| April |
[02 May 2012|08:14pm] |
 April showers! It's weird to think at the start of the month it was bright and sunny. I baby-sat my parents' rabbit, Marmite, who turned out to be pretty cute once he decided to nap at my feet.
 For Easter I visited my parents, who had just returned from Bruges along with several chocolate ducks. Naturally the thing to do was duck racing, with chocolate eggs as the prize.
Emily had brought back a whole sack of chocolate mini-eggs from our visit to the Netherlands, and she hid a share of them around my house, so I could have an Easter egg hunt. I'm still finding them every now and then, today I found one in my box of tissues!
A couple of weekends ago I visited Emily's mum's house in the middle of the countryside in Hampshire, which was awesome. Emily's mum made me feel very welcome, the country air was so relaxing, and I'd forgotten just how many stars you can see when not stifled by a city.
Lastly, my house is for sale! I'm looking to move somewhere closer to London to mitigate the increased commute time from when my work moved offices, plus I'd like a second bedroom to use as a study for when I work from home.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/6036.html.
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| March |
[31 Mar 2012|05:18pm] |
It's that time of the month again!
Considering that last month I was writing about making snowmen^H^H^H Daleks, it seems very odd that I've been out sunbathing in Russell Square Gardens most days this week. The Gulf Stream hasn't shut off yet, then.
Netherlands
At the start of the month Emily and I went to Amsterdam, as it's somewhere we both wanted to visit in order to see our respective friends. On Friday evening after arriving, we met up with Emily's friend Stu, who took us out to an Ethiopian restaurant somewhere in Amsterdam - I forget where exactly because we were too busy running after trams whose stops aren't quite as close together as we'd hoped. Ethiopian food involves shared platters of curried portions spread across a base of floury pancakes. Finger food! It was rather tasty.
On Saturday I went to Leiden to meet up with fuzzie and Bertram while Emily spent the day with Stu. fuzzie, Bertram and I went to Noordwijk's sand dunes, which are just about the only hills I've ever seen in Holland. Emily joined up with us after we got back to Leiden station, and we went out for dinner at an American-style restaurant, where I had a very tasty and filling jambalaya and everyone else's food looked good too.
We had Sunday to ourselves and took the opportunity to explore Amsterdam, but first stopped off at the Sex Museum, which was ... interesting. And slightly scary. We ended up in Leidseplein around lunchtime, and had lunch in the excellent Bagels and Beans before going to a flower market in the afternoon and crashing at our hotel - the Westcord Art Hotel - for a little while before going out for dinner at The Pancake Bakery, which I couldn't recommend enough. I had a savoury pancake for mains, a sweet pancake for dessert, and some poffertjes to finish it off, because poffertjes!
We flew back into London City Airport on Monday, which was slightly unnerving as the plane just flies along the Thames and gets closer and closer to the water until you think you're about to splash down, but the runway appears out of nowhere just before you do. I think I spotted the M25 over Essex before we got too low down, but I don't know Essex's geography well enough to say for sure.
So all in all we had a fantastic time, got to see our friends and do some touristy things, and ate incredibly well to top it off!
On the topic of good food, we cooked the ratatouille from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg Everyday cookbook after looking through it for ideas. Really good! It's jumped immediately onto my list of favourite meals.
Canterbury
Last Saturday I took Emily to Canterbury to show off the city and show her the place I'd gone to University in. After exploring the old town high street, we walked along the western part of my old cycle route, over hand-operated level crossing and through a large orchard. We were going to turn around when we got to the footbridge over the Great Stour river on Tonford Lane, as I always used to do, but it turned out that Canterbury City Council had conveniently built us a footpath back to Canterbury along the Stour called the Great Stour Way, which took us back to Westgate Gardens via the embankment of a closed (and removed) railway track.
  
After getting back to the City centre, we went into Siesta (still awesome) and walked around and through the Cathedral as light faded, before having a curry at Kashmir Tandoori (not how I remembered it) and heading back to London/Dartford on the high speed rail (St Pancras to the Dartford bridge in 15 minutes, oh how I wish my commute was that fast, but I'd have to backtrack to Gravesend to make use of it).
