You ate... what?

Tonight a friend and I shared a dessert that is positively the strangest one I've ever had. We went to Layang Layang, a Malaysian restaurant in Cupertino. Our food was excellent -- and exactly what I was craving.

But, the star of the meal was this dessert, the Ice Kacang (aka, "A.B.C."). I saw a picture in the menu and read a description before we ordered it. It didn't matter. I still wasn't prepared for the mountain of shaved ice mixed with a bizarre (yet, excellent) combination of ingredients. It arrived to at our table looking like an icy volcano drizzled with caramel. Digging into the center brought more surprises in the form of sweet corn kernels, palm seeds, and little green jelly cubes. Two of us could not finish it, but it had a fascinating array of flavors -- including some that our palettes had absolutely no reference for.

I'm definitely glad we decided to be adventurous. I recommend trying it if you find yourself in the Cupertino area.

Juicy, juicy mangoes!

I used to like mangoes okay.  They were good, but a little over-sweet and a little stringy.

It turns out... I really, really like mangoes.  It's just that I hadn't had a very good one until this week.

My wife orders a box of organic produce every other week, and we got two slender, yellow mangoes.  These are from Mexico, are organic (obviously), but I don't know the name.  They are INCREDIBLE.  Juicy, smooth-as-silk, and sweet with a little bit of limey tartness.

I just cut one up for lunches tomorrow, and I'm already obsessing over how to get more.

If you have any recommendations, please send them to me! 

Recreating XML files from fragments

I'm working on an interesting problem right now.  Occasionally I acquire fragments of files that I would like to re-create as much as possible.  Many of these are Microsoft Word 2007 files.  MS Word 2007 uses an XML format, so it would seem possible to parse the file to detect tags that were ended, but don't have a matching opening (because the beginning was cut off).

I figured that I'm probably not the first one to think about this problem, so I went trolling the intertubes for ready-made solutions.  Since perl is my glueware language of choice, I searched until I found the following handy snippet from prlmnks.org:

use XML::LibXML;
my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
$parser->recover(1);
my $doc = $parser->parse_file($ARGV[0]);
print $doc->toString(1);

Very, very nice!  Now I am part of the way there.  Next, I took a pre-existing MS Word document of similar make and model, and prepended it.  With a little manual massaging, I got the script above to parse it, and even pretty-print it (a nice bonus).  Unfortunately, Microsoft Word still doesn't like the resultant "document."

I'm still working on this problem, but that's decent progress for an hour of work.