At This Space Exhibition

The “At This Space” exhibition is opening on the 26th April, at 5pm. I’m invited to the private viewing and you’re not, so neerrrr. If you want to try and bribe your way in (there’ll be free drinks, and people, and cheese[1]), then drop Cat Ashton a line and she’ll try and weasel you in. Cat’s work is being exhibited there as part of the exhibition.

Otherwise please, please, please drop by Tuesday to Saturday, 10am til 6pm. These are young, upcoming, budding artists who need all the support they can get. Hell, one of them may even be the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon. The exhibition is being held at the rather fancy-pants Urban Splash location in Castlefield:

Urban Splash (Mooch)
Worsley Street
M15 4LD

I was there today helping put up some of the work, and occupying space at other times. The exhibition looks great, the space is superb and there’s some excellent work on the walls. All very much worth your time.

[1] I may be lying about the cheese.

Bob 11 – Fiscal Bob (In Technicolor!)

Wikis – Add Salt and Pepper to Taste

Wikis are wonderful collaborative tools for project development teams. They’re lightweight, straightforward and usually fit in well with the way most developers think most of the time.

But occasionally, just occasionally one of your developers may be something of a black sheep. Maybe they don’t like the way a certain part of your corporate wiki looks, or want some customised behaviour for getting rid of irrelevant parts of the page. Maybe they want to improve their productivity (I know, an alien concept).

Take for an example a project I’m currently working on. One of our wiki pages is a rolling todo list, where new items are added under various categories as additional <li< elements in a list and as tasks are completed they’re struck out with a <del> tag. As you can imagine, after a while, this page has become something of a swamp of strikethroughs and it makes it very hard to judge the amount of work remaining.

In some cases, custom stylesheets may be adequate. But in other cases, you may need a little more flexibility. “User Scripts” are a recently modern concept that have been popularised through the Greasemonkey Firefox extension for use with common web application such as Flickr, Facebook and Gmail. User scripts provide flexibility above and beyond the scope of the original application.

So why not apply this to wikis as well? So today, I wrote the world’s smallest user script to hide the deleted lines in the wiki:

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("del").parent().parent("li").hide();
});

You’ll notice that I’m using JQuery rather than vanilla Javascript. JQuery is my library of choice and there’s no reason why you can’t use yours either. There are a few solutions for loading JQuery at runtime, my preference is to simply copy the compressed version into the header of the script. Since the script is loaded locally, the additional 50k is neither here nor there.

For the Safari lovers, there’s also GreaseKit (Mac OS X only alas), which provides similar functionality. I’m currently using this since I’ve given up on Firefox for a while (I blame Caius).

Now I’ve got a cleared down wiki and I can focus a bit on what I’ve got left to do. You can too. Or comment with an idea for novel wiki functionality.

Gardening for Geeks

Here at Tentacle Towers we have the typical urban gardening facility – a yard. Your typical yard does not really lend itself to being transformed into a urban garden paradise of self-sustenance, but we’re giving it a jolly good shot.

Growing vegetables tends to throw up images of hours of back-breaking work, pitch forks, west country accents and the sounds of the Archers. Oddly, non of the above it required, except possibly the Archers (or at least a radio tuned to Radio 4). What it does require is time, a bit of money to initially invest, and dirt. Ideally some compost.

Veg tends to broadly fall into three categories: 1. Straight to pot – the easy one. Take a large container of dirt, add some seeds, water and harvest in a few months. Straightforward enough. 2. Incubate and destroy – a little harder. Requires small potting things, and somewhere warm to germinate and grow. When your seedlings are large enough to eat a small human, transfer into the obligatory large container of dirt later. 3. Herbs – easy, but … odd. Can be kicked off in the open, or in the greenhouse. We already have a few containers of herbs, but are starting off this year’s seedlings in the greenhouse.

Important bits: * Greenhouse – this doesn’t have to be the epic huge glass house that your Aunty Mabel grows her begonias in. The Range and B&Q both sell a small greenhouse which is essentially nothing more than a series of shelves with a plastic cover. The only real difference between that one and Aunty Mabels is Aunty Mabel’s is significantly larger. * Containers – if you let them, containers can be expensive. The most we’ve paid (so far) for a container is £25 for a container to hold our Jerusalem Artichokes. The best containers are often the most novel ones. Our potatoes are in garden refuse buckets and one of the herb pots is an old barbecue.

And to prove it works, broccoli making a bid for world domination.

How to radicalise a middle class white man.

“Why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984′”

– Apple advertisement, 1984.

Steve Jobs, you lied to us! Or at least to those of us in the UK. Every day we appear to be getting more and more Orwelian. That seem like a radical statement?

The state can (and does) watch you, but you can’t watch the state.

It’s now illegal to photograph police officers. General street photography will get you hassled by the authorities and possibly arrested. Due to anti-terrorist laws, you can be now be detained for 28 days without being charged. You can simply disappear. You can be watched almost anywhere, scolded by CCTV but CCTV isn’t helping to cut crime. And for your safety and protection it turns out that CCTV has to be up to a given standard.

You only have to be suspected of a crime to be branded a criminal.

Be arrested and have your DNA taken and stored on a national database. For anything, really, anything. Even handing in a mobile phone you found on the street. You don’t even have to be charged. Children too, so you can be tracked throughout your entire life. Although don’t expect convicted criminals to be on there. Even though the EU ruled this was illegal, the government refuse to act on it. To quote the court:

“the retention in question constituted a disproportionate interference with the applicants’ right to respect for private life and could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society”

We know where you live, we know where you work, we know with who you sleep.

