The Art of Correcting a Botched Cocktail

Death & Co. bartender Joaquín Simó shares tips for repairing a botched cocktail:

Start Cheap

Build a drink with your cheapest ingredients first. If there’s any error, at least you’re not throwing everything out, like your expensive booze, just because you added too much citrus.

Too Weak

This often happens when you’ve poured too much soda water. Add a small amount of booze, say a half-ounce, or a little more. But remember, you already added two ounces of booze—you don’t want three or four ounces of alcohol in a highball. So add a little booze, but maybe add a little bit more sugar and a little bit more acid as well. An overly diluted drink will taste thin, which is what the sugar will correct, and it won’t taste very bright, which is what the citrus will correct.

Too Strong

Sometimes you can make adjustments when something tastes too boozy just by adding a very small amount of a sweetener, especially when it’s a rich sweetener. It’s not so much about adding a lot of sweetness—sugar can help round out a sensation, gaining critical mouthfeel.

Too Sweet

You’re better off starting a drink with the bare-minimum amount of sugar. If it’s too sweet, try adding a little more citrus.

Too Bitter

If the drink is too bitter add a pinch of salt. Salt blunts bitterness on the palate. Try this at home: Pour a little Campari in a glass and taste it. Then throw a little salt in it and taste it again. See how big a difference that makes?

*nix chmod explained

Because of legacy reasons, chmod uses an octal numbering system (0-7). Four digits are used to calculate a file’s permissions. If the first number is zero, it may be disregarded. For example, 0400 is often shortened to 400.

The position of the digit is important. The last digit describes what others can do to the file. The second to last digit represents the access control list for a group of users. The third to last digit grants permission to the file’s owner.

There are three types of permissions:

• Execute = 1
• Write = 2
• Read = 4

Each digit in a chmod number represents a sum of these values. For example, the octal number for read+write access is 6 because 2 + 4 = 6.

Some more examples:

• chmod 600 <file> : owner can read and write
• chmod 666 <file> : anyone can read and write
• chmod 700 <file> : owner can read, write and execute
• chmod 777 <file> : anyone can read, write and execute

To learn more, visit the chmod man page.

How to locate Python’s site-packages directory

Type the following on the command line to print the location of Python’s site-packages directory to stdout:

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())"

ViM Runtime Path

The runtimepath contains a list of directories where ViM stores color schemes, documentation, plugins and settings. Type the following while in ViM to display your machine’s runtimepath:

:set runtimepath?

Game of Thrones: Season 1, Episode 1

Robert Baratheon, King of the Seven Kingdoms, travels North to visit an old friend, Lord Ned Stark of Winterfell. During his visit, the King promotes Ned Stark to a new position in the capital city. Lord Stark will serve as the King’s right hand man.

In Essos, the Dragon Prince Viserys Targaryen marries off his sister, Daenerys Targaryen, to a savage warlord named Khal Drogo. In exchange for his sister, the exiled prince hopes to forge a new alliance with the Dothraki army. The Targaryens will use the Dothraki army to win back the Seven Kingdoms.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using zsh instead of bash (or other shells)?

Jesse Tov:

Everything you know from bash still applies, but zsh does a bunch of other useful things. I know that I use only a small subset of them, but these are especially useful for me:

• Extended globbing: For example, *(.) matches only regular files, not directories, whereas a*z(/) matches directories whose names start with a and end with z. There are a bunch of other things, such as ** as described by Ole Tange.
• Inline glob expansion: For example, type rm *.pdf and then hit tab. The glob *.pdf will expand inline into the list of .pdf files, which means you can change the result of the expansion, perhaps by removing from the command the name of one particular file you don’t want to rm.
• Interactive path expansion: Type cd /u/l/b and hit tab. If there is only one existing path each of whose components starts with the specified letters (that is, if only one path matches /u*/l*/b*), then it expands in place. If there are two, say /usr/local/bin and /usr/libexec/bootlog.d, then it expands to /usr/l/b and places the cursor after the l. Type o, hit tab again, and you get /usr/local/bin.
• Nice prompt configuration options: For example, my prompt is currently displayed as tov@zyzzx:/..cts/research/alms/talk. I prefer to see a suffix of my current working directory rather than have a really long prompt, so I have zsh abbreviate that portion of my prompt at a maximum length.

Posted to Quora on 20 July 2011 in an answer to the question “What are the advantages and disadvantages of using zsh instead of bash (or other shells)?”