It was all a wonderful day, and we'll definitely go back. Emily loved the sound of camping in Blean Woods (I will update the link to the photos in that post soon, I hope)(Holy crap, I've barely changed) so there might be hammocking forthcoming in the summer.
And finally...
 I had to perform surgery on femputer, my plug computer which hosts my website, irssi and bitlbee sessions, and a few other things, after the PSU decided to go pffffut the week before last. My website was offline for a while but it doesn't seem to have affected my search engine rankings too much. I still get beaten by a dozen pages about the incidental Scrubs character, bah.
( Third Doctor summary )
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/5805.html.
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| traceback.extract_stack(): my new favourite python function |
[26 Mar 2012|12:31pm] |
Ah, SQLAlchemy, my old nemesis. I'm still stuck using SQLAlchemy 0.4.x/0.5.x at work, so I don't know if this has changed in later releases, but I hope so. Whereas things in Python like file objects will automatically close themselves when they go out of scope, something like this will leave hanging connections open:
( code )
Now, this is annoying to debug because rather than getting an error immediately, you find out about it sometime in the future when the QueuePool queue exhausts all of its available connections and raises an error on some future unfortunate self.engine.execute().
Fortunately I can edit SQLAlchemy's code pretty easily, but throwing an error (my usual way of figuring out where code is misbehaving) when connections are established doesn't work due to the queue semantics above. After that, traceback.print_stack() is pretty useful to hack in, but the stacks end up huge through SQLAlchemy's internals, and I had a lot of database reconnections going on with all those engine.execute()s around.
So I decided to write something that would tell me where in my code the connections were established and closed to see where my leak was. The following code shows a self-contained file that demonstrates what's going on:
( code )
Essentially, I'm creating a stack trace that only shows the lines of the stack that I'm interested in.
The relevant part of SQLAlchemy to add these into are in pool.py's QueuePool methods do_get() and do_return_conn().
With this extra output it was relatively easy to spot which lines of my code were checking out more connections than they were putting back, and I found the bug quickly after that.
Anyway, I thought it was a neat hack and I'll probably end up using it again sometime, so in the blog it goes.
Edit: It seems that engine.execute(...).fetchall() does actually close the connection, whereas fetchone() doesn't (SQLA 0.5.8). Consistent!
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/5560.html.
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| Dans le Noir? |
[16 Mar 2012|10:09pm] |
In my previous post I described my meal at Dans le Noir?, a restaurant where dining happens in pitch darkness. In the spirit of the evening, I didn't reveal what I actually had at the time, but we were told afterwards what we'd been served. I had some pleasant surprises!
( spoilers... )
So there you have it! This was the recommended option of a whole mix of things. There were also no-meat, no-fish, and vegetarian options.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/5176.html.
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| February |
[29 Feb 2012|08:40pm] |
29th February! Cor, I've been up to a lot this month. Skip to the end for the super-awesome part!
On a very cold and clear Winter night, Emily and I met up at Waterloo and decided to take a ride on the London Eye. While it looks like the Eye rotates quite slowly from the ground, when you're in a pod time seems to go fairly quickly. It was pretty cool picking out all the landmarks we knew.
It only got colder for the first weekend of February. I met up with Emily and some of her friends for an early birthday meal at a pizzeria called Bianco43 in Greenwich before having a walk around Greenwich Park. That night it snowed, and I met up with the Hampstead crew again on Sunday, where Emily's friends had been up since dawn making these rather awesome snow sculptures:
I suggested making a snow Dalek, so we did! It's harder work than it looks, but the snow was great for clumping together into shapes.
I have eaten well this month!
On the second weekend, my parents put our family up in a hotel in Portsmouth overnight so we could meet up and have dinner with my aunt and cousins. We ate in a private room in a pub on Gunwharf Quays called The Old Customs House; I had fish and chips for the first time in a long while and everyone's meals looked really good. It was really nice to catch up with my cousins.
