on a file to store it).

Code -> http://pastebin.com/f53aa5124

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

A very nice article Here.

Linux FAQ

A friend of mine asked me some questions, and I though they might be helpful for other people.

Some how I feel that my linux is slower than windows XP, not the boot up time but the reponses on button click,opening a web page etc..
I am using mac4linux theme , will it consume any CPU bandwidth?

This doesn't necessarily mean that your theme is the reason, there are other factors that can slow down your response time. This could be something like compositing (a program called compiz, that does some sort of animation and effects forlinux desktop), compiz requires some high capabilities, like a good graphics cards... disabling compositing will greatly improve your response time.

Also this could be due to some malfunction in a program that sucks your resources, by experience, firefox sometimes does that especially if there is some flash running. Also firefox leaks some memory (the memory it takes keeps growing and never shrinks with time), this will cause your RAM to be full after sometime, and this will cause your computer to start using the swap space on your Hard Drive, which will really slow down the response time. Both can be solved by closing firefox (Closing the page containing flash sometimes doesn't solve it), please not that when you close a program it doesn't get closed immediately even if its window disappears, it will probably will take some time, 1 to 30 seconds, it might not even close at all. I would rule out the theme as the reason and check compositing and firefox, although this might not be true.

There is something really useful that you can do to have a guess about what is sucking your resources. Right-Click on the pannel (top or bottom of the page), select "+ Add to Panel", then select "System Monitor" (you can use the search field on top), then click "+ Add" once and then close. A new Item will appear in your panel, Right-Click it, Choose "Preferences". Now select all the Check-Boxes, Decrease the "System Monitor Width" to 10 pixels and set the "System monitor update interval" to 500 milliseconds, and click close. This will put a graph for most of your computer/laptop resources in the panel, that will show you what was happening in the last 5 seconds (you can Increase this amount by either increasing the width or the interval, but 5 seconds do really well for me). Now keep your eye on this graph while using your competer/laptop. Check where are the spikes that stay high for a long time, (you can know the colors from the Preferences window). Now if you want more details, for example something uses your processor, or memory. Give a single-click to the graph, which will open the System Monitor. There you can see bigger graphs, but now let's go to the processes tab. There you can see each process running and its resource usage. If you press the field "CPU" (or Memory) from the table this will sort the processes according to their processor (Memory) usage. Now you can see clearly what is sucking up your resources and handle it.

I also just wanted to know the best softphone available for Linux... I came across some phones on web, the quality of the audio is not so good..... can you please suggest any?

I understand you need a SIP phone, which uses the SIP protocol to make calls through a VOIP provider.. Personally I couldn't get any to run correctly.. But there is some phones that people say are really good like Ekiga for example.

Also please feel free to ask about anything you would like about linux or other things at anytime, I am not a very terribly good expert, but at least I know some stuff.
Also, with linux googling your problem and reading some forums usually does it. If the problem is somehow extreme, you could join an IRC channel related to your problem and ask there, there is usually somebody to help.

Quote

Lead, follow, or get out of the way. [Laurence J. Peter]

One of my dreams coming true - Shooting

So finally I found a club nearby in Stuttgart where I could learn shooting competition Air Rifles. Yesterday was my first time :D. I used a 16,000 LE for 2 HOURS. Did aprox. 100 shots. You can see my results below :D. Hopefully I will go regularly and I hope those holes get a little more towards the center.

CUDA Project and Presentation - Steganography

So, finalizing the semester and submitting everything....
Today I had my presentation for the General Purpose Programming with Graphics Card. Here are the presentation along with the project code.
Here you can find the code, the presentation and the report.
Project

Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems [SEMINAR]

Today I finished my presentation for the seminar. It was about Reliable Gossip Based Multicast. Take a look if it's beneficial for you.
Report
Presentation

Linux is

Let me explain some stuff about linux. First of all, about the safety, Linux is structured in a such way that the system is relatively safer than windows, and limiting the control of program (compared to your control) over your system. That's what have prevented Linux from the Virus explosion that happened for windows.
But away from safety, personally I don't use linux because of safety, I use it for 2 exact reasons, "Stability" and "Control" over my OWN hardware :D. That's what windows lacks generally. We could get into details here, if you'd like. There's a lot of examples where you don't have control over your own hardware in windows. For linux, in most cases, this doesn't happen at all. For example, once I had a couple of my friends over in my room, and we all needed internet access... I was able within 10 minutes to turn my laptop to a wireless router. To be honest, this worked for may b 6 months and they did some changes to the driver that made problems. This is control over my hardware. Talking about drivers, one of the main issues with linux, in my opinion is the quality as well as the availability of drivers for the various hardware. The hardware manufacturers are the one to blame for these problems. The usual scenario is that the manufacture makes the hardware and only provides drivers for windows, then the linux programmers have to reverse-engineer the device and write drivers for it. This solution provides a working driver, but sometimes not supporting the full functionality of the hardware. The hardware manufacturers could release the APIs for their devices and thousands of linux programmers would be more than happy to develop the drivers. OR they could write linux drivers for their own hardware as they do for windows, by the way, NVidia started with the second option.
Also, did you know that a lot of the very famous programs were first developed for linux.. like firefox, thunderbird, apache web server, sqlite and a lot of other software.

About stability, we should take a look at the servers field, where stability and reliability (uptime) is the key issue. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html take a look here... Linux software (apache) takes more than half the market share for web servers.

One last thing, if we judge linux before really trying it for a relatively long amount of time, our judgment will will biased. Because the linux things will be really hard and annoying, and the tasks will seem long and complex.. just as they seemed when we started using windows.. we just need to get used to it first, and then judge the difference.

Myself, I used windows form 1998 - 2006 and linux 2006 - current. If, at least for my own needs, windows was a better operating system, I wouldn't have made the switch or I would have switched back.

Give it some thoughts, and may be if you'd like, give it a try.

Andrew Boktor

New Type of Stealing - Mobile Credit

Recently in Egypt, some new ways to steal people have emerged. Thieves steal mobile phones credit !!!!
Well I have seen 2 ways of doing that. If you are familiar with GSM providers in Egypt, most if not all of them provide a service called Credit Transfer, allowing a user to transfer a part of his credit to another user.

1. The thief sends a message to a random number, the message is an identical copy of the message received from the service provider upon the reception of a credit transfer.
2. The thief then sends a second message to the same number saying, "sorry, i did a credit transfer to you by mistake, could you please transfer the credit back to me?" or something similar. The naiive user will transfer the credit, that he never received in the first place, back to the thief.

Another way used in stealing mobile phones credit that I have seen many times.
1. The thief manages to get the username and password of an MSN user.
2. The thief talks to random people, preferably an opposing sex to the stolen account's owner, telling them that he/she needs mobile credit really bad, and his/her father is preventing him from leaving the house to buy credit, so can you buy credit for me and just give me the number of the card... or a similar message.
3. The naiive user again buys the credit and sends the credit recharge code to the theif, which recharges his phone immediately to cut any way of going back for the user.

Those thieves probably sell the credit they accumulate either to mobile phone shops (which sell this credit through Credit Transfer to other users that needs small amounts of credit) or to the people on the street that sell the calls to people who don't own a mobile phone on the street.