So, I decided to start off gently. The advantage of this recipe is that... I already knew how to make it. Awesome.
Easy peasy. Heat some oil in a saucepan, add the onions and stir until they're more or less transparent (supposedly, although I'm sure I just make them turn brown). And add the garlic shortly afterwards.
When you get bored of watching onion cook, add the chopped tomatoes and herbs. Thus begins phase 2, involving bubbling rather than sizzling.
After about ten minutes of that, boil water in a second pan. Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the packet. Once it is al dente, the pasta sauce will be about ready as well. Drain the pasta and stir into the pasta sauce. Serve.
And lo, it was good. I think the browning of the onion was due to too high a heat in the initial stages; it's better taken slow.
The total cost of the sauce was somewhere less than £1; this compares favourably with ready-made sauce. In fact, this was a ridiculously economical meal.
At the same time as doing this, I set up a new housemate with wireless internet access, and got a beer and £5 in return. Bizarre, but he insisted. Then I had to fix his DNS settings, which someone at his previous accomodation at hardcoded to something weird... and wrong. This was the first time I'd ever had to tackle Windows XP's network settings in Hungarian.
Posted: 30 Mar 2009 00:00 |
My HP dx2250 desktop suddenly refused to turn on last Tuesday; it just beeped loudly at me when the power button was pressed. It took me until today to look at it; downloading the troubleshooting guide, I could translate the pattern of flashes of the LEDs as signalling faulty RAM. Phew.
I must say I was surprised - I have never had RAM die on me before. At least it wasn't a DIMM module I had bought myself... and it could be worse, I was almost considering replacing the machine. (I wonder how many people do.) For now, I'm down to 1GB RAM, unless I can find something stashed away somewhere.
Posted: 29 Mar 2009 00:00 |
No man is an island; objectives cannot be set in isolation from the reality of our situation. One standard technique for analysing where we are is the SWOT analysis: considering Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses deal with aspects internal to your organization; Opportunities and Threats are concerned with environmental factors over which you have no direct control. Once these are identified, you can act to mitigate the negative points.
One particular threat is that I'm visiting various people each weekend for the foreseeable future - tonight I'm with my brother at Badger Farm near Winchester, so the results of my SWOT analysis will wait until tomorrow. :)
Posted: 27 Mar 2009 00:00 |
Spurred on by the accusation that my expertise is limited to computer-related topics, I have resolved to learn to cook. This in fact will solve more than one problem: what to do with my copious free time given that I am organized, and give me more confidence that I am not wasting my money on ready meals each week.
Obviously I am looking to transfer skills from existing domains of knowledge to this endeavour. (From open source development to... open sauce development?) My first insight from my project management experience is that this project really needs some SMART goals to work towards. Hmm... okay, first objective:
By 30th April 2009, I want to have documented a repertoire of at least 10 simple main course recipes, where I have cooked each dish at least once.
Tomorrow: SWOT analysis.
Posted: 26 Mar 2009 00:00 |
Apparently today was Document Freedom Day. Next year we shall have to actually celebrate it.
At work, one of the company's key objectives is to promote open standards like ODF. We are lucky to have an OpenOffice.org developer in-house (a rare commodity, especially outside of Sun or Novell), and I've had the opportunity to work on supporting openoffice.org from time to time. The biggest difficulty is the sheer size - the built source tree needs 15GB, so it's pretty difficult to search through, for instance.
Then there's the long compile times; if you're writing a patch for OO.o, it is important to get your debug cycle as short as possible. If you can limit the patch to just one module, then that can be rebuilt individually... and then you can symlink the relevant libraries from your installed copy to point directly into your build tree. If it sounds ugly, that's because it is - but you can get the compile/testing phase down to a minute or so.
My most memorable encounter with OO.o so far has been tracking down an issue with hidden text - it turns out OO.o 2.x writes the opposite value to the ODF standard for the hidden text property. A conversion routine had been put into OO.o 3.0 to import documents written by 2.x correctly, but passing documents from 3.x (or AbiWord, or KOffice) users to OO.o 2.x users is prone to trouble. Last I checked, we were trying to persuade Sun that a 2.4.3 release would be a good idea.
Posted: 25 Mar 2009 00:00 |
Flymake is an emacs minor mode that runs a syntax check tool over source files as you write them, on the fly. Essentially it calls the compiler for the relevant language and then parses the warnings.
Because this is so obviously useful, I have it turned on by default in .emacs:
; Highlight syntax errors (require 'flymake) (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook)
Recall also that I use emacs to view page source in Epiphany. Unfortunately, this produced a nasty dialog box warning about not being able to find an 'xml' command.
The solution comes in two parts:
;;;; xml-specific init-cleanup routines (defun flymake-xml-init () (list "xmlstarlet" (list "val" (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy 'flymake-create-temp-inplace))))
I suppose both emacs packages should really Suggest xmlstarlet - I wonder how many other external programs might fall into that category.
Posted: 21 Mar 2009 00:00 |
Suddenly I am very organized - a series of tedious tasks seem to have completed themselves, and I'm teetering on the brink of productivity. But that way lies madness.
Today at work we finally deployed the new django-based website. It uses the same HTML and styling as the old website, but reduces the URL duplication, which will help with optimizing for search engines. We now need to add better content, and then perhaps work on the style. (I am now able to link directly to a page about PostgreSQL training, but the content is not yet too informative. And we still have nothing on Nagios.)
Next tedious task: the last of the Debian NM questions.
Posted: 19 Mar 2009 00:00 |
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
JabberID: tim@retout.co.uk
I'm afraid I have turned off comments for this blog, because of all the spam. Let's face it, I didn't read them anyway. Feel free to email me.