The government persists in pushing for a centralised database and compulsory identity card scheme, even attempting to backdoor acceptance by enforcing their use for asylum seekers and airport workers. Attempt to renew your passport to leave the country, and have your details recorded (from 2011). The government has a proven track record of losing information, and using what they do have inappropriately.

For the good of society, we will restrict the materials you have access to.

Under 18s can’t purchase spray paint (legally 16, but that doesn’t stop over-entusiastic retailers), in case they act anti-socially with it. Under 21s can’t purchase peat based compost in case they’re making bombs (again over-enthusiastic retailer). In some places crackers can’t be purchased by under 16s because they’re considered “explosives”. And don’t think that looking older will save you. 72 and looking young. And if you’re 47, don’t try to be sly by getting your ID enabled 22 year old to buy alcohol on your behalf. Heaven forbid they may give it to you.

It is the responsibility of all citizens to spy on their fellow citizens.

A recently launched poster campaign asks citizens to report suspicious behaviour. This is the second such campaign, with the first already being poorly received. Suspicious behaviour consists of noticing CCTV cameras, and depositing containers which held chemicals. The second of these would brand us terrorists every time we enter the darkroom.

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

– H.L. Mencken

Taken individually, most middle class regular white people would consider them safe, acceptable, almost sensible measures. But there comes a point where all these points come together and start to hamper everyday life. Where you become acutely aware that you are being watched, that you are being measured and that any deviance from the accepted norm suddenly brands you a potential criminal.

“And then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

– First they came, Martin Niemöller

And this is how this government will score an own goal. Because to push these policies through, regular, white, middle class people have simply to do nothing. But as more and more policies encroach on everyday life under the banner of being “for our own protection”, more and more will take notice. And more people will act. Until these policies can be pushed no more.

But there could be a point where it is too late. If civil liberties are eroded one at a time, there will not be a single large enough voice to act on it. And so we must look beyond ourselves and to the civility of our neighbour and stand up for their rights as well. Because if you stand by and do nothing when they are taken away, who will stand by you when they come for yours?

http://www.no2id.net/

Beef Casserole with Dumplings

What to do with a large quanitity of root vegetables? Well, the only logical answers are to stew it or casserole it. Here’s my basic recipe.

Ingredients

• 500g Shin Beef, Diced
• 2 Carrots
• 1 Parsnip
• 2 Onions
• Fresh Rosemary
• Bay Leaf
• Beef Stock Liquid

Directions

1. In a frying pan, heat a little oil, fry off the beef and onion with a little rosemary. Add to a casserole dish.
2. Scrub/peel carrots and parsnip. Add to casserole dish.
3. Add rosemary and bay leaf.
4. Add enough made up stock from liquid to cover meat to cover contents.
5. Cook at 200oC for 1 hour, then drop to 80oC continue cooking for 1.5 hours.
6. Mix 1/3 suet to 2/3 self raising flour for as many dumplings as you want. Add a little salt, and rosemary if you wish.
7. Add water to the dumpling mix until a sticky, moist mixture is reached.
8. Spoon mixture into casserole dish. Either leave of surface or push under surface.
9. Turn oven back to 200oC and return casserole dish to oven for 30 minutes.

Just before adding the stock and committing to the oven:

Fresh rosemary – no garden or kitchen should be without it:

Abel and Cain (Surely Cole? – ed)

It’s a well regarded fact that geeks often live off a combination of pizza, Coke (Dew for our Merkian and enlightened home bretheren) and foodstuffs that generally come with an immediacy. Quite a few of us are also food-geeks, but our planning faculties tend to let us down in having raw materials to hand to put dishes together. Despite the fact that I live around the corner from the major supermarket (and I really do mean around the corner), I am particularly pants at getting, and then using fruit and vegetables everyday. Until the garden proper kicks off, we decided to start getting our vegetation in from Abel and Cole. The idea is working on the time honoured principal that if someone thrusts it in our face, we’re going to eat it.

There’s also the benefit that Abel and Cole boxes are organically sourced, and all UK produce, zeroing the air miles as well. Ignoring the fact that a little man comes and delivers it to the door, it’s significantly better for the environment, see?

So, for a first time out we decided to order a mixed medium box, some mushrooms and a loaf. Pretty standard fare, except that we were told “order over £20, get a mixed box free”. Which meant that when the box arrived, we were greeted with this:

Oh holy, moly. That’s a lot of food.

For the inventory, there are potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, rocket, radishes, broccoli, apples, plums and oranges plus the mushrooms and bread we bought extra. The potatoes are smaller than those you’d be expecting from your supermarket, as are the onions, but there is a significant difference in taste.

Out of this fine assortment, there’s a (broccoli) bit that Cat (rocket) can’t (radishes) or won’t eat. Abel and Cole have a preferences system so you can adjust what they will and won’t send to you. We clearly need to do a little more tweaking on ours, but for a first effort, not bad at all.

So what to do with a mountain of good quality food? Well, best cook it. See the next post for my basic, but nommish beef casserole recipe.

Welcome to the LifeTrack

Welcome to the LifeTrack, feel free to ignore it

This is a new category for the blog that’ll be dealing with me getting life, funnily enough, back on track. It’s going to be about food, gardening, exercise and most likely have little or nothing to do with code, photography, bob. Since graduating in 2003, I’ve wrestled with my work/life balance, usually falling far too far on the wrong side of work. This year I didn’t just decide that enough was enough, I decided to actually act on it. Also, in a world of economic recession, being sensible and looking after my primary business asset (me) as also in my best interests.

Over the course of the year, there’ll be updates to the state of the garden as we attempt to grow our own fruit and vegetables, possibly the occasional recipe and tips for attempting to keep your life in a roughly working order.