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This Thai roasted chile-tamarind curry paste is used in dishes such as tom yum and cashew chicken. Mixed with equal parts lime juice or lemon juice, it makes an excellent salad dressing. However, this recipe involves lots of hot oil. Be very careful when making this curry paste. This is your final warning.

• 1/2-cu dried shrimp
• 2-cu vegetable oil
• 1/2-cu garlic, sliced (1-2 heads)
• 1 bunch green onions, sliced
• 12 chiles japones, or tien-tsin, or thai long chiles
• 3-T tamarind concentrate
• 3-T palm sugar
• 3-T Thai fish sauce

Rehydrate the shrimp in a small bowl, then drain and set aside. Prepare the garlic and green onions, then heat the oil in a wok. Dip a wooden spoon to test the oil: when you see tiny bubbles coming from the wooden spoon, the oil is ready.

First, fry the garlic for 30-90 seconds. Wait for it to turn golden, but do not let it burn. You can skim the garlic out of the oil, or strain the oil into a glass container for the next step. Either way, set the garlic aside in a bowl.

Next, fry the green onions until they begin to caramelize, 2-3 minutes. Skim or strain them out and add to the bowl containing the garlic. Fry the chiles for about 30 seconds, and add them to the bowl. Then fry the shrimp for about 1 minute and add them to the bowl.

Using a food processor, combine the fried ingredients, the tamarind and 3-5 T of the frying oil and blend into a smooth paste. Move this paste to a saucepan, add the sugar and fish sauce, and simmer for 5-10 minutes. Remove and cool.

Store the paste in a clean glass jar with a good lid. Refrigerated, it will keep for some time. This version of the recipe makes about 6-oz of curry paste.

AlbumMixer 1.6 is coming to an iOS device near you. This release works around a problem with the playlist query API in iOS 4.0 - thanks to Ray for the problem report and the debugging help. I also added new settings to adjust the playback volume (Kelly?) and disable use of Album Artist when filtering by playlist.

I'm giving Chrome 5.0.375.55 a chance to take over from Firefox 3.6. Here are my thoughts so far:

The minimalist windows take some getting used to, but I do enjoy the extra pixels. I turned off the bookmark toolbar, of course. The speed is nice, and I'll be interested to see if battery life is significantly better or worse than with Firefox 3.6.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my bookmark keywords and bookmarklets imported without a hitch. Most of the keyboard shortcuts seem to match with Firefox. I have already installed a few extensions: here is a list. I'm still using privoxy to handle most web annoyances, so I don't care about AdBlock.

1. FlashBlock
2. Type-ahead-find
3. XML-Tree
4. ChromeReload

So far my biggest problem is cq. I have a fix for the keyboard shortcuts, but I can't get XML-Tree to pick up the results frame as XML. I can see the Content-Type header is text/xml for the results frame, but I think perhaps XML-Test doesn't handle this situation. I may need to dust off the older idea of having the browser evaluate an XSLT to display the tree - perhaps with Chrome it will be fast enough to be a worthwhile solution.

I would also like to get emacsclient working. I know about Edit with Emacs, but I'm not yet convinced that I want to run a second micro-server inside emacs.

It annoys me that Type-ahead-find doesn't work on chrome:// pages. Of course this is a security precaution, but it also points out why keyboard access should be well thought-out as part of the user experience. Supplementing an incomplete keyboard experience with extensions dooms keyboard users to an incomplete experience.

MarkLogic Server 4.1 won a CODiE this week, for "Best Database Management Solution". That goes up next to past awards from 2009, 2006, and 2005.

I wonder what they will think of 4.2?

The conference starts tomorrow. I'll be speaking twice: once on high availability, and once on semantic storage and queries. I hope to see you there.

http://www.marklogic.com/UserConference2010/agenda.html