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'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....

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....

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....

On Wednesday I was told that a mole that was removed from my left forearm about a month ago was in fact a melanoma. Melanoma is a form of skin cancer - a relatively uncommon and dangerous type, but fortunately curable if picked up sufficiently early. I don't have all the details yet; but the impression I get is that my mole didn't look like the classic pictures on the internet - neither my GP nor the dermatologist instantly recognised it as malignant....

I wanted to improve my night life, so I joined the Rugby & District Astronomical Society. This evening there was a talk on Norman Lockyer by Mike Frost - a topic of particular interest to me, because our computer naming scheme at work involves famous historical figures from Rugby.

No, this is not an exotic seafood/glass recipe. Yesterday (well, Tuesday evening) I was sent down to Poole to set up a caching proxy server for a customer... on Windows. Working with a Microsoft operating system is a little bit unusual in my open source support job, but hey, it pays the bills. It turned out to be surprisingly easy (or rather, my preparation had been sufficiently thorough). We'd budgeted the entire day to set things up - but I had Squid running by 9:20am, and was authenticating against Active Directory by 10am (with a choice of methods; single-sign on with NTLM or prompting the user for credentials)....

I was lazy with cooking over the weekend - on Friday I had leftover lasagne for lunch, so just cheese and crackers in the evening. On Saturday I was down in Hastings all day, so didn't cook. On Sunday evening I had frozen pizza (ew), but used the 18 minutes while it cooked to boil an egg, chop some lettuce, and prepare a basic vinaigrette. (1tsp Dijon mustard, 1tbsp white wine vinegar, 3tbsp olive oil, salt and pepper, mix....

The new kernel mode setting feature in Linux 2.6.29 is relatively easy to enable, although at this point there does not seem to be much in the way of documentation. Ingredients You will need: linux-image-2.6.29-1-686 or similar (or later) The xserver-xorg and related packages from Debian experimental, unless you're reading this in the distant future, at which point X.org 7.4 will be in unstable. An intel graphics card which uses the i915 driver....

This evening I made lasagne, loosely following a recipe from Gordon Ramsay. I'm not going to type it out, partly because I didn't follow it to the letter; I still don't have fancy stuff like oregano or bay leaves. My cheese sauce needs work, but the end result was edible, surprisingly. There's half of it left for lunch tomorrow. Some bits of the lasagne sheets seemed like they were still hard, which was probably the result of not quite being covered in sauce or something....