bfm's blog

Made dumplings on the weekend. We've made dumplings many times but this is the first time we made the wrappers from scratch.

We made two versions, one pork, one veggie. The veggie version was made with mushrooms, black fungus, transparent noodles and more. The veggie dumplings are shown here.

Delicious!

This is in Tai Wai, New Territories, in Hong Kong.

What to Search

There are two types of searching on this website. The Dilbert Strip Finder and the Web Site Content.

The search box on the side navigation bar every page will search the Dilbert Strip Finder.

If you want to search the web site content instead -- say for Pho Ottawa restaurants -- then select the "Search" button on the side navigation bar (with or without entering a search word), and then select the "Content" tab.

Here are some tips for the Dilber Strip Finder:

• Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT are not recognised. The search engine uses Natural Language mode.
• Not case sensitive.
• Wildcards (using the asterisk) are allowed except at the beginning of words. For exanple, meet* is allowed, but *ful will not work. (In this case, searching for *ful will instead search for ful)
• Search for individual dates using the formats YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYYMMDD. Wildcards are not available for dates.

A restaurant in San Fransisco is offering a challenge to pho lovers. A huge bowl, about the size of three large bowls, contains two pounds of noodles and two pounds of beef and tripe. If you finish it in an hour, it's free. Or else they charge you $22.

Details are here:

Pho Garden Challenge

This is my cat Monty. Not always the bravest one.

Another update to the download section. Version 3.01 is available immediately with the following new features:

- Strips added to 2009-06-14. Some spelling and grammar corrections to older strips.
- Some improvements to an included script.

See the Changelog, included in the zip file, for further details.

You can grab this from the Downloads page.

Here's what's changed:

• Results are ranked by relevance instead of by date
• Pagination works properly
• search by date works. Use the form YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD
• Searching now defaults to the Dilbert Strip Finder instead of the site content and comments. This happened several days earlier than the other changes.

The search function is based on MySQL's full text search in natural language mode. That means that boolean operators like AND and OR aren't needed. The gory details are at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-natural-language.html if you're interested.

One of the side-effects of the natural language mode is that words which occur in more than half of the indexed items aren't available for searching. The only word that this affects is "Dilbert", ironically enough.

After a three month absence, searching on the Dilbert Strip Finder is functional once again. You can search for your favourite strips by typing your words in to the search box on the left, and, after the results, select "Strip Finder".

All strips are indexed from the beginning up until 2009-04-30. In the results, you can see the full title of the book by hovering your mouse over the book name. Or, just select the date to see the strip at the Dilbert website.

The Finder is still rough around the edges, though. For example, pagination does not yet work, and booleans are limited to all your words being "OR"ed together. But I wanted to release this now to get your feedback.

Please don't hesitate to leave a comment or drop me a line on the contact form and say what you think, and how it can be improved.

The Dilbert Strip Finder is being updated and readied for relaunch.

The Dilbert Strip Index (DSI), the data used for searching, has been updated and is available for downloading. It's been about 5 years since the previous release, so it's way overdue.

Highlights of the changes include:

• Strips to 2009-04-30 were added so data for all strips from the beginning are included, though the strips past 2007-02-02 are not complete.
• The data is now in JSON format instead of XML. JSON is easier for computers and people to read and update.
• The strip descriptions and book descriptions are now combined into one download.

For a complete list of changes, see the Changelog file included in the download zip file.

The file is available from the Downloads page.

Can anyone identify what this package contains? I don't recognise it. The photo was taken at an Asian supermarket in Toronto.