Posts from "January, 2008":
Re-learning old tricks
At work I had been working on a project for a rather difficult client whose name I will decline to mention. But with that work wrapped up in the past week I’ve been a lot calmer and a lot happier. It has also meant I didn’t have a lot of billable work at the office. As a result I decided it was time I got started relearning things I have forgotten due to disuse over the past fourteen months or so. I thought the idea was a good one because from the sounds of things we may have a number of projects coming up soon which will require interaction with a database, something I haven’t had to deal with since changing jobs.
I did remember how much easier Hibernate made things when I did have to interact with a database so I thought that would be a great place to start my foray into relearning database interaction. Also the last version of Hibernate I used was 2.x and they’re now into the 3.x and I wanted to take Annotations for a spin. Put succinctly, Annotations are awesome. It took me a little bit of digging in documentation to remember what all the interactions meant and apply that to what I needed but once I got the hang of it the Hibernate Annotations made adding a new relationship magically easy.
Through the course of writing unit tests for my new database interaction I also discovered HSQLDB which can be used to create a database entirely in memory so your unit tests don’t have to rely on a database being up and running on your development machine. I thought that was kind of nice. Given that I found a three year old article at The Server Side this has been around for a while, none-the-less it was a pleasant discover for me.
Bourbon Sausage Gravy
Summarized from Accidental Hedonist…
Ingredients
- ½ med. onion diced
- ½ tablespoon olive oil
- pinch of salt
- ¾ lb of ground sausage
- 4 oz of bourbon
- 5 tablespoons all purpose flour
- 3 cups whole milk
Instructions
In a small skillet over medium heat add the onions oil and salt, then fry until the onions are translucent. Once they are translucent set them aside.
In a large skillet over medium-low heat…
- Add the ground sausage and 2 oz of bourbon
- Fry the sausage until browned
- Once browned add the cooked onions
- Add one tablespoon of flour and stir until the sausage and flour are incorporated together
- Repeat 4 times until all flour is used
- Slowly add one cup of milk until it begins to thicken
- Repeat 2 times until all milk is used
- Add the last of the bourbon and stir it together