For Emily's birthday (and totally not for Valentine's Day, nuh-uh), Emily brought over her fondue set and we sat on the floor eating fondue before watching modern Doctor Who. A week later it was Shrove Tuesday, and we made pancakes; I had savoury crêpes for the first time (asparagus, mushroom and cheese) and it was totally awesome.
In my entry for December I mentioned that Emily had booked a restaurant for my birthday, and this weekend we made it there. Dans le Noir? is a restaurant where you eat in pitch darkness. The menu is also a surprise, within any dietary requirements you have, and is designed to appeal to your remaining senses.
We were lead by our (blind) waiter to our table, and the feeling of distinct unease dissipated quite quickly after I was seated and able to find Emily's hand. The restaurant doesn't make any particular concessions to the darkness - we were expected to pour our own water from the jug and we used cutlery during each course (although I tended to prod my dish after finishing to make sure I hadn't missed anything!)
What we actually had was revealed to us afterwards, but in the spirit of the meal I won't say what we had in this post in case anyone else fancies going (and I'd highly recommend it!) and they don't happen to rotate the menu often. However, I will describe it:
- Starter: There were three small round chunks, served warm, with the texture of the inside of roast potato, with a delicately spicy taste (corriander/cumin, perhaps). Each one was topped with a dollop of something I couldn't associate a flavour with but had the texture of whipped cream.
In the centre of the plate was probably my least favourite part of the whole meal; again I had trouble identifying any kind of flavour, but had a texture that was lumpy and slimey; like a cross between cold baked beans and the protein mix they eat in The Matrix ("If you close your eyes it almost feels like you're eating runny eggs" // "Yeah, or a bowl of snot")
- Main: This one was easier. There were three pieces of meat, quite thin and roughly 10x5cm each. The first one I identified as some kind of meaty fish, possibly monkfish, but seemed to hold together better than monkfish. The second one I placed as a really good steak. The third one, somewhat of a mix between beef and lamb. They were all super-tender. They were served with green beans.
- Dessert: Easily the best chocolate mousse I've tasted, inbetween two layers of what tasted like chocolate but were somehow rather versatile, like a square of American processed cheese (although minus the cheese flavour). There were also two jelly cubes
A very odd thing that Emily and I both noticed was that we can remember vision from that evening.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/5084.html.
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| January |
[29 Jan 2012|11:49am] |
This year literally started with Emily and I kissing ^_^. There was a great view of all the fireworks going off along the horizon from the top of Temple Hill at midnight, with Crayford Ness to the North and Canary Wharf to the West.
On New Years Day we went up to London to visit St James Park, and there happened to be a parade going on down The Mall and Whitehall. It was tipping down with rain but a quick stop at The Umbrella Shop (Boots) fixed that. St James Park was deserted as a result, and the squirrels were hungry. Emily managed to get one to climb up her leg for a hobnut. We went back again last weekend and I managed the same trick. Squirrels are awesome.
While stuck on a train thanks to a Network Rail cockup, I finished the V for Vendetta graphic novel, which is really rather good. The film did a good job of modernising and restructuring it for a movie, I think, and the storylines diverged enough to keep the graphic novel interesting. I've now started on Arthur C Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth, which is making for good reading so far.
On the 14th we went to Whitstable, a seaside town on the north Kent coast. We squeezed through Squeeze Gut Alley, went paddling in the sea (holycrapcold), then had a gorgeous lunch at a wonderfully cosy place on the high street called Samphire before walking down to the sea front again to watch the sun set and the stars come out. I have also been coveting a couple of houses I saw for sale (if only!).
Yesterday I went over to my brother's place in Gravesend, along with my parents, as he and his girlfriend had invited us over for dinner. Rabbits were petted and lasagne and white chocolate cheesecake were eaten. Again with the coveting of a full size house :)
I've also been discharged from the physiotherapist since I've been making (slow) progress and there's not really anything else they can teach me to do in one-on-one sessions like I've been having. So I have the advice to continue my daily exercises and motivations, gradually increase the amount I'm walking (and scale back if having trouble), and eventually ween myself off the knee straps I have to wear. I think overall it's been quite positive, and I did 6km yesterday with only some minor niggles. I was doing about twice that each weekend before the trouble started last autumn, and I did 20km in Kenilworth before Ayacon last year, which I suspect was probably the root cause of all this trouble, if not just ageing physiology.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/4794.html.
