Pască Tanti Vali (traditional Romanian cheesecake)

Ingredients:

• 1kg of cottage cheese
  or 1kg of sour cream
  or 1/2kg of cottage cheese and 1/2kg of sour cream
• 8 eggs
• 50-100g raisins
• 250g sugar
• half teaspoon of salt

Ingredients for the dough (only for the variants with sour cream):

• 75g butter or margarine
• 2-3 spoons of sour cream
• 1 egg
• 3 spoons of sugar
• 1 spoon of baking soda neutralized with lemon juice
• flour proportional to the rest

Special equipment:

• springform baking pan
• handheld electric mixer/beater
• Immersion blender

Preparation:

• For the variants with cream you need to first make a soft dough. Once done put this dough in the fridge for 2 hours or so. Afterwards, take the dough out of the fridge, flatten it with a rolling pin and give it a round shape, then lay it on the bottom and sides of the springform pan, all the way up.
• Blend the cottage cheese in a bowl with the immersion blender.
• Separate the 8 eggs. Beat the egg whites and sugar with the electric mixer until stiff. Separately, mix the yolks with a bit of salt. Add everything to the cheese and homogenize.
• Put the raisins into boiling water, boil for a bit, than take them out, and remove excess water. For the variants with cream pass the raisins through flour and gently lay them on top of the cheesecake. For the variant with just cheese put the raisins with everything else when homogenizing.
• Pour everything in the spring form (over the dough if making a variant that requires dough).
• Bake in the preheated oven for 60 minutes starting at 200 degrees Celsius but decreasing the temperature to 150 degrees Celsius towards the end. After it is done turn off the oven and leave the cheesecake inside until next day so that it cools down very slowly.

Tiramisu

Ingredients:

• 6 egg yolks
• 6 spoons of sugar
• 400g lady fingers
• 400g Mascarpone cheese
• 500g whipped cream
• 2 small bags of vanilla sugar (2 x 7-9g)
• some cacao
• amaretto liquor
• 10 little cups of espresso (or decaf espresso, or instant espresso) mixed with 4 tea spoons of sugar

Equipment:

• a high rectangular plastic/glass tray

Preparation:

• Make the coffee, add the 4 tea spoons of sugar and let it cool down.
• Stir the yolks with the sugar in a large container until the sugar melts, then add the cheese little by little.
• Whip the cream in a separate container. Keep 1/3 of it for decorating and incorporate the remaining 2/3 little by little into the cream.
• Pass the ends of the lady fingers quickly through the coffee, then put into the tray. Once you’re done with a complete layer of lady fingers pour half of the cream, then lay another layer of lady fingers rotated by 90 degrees (perpendicular wrt the first layer). Then put the other half of the cream and at the end the 1/3 of the whipped cream.
• Put in the fridge for a couple of hours.
• Before serving, put cacao on top through a small sieve.

Wealth Inequality in America

I wonder how Europe compares to all this …

CFP: FCS’13 Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security

My first PC membership

+---------------------------------------------------------+
!                                                         !
!			FCS 2013                          !
!       Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security      !
!     Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA      !
!                     June 29, 2013                       !
!   http://prosecco.inria.fr/personal/bblanche/fcs13/     !
!                                                         !
!          Affiliated with LICS 2013 and CSF 2013         !
!                                                         !
+---------------------------------------------------------+

Important dates
===============

Submission:			April 10, 2013
Notification of acceptance: 	April 30, 2013
Final papers: 			May 31, 2013

Invited speaker: Boris Koepf, IMDEA, Spain
===============
 

Pâté à la Valironrons

Here is a wonderful pâté recipe we have from our French friends. You need a meet grinder, but otherwise it’s not hard to make.

Ingredients (1 pound ~= 450g):

• 1 pound of chicken liver (or of any other poultry)
• 1/2 pound of bacon
• 1/2 pound of boneless pork
• 1 big bunch of parsley
• 1 egg
• 8g of salt (1/2 tablespoon)
• and then, at wish: black pepper, garlic, mustard, coriander (cilantro), juniper, clove, pistachios,…

Preparation: Grind everything*, homogenize, and put in a rectangular baking dish. Cook in the oven in a bain-marie for about 1h:30min at 380F (~193C). Cool down before serving.

[*] Grinding chicken liver works best if it’s slightly frozen, otherwise the process is a bit messy.

All Your IFCException Are Belong To Oakland 2013

Our paper marrying reliable exception handling and sound fine-grained dynamic information flow control was accepted at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland 2013).

All Your IFCException Are Belong To Us. Cătălin Hriţcu, Michael Greenberg, Ben Karel, Benjamin C. Pierce, Greg Morrisett.

• Coq formalization and proofs are available here.
• Breeze interpreter, libraries, and sample applications are available here.
• A previous version of this work was called Exceptionally Available Dynamic IFC, July 2012.

Learning/Teaching Coinduction with Coq

This semester Benjamin Pierce gave a course on Advanced Coq Martial Arts based on Adam Chlipala’s CPDT book. The course was very interactive, with the students giving most of the lectures and being in charge of creating the exercises. Since I wanted to know more about coinduction I taught the coinduction lectures and learned a lot in the process. One of the results of these lectures is a new set of materials for teaching coinduction in Coq:

• An Introduction to Coinduction
• Coinductive Operational Semantics

These materials are based on Adam’s book chapter, Giménez and Castéran’s tutorial, and Xavier Leroy and Herve Grall’s development on coinductive operational semantics. I’ve tried my best to explain things better and to add good exercises.

Another result is a new Coq tactic that allows for aggressive automation of coinductive proofs. Most of the easy proofs now take the form coind using coind_principle; crush.

• Full Coq development including my coind tactic

Update 2012-12-25: