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Einem Freien Parlament

Paul Battley discovered that the proceedings of the European Parliament are recorded in the speaker's original language. Awesome, I can get some language practice in.

To provide context for the following excerpt, Ashley Mote was formerly a UKIP MEP, but got kicked out of the party after a conviction for benefit fraud.

Ashley Mote (NI ). - Mr President, over the last five years I have watched in horror the EU's endless scandalous institutionalised looting of taxpayers' money. I watched in horror an already overcrowded UK deluged by hundreds and thousands of uninvited foreign workers who arrive for their benefit and claim our welfare. I watched in close-up a legislative system that permits anonymous bureaucrats to generate so-called law without any regard for the damage they do to the British economy and its businesses. I watched in close-up -

(Interjection from the floor: 'From Her Majesty's prison!')

- this expensive, ineffectual talking shop of a parliament, masquerading as an elaborate illusion of accountable democracy, a monstrous deceit on the electors who sent us here.

President Gorbachev was right: the EU is the old Soviet Union dressed in Western clothes. You will one day realise that you cannot be masters in someone else’s house.

Der Präsident. - Sie reden in einem freien Parlament. In einem unfreien Parlament hätten Sie diese Rede gar nicht halten können!

(Beifall)

Or roughly: "You are speaking in a free parliament. In an unfree parliament you would not have been able to hold this speech!" Even the applause was German.

Posted: 26 May 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, politics, eu

Notifications

I've been experimenting with the python bindings to libnotify - the interface to the cross-platform notification daemon. The API is quite simple (although there's more when you start adding buttons and things to the notifications):

        import pynotify
        import sys
        
        if not pynotify.init("Test Notification"):
            sys.exit(1)
        
        n = pynotify.Notification("Test", "testing")
        if not n.show():
            print "Failed to send notification"

Then I put these notifications into a simple XMPP bot, so that I could send it Jabber messages and they would get displayed as a notice.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. :)

One problem I have with e.g. Facebook is that it requires me to go to their website and check a page to see what's been happening to my friends. Similarly BBC News.

One traditional answer to the news problem is the use of RSS (and similar) feeds in a reader such as liferea. But for information that comes from the Facebook API, Twitter, XMPP or email, I'll have to use a different app. Why should the user interface depend on the underlying technology?

I found 'yarssr' while thinking about this - it's an RSS reader in the form of a notification area icon. I like the way it tries to integrate with the desktop more than, say, liferea does - but I would prefer a list of new entries when I click on the icon rather than a list of feeds to hunt through. I suppose I could change it, it's in Perl. :)

Something like a drop-down notification icon list of recent 'events', with pluggable sources of information and libnotify notifications, might make an interesting diversion.

Posted: 25 May 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, rss, atom, xmpp, notifications

Roast Chicken

My brother visited last weekend, which was nice. For those who don't know Michael, he's like a younger, more stylish version of myself. He's started a blog, and it is instantly younger and more stylish than mine. It would be even better if he replaced the Wordpress example text. :)

On Sunday I cooked roast chicken, which was a first. Not just chicken though - M&S chicken, with M&S vegetables and M&S roast potatoes. Bought with an M&S staff discount.

Posted: 16 May 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, food, cooking

Baked Potato

I got distracted from cookery by a minor health issue in April, so didn't meet my original target. Still, I managed four recipes, which is better than none; and I've managed to improve my omelette technique to the point where it is actually semicircular rather than sausage-shaped when it rolls onto the plate. So let's reschedule for ten by the end of May.

It's odd, I don't feel too worried by this melanoma; for one thing, the chances of dying seem relatively small, now that it's been found. I have suffered from depression for one reason or another over the last ten years, and got over that; cancer just pales into insignificance. It's prompted some thinking about who I am, and where I'm going, but I was prone to that sort of thing already.

Meanwhile, I've joined the local gym. This seems to be a difficult process; you need to see a customer advisor, and they don't seem to work there in the evenings. When I left my name in the book, I didn't get a phone call. So several months later, I just went down there on a Saturday afternoon, which was much more productive. I haven't mentioned to them yet that I'm expecting a huge amount of tissue to be taken from my left arm in the next couple of weeks... we'll see how that affects my "fitness journey".

I think I need to eat less chocolate.

Anyway, having done my 30 minutes cardiovascular exercise this afternoon, I returned home for a meal. And so to the real point of this blog entry: microwaving baked potato makes it really underwhelming. I should have thrown it in the oven before I went out.

On the plus side, the total cooking/preparation time was 15 minutes; I served it with tuna and sweetcorn as filling, and a pile of lettuce, tomato, yellow pepper and olives on the side, with a vinaigrette. I think I met my five fruit and veg portions in one sitting.

I've been watching Professor Regan's... on BBC iPlayer, which is awesome; my favourite bit must have been the placebo "diet pill" in the first episode, which led to amazing weight loss when combined with a healthy diet and exercise! As I write this, there are 11 days left to watch the whole series. Interesting factlet this week: encouraging children to eat breakfast of any kind (even sugar-laden Frosties) is good for their long-term health. And there's apparently no proven link between sugar and obesity; I guess fat is the real problem. (So long as you avoid tooth decay.)

Posted: 03 May 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, food, cooking