24
Feb
So I have been wanting to eat Mutton since the past couple of weeks, and finally went and got a 1kg packet of frozen mutton the other day from our very own Kohli’s (for those who are not from CMU/Pitt, fret not, its just an Indian grocery store 
) Whenever I go to Kohli’s, I usually end up buying a couple of packets of readymade spice mixes, just because they save me tons of time and headache and do not hurt the wallet so much. So, keeping with my habit, I ended up buying 2 different types of spice mixes specifically for mutton (I will reveal them in later blog posts).
Finally after a week of getting these ingredients, I got opportunity to actually try out my very first real mutton dish (if you don’t count mutton seekh kebab as a dish ingredient). I used Sanjeev Kapoor’s Kohlapuri spice mix as my starting point, and just followed the instructions he had on the packet for a start. Unfortunately these spice mixes have very idealistic cooking times printed, and they usually fall short of the actual cooking time for each step. What should have taken 50minutes to cook, took me a good ~2 hours in reality.
The important thing to keep in mind while cooking mutton curries is that mutton always takes a lot of time to become tender and soft to chew. Unless you’re a fan of eating rubbery stuff (which I’m sure most of you are not), your mutton will always take about an hour or more on simmer to become tender and soft. Mine took about 1.5hrs to become really tender and even then some of the pieces were still a bit chewy. Lesson well learned I hope 
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24
Last week was pretty hectic in terms of work load and number of different projects I’m involved with right now, both in and outside my course. On a positive note, I was able to complete my last week’s goal, much to my joy!
In brief, here is what I did:
- Integration of PHP Client Library for Google API’s that is distributed by Zend. You can get it here at http://framework.zend.com/download/gdata
- I found a library that had some neat functions for initializing and doing a bunch of stuff with the Zend Libraries. But I couldn’t get it to work properly so I ditched that approach and build my own function that prep data for accessing calendars and such. If you’re interested you can find the library that I found originally at http://github.com/seanmcgary/Codeigniter-Gcal/
- Created a couple of fake calendars in one of my google apps account, and tried to access them using PHP code. I wrote code to fetch, edit, add and delete events. The google documentation is really very helpful in understanding small things and making it easy to write usable code quickly.
Some of the things I’m still fighting with to improve my final output:
- Copy Google Calendar’s CSS or find a way to display something similar to what they show on their google apps page.
- If not the above approach, integrate this with jQuery UI Calendar and build on top of it.
This week’s Goal: Catch up on some sleep, work more on Codeignitor, specifically on Doctrine ORM and how to use it to power a web app I’m working on. Doctrine is particularly exciting to me as it offers millions of possibilities and new things to learn about, some of which people who work on RoR have been boasting for quite some while.
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15
Feb
This week I’m aiming to use the Google Calendar API for a side project of mine. A quick outline of what I’ll be trying to do:
- Create new calendars for users who register on the site.
- Modifying a user’s calendar from an admin interface.
- Modiyfing multiple calendars at one via a script.
3 simple goals, 7 days to achieve it. I’ll be programming in PHP and using jQuery as my JS library.
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