After my research on making peelable hard boiled eggs, I did a few experiments.

First I tried the salt theory. One dozen eggs separated it into two groups of 6 and, in two pots, I performed the standard method with one pot having added salt. Nearly two tablespoons for the 6 eggs. I can report that there was absolutely no difference in their peelability.

The second experiment was to take 6 eggs with the store pull date of March 2 and 6 eggs with the pull date of March 20th. This experiment I performed on March 18th. I boiled them using the standard method (a Sharpie(tm) writes on eggs and it doesn’t come off through boiling, by the way). Here, I notice a difference. The older eggs were easier to peel than the newer eggs. Not a lot easier, but it was noticeable.

One data point.

One the north side of my house is an old limb from a cherry tree. No sun, only damp and ,yes, you can tell which side faces north.

Spring is starting to happen here in the Willamette Valley. Some parts of the country are under snow and floods but here, in a milder place, the cherry trees are blooming.

A local church (St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Church) which supports the Ukrainian and Polish community here in town, hand makes and sells perogies and other Ukrainian/Polish foods. They do this every Saturday to support the remodel of the church. This Saturday, I took the whole family for food from the old country. Pictures are available.

I have moved some web hosting to Dreamhost (very pleased, by the way) but one irritation is the lack of all of the libxml2 tools. In particular, the fact that xsltproc is not installed.

Derived from these excellent instructions on Installing an XSLT processor, here are the instructions for creating a version of xsltproc for use on DreamHost. Get the latest sources from ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxslt/. The trick is that Dreamhost has libxml2 available in /usr/lib and they have an old version – not just any xsltproc source will work. On November 18, 2007, /usr/lib/libxml2 in Dreamhost was version 2.6.16. Looking at the ftp dir listing at xmlsoft.org I discover that 2.6.16 sources were distributed on 11/10/2004. Looking down the list, I find libxslt version 1.1.12 was distributed on 10/29/2004. This is the one I want.

The following block shows the command line steps to build xsltproc.

me@hera ~> ftp xmlsoft.org
Connected to xmlsoft.org.
220 (vsFTPd 2.0.1)
Name (xmlsoft.org:me): anonymous
331 Please specify the password.
Password:
230 Login successful.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> binary
200 Switching to Binary mode.
ftp> cd libxslt
250 Directory successfully changed.
ftp> get libxslt-1.1.12.tar.gz
local: libxslt-1.1.12.tar.gz remote: libxslt-1.1.12.tar.gz
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for libxslt-1.1.12.tar.gz (2617274 bytes
).
226 File send OK.
2617274 bytes received in 14.93 secs (171.2 kB/s)
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.
me@hera ~> tar -xzf libxslt-1.1.12.tar.gz
me@hera ~> cd libxslt-1.1.12
me@hera ~/libxslt-1.1.12> ./configure
... much outout ...
me@hera ~/libxslt-1.1.12> ./make
... much output ...
me@hera ~/libxslt-1.1.12> cp xsltproc/xsltproc ~/bin
me@hera ~/libxslt-1.1.12> cd
me@hera ~> xsltproc -version
Using libxml 20616, libxslt 10112 and libexslt 810
xsltproc was compiled against libxml 20616, libxslt 10112 and libexslt 810
libxslt 10112 was compiled against libxml 20616
libexslt 810 was compiled against libxml 20616
me@hera ~>

This works but be careful about trying to move the bin/xsltproc around – it is a script and it refers back to the build directory for the libraries. If you want to move the libraries, you will edit bin/xsltproc to point at your new location. If you don’t do anything tricky, you won’t notice this problem.

Happy transforming.