Srini's Point of View

My take on Butter Chicken

srini — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:50:00 +0000

This is my favourite chicken dish of all time! Not many restaurants in Boston serve this dish! The only place I know of which even comes close to the same taste one would get in delhi is Royal Bengal in Cambridge.. Here is my version..

This dish is actually made from tandoori chicken but who has a tandoor.. so this has been modified so it can easily be made at home. For those who are vegetarian can just skip the chicken and either put fried tofu or fresh Paneer. As we only get frozen paneer in the indian stores, what I do is put the frozen paneer in hot water which completely softens the paneer.

Marinate for Chicken

Cut 4 pounds of boneless skinless chicken thighs into bite size pieces
Season with 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper, ¼ cup lemon juice, 2 table spoon ginger garlic paste and cover and put in ur fridge for 30 minutes
Whisk ½ tsp red pepper powder, ½ tsp cumin powder, ¼ tsp turmeric pdr, 1tsp garam masala, 1 and ½ tsp coriander powder in 1-2 cups of yogurt and mix into the chicken. Put this back in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Broil chicken
Spread the chicken in a drip tray and broil in the oven on high for 6-8 minutes on each side. Keep this aside.

The Curry

Heat a heavy bottom pan.. add 2 table spoon of butter and about ½ cup of cooking oil ( I used olive oil (not evoo)).
Once oil is hot add about 1 tsp mustard seeds and let it crackly a bit.. don’t burn this as this can give your dish a bitter taster
once the mustard seeds are a little darker than its normal color add 2 finely sliced onions. ( I only use red onions in Indian cooking)
Cook till it is soft and light brown.. We don’t want it to be completely caramelized.
Now add 2 table spoons of ginger garlic paste. It will make a world of a difference if you use fresh ginger garlic instead of the store bought.
Slit 2 Thai chili peppers and add that to your pan
Now add your dry spices at this point. I put in salt, red pepper powder, garam masala, coriander powder, turmeric.
keep mixing the onions and the spices you added and don’t let things stick to the pan. You also don’t want to over cook the spices you added. Maybe 30 seconds depending on the heat.
Add two cans of crushed tomatoes and mix the onions into the sauce. Give this a good boil and keep mixing making sure it doesn’t stick to the pan.
crush 2-3 tsp of kasoori methi in your hands and mix into the pan
Now add half a pint of light cream into the sauce and mix.
Bring it to a boil and then add the broiled chicken.
Another boil should finish the dish.

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Tandoori Style Butter Chicken at Trader Joe’s

srini — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:04:38 +0000

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Time Machine backup to an SMB share

srini — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:55:07 +0000

If you wanted Time Machine to work with a SMB share you will notice that it doesn’t work. To get it to work run the following command on the terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now mount your SMB share. The best way to do this is to click on Go->connect to server in the finder menubar. For the server name you enter smb://username:password@servername/ShareName. I have a NAS share which has a Guest account with no password so my address looks like smb://Guest:@MyServer/HomeShare/TimeMachineBackup. Notice I have no password as no password is required for the Guest account.
Once mounted, Control click on the Time machine in the Dock and select “Time Machine Preferences”. Once you select “Choose Backup Disk” you should see your SMB Share. Select your SMB share and start your Time Share.
Once Time Machine backup starts, you will see an error saying that it cannot create image error. This error message was expected as Time machine could not create a file called a sparsebundle which is required for it to work on the SMB share. For this to work correctly we will be creating the sparsebundle manually. Turn off Time machine and go on to the next step.

In your terminal find your mac address. You can do this with the following command

ifconfig en0 | grep ether

Make a note of the mac address without the colon symbol. For this example lets assume my MAC address is 000000000000. Decide on how big you want your Time Machine backup to be. Then run the hdiutil command to create your sparsebundle file. Here is the command I created for a 200 Gigs share -

hdiutil create -size 200g -fs HFS+J -volname “OSX Backup” mymac_000000000000.sparsebundle

Where 000000000000 is my mac address and mymac is my mac name.

