Low Carb Spice Cake Ice Cream with Cream Cheese Frosting Bombs

I’ve discovered that a mix of cinnamon, amaretto, and Irish cream miraculously result in a flavor that tastes just like spice cake. It worked so well that I just had to bring back my cream cheese frosting bombs as a mix-in.

Low Carb Mudslide Ice Cream Affogato

One of my wife’s favorite cocktail drinks is a Mudslide. It’s a mix of vodka, Kahlúa, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and light cream. LorAnn Oils makes Kahlúa, a.k.a. Keoke Coffee, and Irish Cream flavorings, so a low carb Mudslide ice cream is easy-peasy. Scoops of this ice cream are going to be visually indistinguishable from vanilla, which would make for a very boring blog entry. Instead, I’m presenting my first Italian coffee-based dessert: an affogato. I’m going to drown three scoops of my Mudslide ice cream with a cup of coffee and top it all with whipped cream and chocolate syrup.

Low Carb Old Bay Caramel Ice Cream

Fish seasoning in ice cream? Believe it or not, this is The Charmery's best selling flavor. The instructions below specifically use my Philadelphia-style base because that’s the only way I attempted it. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to attempt a French-style custard base version. The main difference will probably the amount of flavorings. I suggest leaving out the salt since the Old Bay season should provide all we need.

Low Carb Cream-a-Latta Ice Cream

This recipe was adapted from “Incredible Ice Cream” by Malcolm Stogo. It was originally written as a gelato to be made in a large batch freezer. I reformulated it for home ice cream makers.

I tried to find any references to “Cream-a-Latta” other than this recipe on the Internet, but came up empty. Perhaps Mr. Stogo made it up? I don’t know, but it’s delicious and that’s all that matters!

Using Metrics to Drive Improvement: The Tail Wagging the Dog

Performance metrics help quantify the overall health of an organization or product being developed. Quantitative analysis is a mark of a mature organization. Everyone knows that successful companies collect metrics; therefore, it follows that every company needs to measure things in order to be great. Measurements gauge the efficacy of processes that affect budget, schedule, quality, and safety. Critical business decisions are made based on the results of this data.

Most articles about measurement and analysis opine on the pitfalls of measuring the wrong things, getting buy-in from stakeholders, or how to interpret the numbers collected. Obviously, our ability to make accurate predictions requires proper measurements and good statistical tools. None of that is what this blog entry is about. Instead, I’d like to challenge the very idea that performance metrics themselves ought to drive improvements.¹

OpenSSL FIPS 140-2 - Part Three - Windows OS

Compiling OpenSSL with the special FIPS module on Windows is a little more complicated than on Unix. As before, we are not allowed to make source code or build process changes to the FIPS module. (See part one of this series for more information on the build restrictions.)

OpenSSL FIPS 140-2 - Part Two - Unix OS

Compiling OpenSSL with the FIPS module on Unix-ish operating systems like Linux and Cygwin is pretty straightforward.

I was not able to correctly build the FIPS module on 64-bit Cygwin. There’s a bug in the ./config script that prevents it from compiling. I could get around the issue by running ./Configure linux-generic64 instead of the standard ./config script, but that would violate the mandated build procedure. The 32-bit version of Cygwin compiles everything without issue.

If you’d like to use the Cygwin compiled openssl.exe binary on a Windows system without Cygwin installed, copy the cygwin1.dll and cyggcc_s-1.dll files from the Cygwin bin directory and put it in the same directory as the openssl.exe file. Of course, it makes more sense to simply use the native Windows OS build.