"Geir Harris Hedemark" wrote in message
...
"Ted Byers" writes:
When I cook, I tend to wash my hands repeatedly, every time I handle a
different food; especially meats. And I clean my work area thoroughly
when

And what do you do when you are handling a dough? You can't keep
washing your hands every time you touch it, can you?

No. But I work in the kitchen in a manner similar to how I used to work in
a wet lab. I'd have everything that I need paid out in an orderly fashion,
wash my hands before beginning a given procedure, start and finish the
procedure, and then wash my hands again. I almost never interrupt a given
procedure, but if it is necessary, I'd wash my hands before and after the
interruption also. One of the advantages of working in a wetlab was that
interruptions are not tolerable (at least in most situations I have seen)
and no-one interrupts because everyone there knows that any interruption in
many procedures will result in the entire effort being scrapped and started
over.

Alas, I don't do much cooking any more because I like things a little
diverse and interesting but my sister and neice and nephew prefer things
I
find bland and won't eat the kinds of things I'd prepare (if I made a
meat
sauce for pasta, they won't eat it if I put in garlic or chili or cumin
or
mushrooms or beans or onion ...). :-( And I can't be bothered just
for
me.

Not even onions? You _are_ in trouble.

Yep. But I suspect it is, in part, a consequence of how their father's
mother cooks. You wouldn't believe some of the aweful things she prepares.
But to be fair, there are some things she prepares that are quite nice.
They're just fewer in number than the disgusting things she'd feed the kids.

Sometimes there's reasons why a kid is finicky. And my sister is rather
indulgent.

The single biggest benefit of my product is that it does a thorough
analysis
of the ingredients of a recipe (including especially quantities) in
order to
estimate the nutritional properties of the recipe (e.g. calories, fats,
protein, carbohydrates, sodium, &c.) and supports the entry of limits on
nutrient intake (e.g. at least so many grams/day but not more than this
number of grams/day) and food allergies.

I can't see why I need this function, but I may of course be wrong. I
eat more or less whatever I want. Luckily, I am fond of healthy
food. If I had liked chips, french fries or other fatty foods, I would
be in trouble.

I became aware of it as a consequence of being diabetic. While there are
now some cookbooks with recipes where some of this information is provided,
they are of no help with things like Grandma's favourite butter tart recipe,
or with my efforts to modify it so that the revised version doesn't put my
blood sugar ten times higher than it is supposed to be. And on checking, I
found plenty of other health issues affected by diet. Then I recalled that
my mother had trouble finding and preparing foods that my father could eat
(because he was often ill, and had chronic problems greatly influenced by
diet). She would complain that she didn't know what or how to cook for him
because it seemed that no matter what she prepared, someone told her that he
couldn't eat it because it was bad for him. It seemed to me that if she had
had a product like this, and obtained instructions from her physician
regarding what the minimum and maximum daily intake for each nutrient should
be given Dad's health, she could rather easily find recipes and construct
meal plans that would have met Dad's dietary needs. But in adition to those
who have diet related health issues, there are increasing numbers of people
taking steps toward improved health by taking some preventative measures
such as exercising and studying healthy eating (according to the latest data
I saw, some 80% of folk in north america have done something along this line
in the past year). Many people may not need such a feature, but it seems
there are plenty of people who would be interested in it.

I had thought of using XML, but I post-poned that since I didn't want to
take the time to develop fully fledged XML parsing code. XML is easy,
almost as easy as basic HTML, but the code to manage it isn't.

This is why people use things like xerces, xalan, xpath and the
like. You do _not_ want to write your own parser. I like the ability
to be able to say "give me the nodes that has a "keywords" element
attached containing a "keyword" element with the word "indian" in it".

There are no production-quality (as I define production-quality) free
as in beer XML databases out there yet. This is probably the biggest
problem to my solution. Xindice is getting close. Hibernate may help
out, though, but I would think there is a need to serialize the xml to
text for storage. I haven't tried yet. YMMV.

My opinions may be skewed. We are an all-objects, all-xml shop.

Isn't everyone's? Almost all of the development I have done in recent years
has been in C++ and very object oriented. I do do some structured and
procedural programming when the occassion calls for it, but most of that is
now deeply embedded in some class. While I am very familiar with VB and
Java, I find the object model in VB seriously broken and the Java runtime a
major performance problem (but Java is a very interesting language - it just
doesn't have much utility in the kinds of programming I do).

Are you familiar with SQL? If so, how would an XML database provide an
advantage over combining SQL with C++ and perhaps COM/DCOM? I can see how
one can relatively easily find all objects satisfying your search criterion
using SQL and C++ and a suitable class inheritance tree (and one of the
things making it easy is the availability of the STL in C++ and the power of
SQL).

Cheers,

Ted