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Showing posts from 2015

Bechamel / Velouté without clumps - my method

After years of preparing velouté for Dutch croquettes, I think I can explain how to prepare this sauce without getting lumps. The secret is quite simple: don't mix in the liquid with the heat on. Having said that, here's the method. Heat the liquid. Milk for bechamel. Fond for velouté. Prepare a roux. Melt butter and add flour. Normally, the proportion is 1:1, but I use 1:1,5. The flour is the thickening agent. So, more flour - more thick. For a small batch, use 100g butter, 150g flour.Cook the roux thoroughly on a medium high flame. The roux will change colour and you'll see it becoming clearer. It will also start smelling nutty. Kill the heat and add the hot liquid slowly (in increments) while stirring with a ladle or whisk. Some prefer the whisk, I prefer the ladle. After adding all the liquid, turn the heat back on. Keep stirring and finish the sauce. Clumps will only form if you have the heat on and you don't stir.

Linear Mortgage Calculation

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One of my clients asked me to do a Linear Mortgage Calculation. Not a big deal were it not that I could not find the mathematical formula for it. There are a number of online calculators, so 'they' know what's going on but 'they' don't want you to know*! So, what's the deal? With a linear mortgage, also called a straight line mortgage, you pay back the same amount of  capital each period and therefore the same 'relative' amount of interest. This Dutch graph explains it. 'Aflossing' is repayment. 'Rente' is interest. Source: De Hypotheker (Dutch) So, how do you calculate this? It's relatively easy. Loan (L) is 100.000€ Years (y) is 30 Interest (i) is 2% Periods (p) is y*12 (months per year) is 360 Repayment (r) = L/p = 100.000/360 = 277,78€/month The total amount of interest (t) = L*i*y =  100.000*0,02*30 = 60.000€ The first month, the interest you pay is t/p = 60.000/360 = 166.67€ Now we can solve the followi

Configuring Apache2 for multisite (localhost)

Apache2 is one of the most popular webservers out there. If you develop websites, you want to have WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL & PHP), MAMP (Mac ...), LAMP (Linux ...) on your development machine. I have LAMP installed on a Virtual Machine I'm using for development. First things first; unless you're an expert, don't configure Apache2 to serve as a webserver. There are hosting services out there that have professionals doing these configurations, and they get attacked by hackers A friend asked me how to configure Apache2 for multisite development. I told him it was easy and then spend the whole morning figuring out how easy it is. It's not hard, just follow the following steps... in no particular order. I'm supposing you already have one site up and running. 1. Activate the Virtual Host module     You can skip this if you already have more than one site $ sudo a2enmod vhost_alias 2. Create a new configuration file from the default $ sudo cp /etc