Now copy the sparsebundle file to the Nas share you want for your backups. In my case I copied it to the TimeMachineBackup folder on my NAS Share.

Go back to Time machine preferences and turn on Time machine. You should now see that the backup starts up with no problems. Depending on what you are backing up, the first time it runs it might take some time.

An important point to note is that for this to work your NAS Share needs to be mounted. You can set Time machine to be manual so that way you can make sure your SMB share is mounted before you click on the backup button.

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Super Secret features and shortcuts for your MAC

srini — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:28:18 +0000

http://mac.appstorm.net/how-to/os-x/30-super-secret-os-x-features-and-shortcuts/

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terminal tips and tricks for Mac OS X

srini — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:26:35 +0000

Some interesting tips and tricks for Mac OS X
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/5435/terminal-tips-and-tricks-for-mac-os-x

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Mac Book Pro terminal prompt keeps changing

srini — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:00:58 +0000

It got really annoying for me to see how my terminal prompt kept changing when I connected my Macbook from work. I know I can easily fix this by setting my prompt in my .profile file, but I wanted to find out why this was happening.

It turns out the culprit is DHCP. By Default the hostname is determined dynamically on your macbook. This setting can be controlled with your /etc/hostconfig file. Here is what it looks like on my laptop -

# This file is going away

AFPSERVER=-NO-
AUTHSERVER=-NO-
TIMESYNC=-NO-
QTSSERVER=-NO-

To hard code a hostname, I just added “HOSTNAME=MyMacBook” (without the quotes) to the end of the file.
Some might consider the changing hostname a feature they might want. Not me

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Convert uploaded file with windows line ending to unix line ending using php

srini — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:56:40 +0000

I was working on a php project which involved in uploading a tab delimited file and then processing it with php on a unix webserver to insert data into a database. The file was produced on a windows machine and so it had windows line endings. I used this trick to strip off the carriage return and line feed characters from each line of the file

Here is my html form code

Here is my code for process.php

if(isset($_POST['action']) && ($_POST['action'] == 'import')) {
	if (is_uploaded_file($_FILES['import_file']['tmp_name'])) {

		//	Move the file into an accessible location.
		$buffer = trim(implode("",file($_FILES['import_file']['tmp_name'])));

		// Convert all line-endings to UNIX format
        $buffer = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $buffer);
        $buffer = str_replace("\r", "\n", $buffer);

        //code for processing $buffer

	else {
		echo "File Upload Failed.";
	}
}

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Argument list too long

srini — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:02:07 +0000

Ever tried to copy or move a bunch of files on unix/linux from one location to another and see this error message spit out back at you??

$ cp /var/www/* /var/tmp
-bash: /bin/cp: Argument list too long

UNIX find to the rescue…

$ find /var/www -type f -name '*' -exec cp {} /var/tmp/. \;

problem solved!

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MAMP – mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045

srini — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:18:03 +0000

I started seeing the following error every time I started MAMP. This began after I changed the root password for my MAMP installation on my MBP.

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) when trying to connect

It turns out that the default password is hard coded in different scripts under ‘/Applications/MAMP/bin’. In my case the script quickCheckMysqlUpgrade.sh. Just edit the script to have the correct password and you wont see the annoying message again.

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Join multiple mpg files into one file

srini — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 02:19:29 +0000

I did not realize how easy it is to join mpeg files with just the windows copy command or unix cat command.

On windows the trick is to copy the files while preserving the binary format. Here is how you would do it -

copy files1.mpg /b + files2.mpg /b joinedfile.mpg

You could also do the following if the files are named consecutively

copy file*.mpg /b joinedfile.mpg

On UNIX it couldn’t be any simpler..

cat file1.mpg file2.mpg > joinedfile.mpg

cat file*.mpg > joinedfile.mpg

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