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| Using repoze.profile in a Pylons project |
[23 Jan 2012|02:58pm] |
What with Google Code Search having been closed down, and the Pylons documentation largely broken since that project merged into Pyramid, it took a few leaps of faith on my part to figure out how to set up profiling on a project using the repoze.profile middleware.
project/config/middleware.py:
from repoze.profile.profiler import AccumulatingProfileMiddleware
# ...
def make_app(global_conf, full_stack=True, static_files=True, **app_conf):
# Configure the Pylons environment
load_environment(global_conf, app_conf)
# The Pylons WSGI app
app = PylonsApp()
#Profile the app
app = AccumulatingProfileMiddleware(
app,
log_filename='profiling.log',
cachegrind_filename='cachegrind.out',
discard_first_request=True,
flush_at_shutdown=True,
path='/__profile__'
)
# Routing/Session/Cache Middleware
app = RoutesMiddleware(app, config['routes.map'])
app = SessionMiddleware(app, config)
app = CacheMiddleware(app, config)
# CUSTOM MIDDLEWARE HERE (filtered by error handling middlewares)
# ...
Then go to http://localhost:5000/__profile__ for the stats. It looks like this might be rather helpful as of writing, but we shall see now I have it set up.
Edit: You'll need python2.6+ for the pstats module, which caused me some trouble (yes, I know it's 2012), but seems to have paid off. I've already got some nice juicy stats that have exposed at least one function that's taking longer than ideal.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/4593.html.
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| EOY |
[31 Dec 2011|11:59am] |
End of year post! Precisely six things happened this month.
Doctor Who
On the third, Emily and I went to the Doctor Who Experience in Kensington (London), which is open until February and I would thoroughly recommend if you're looking to do something cool. It starts off as a (semi-)interactive tour, as the Doctor, trapped in the Pandorica, guides the tour group through various scenarios, including encounters with Daleks and Weeping Angels. Being a super nerd, I recognised some Dalek voice clips from some of the B&W classic stories, but either way, having Daleks creeping up behind you is super awesome.
After the tour, you find yourself in a museum that has some recreations of TARDIS interiors, display costumes for each of the eleven Doctors and the New Series companions, and recreations of Cybermen, Dalek props, and other (some rather obscure) classic aliens. It was all super fun.
Gingerbread
I made gingerbread biscuits the weekend before Christmas, using this recipe, and they turned out rather well! Emily helped me ice them the next day using a nifty improvised ... icing... squirt... thing... made out of greaseproof paper, and they were SO AWESOME.
Mushrooms
I bought some mushroom kits at the end of November and they've started to pop up some tasty toadstools. The Oyster mushrooms came up first, and the button mushrooms are in charge at the moment - they shall be joining a pizza tonight, most likely. The chestnut mushrooms seem to be taking their time coming through, but I have a few nubs so I assume something's working. They're not going to be cost-effective compared to buying from the supermarket, but opening the blinds every morning and seeing how much they've grown is fun enough to make up for that deficit.
Southbank Christmas market
This has been going for a few years now and it was here once again this December. There was a merry-go-round (which Emily and I couldn't resist going on), food stalls selling mulled wine, ostrich burgers, bratwurst, and a whole plethora of other foods; wood carved giraffes for sale, jewellery, stripy socks, and much more. I'm not sure how I can make that last part sound less like an advertisement, but we'll run with it.
Knee
I visited the physiotherapist again and I have some 'motivations' and 'exercises' to try to improve my knees, along with another appointment for the middle of January. I had one day over Christmas where my knee was a little too painful to walk about much on, but other than that I just get a tweak in it every so often, and sometimes my left shin and ankle feel like they're about to get pins and needles. At any rate, I'm impressed that the NHS is able to fit me in so regularly; I know it's what they're there for, but you hear stories. Hopefully in 2012 I'll be able to get back out and about more regularly.
Christmas & Birthday
Over Christmas I stayed at my parents' place, and so did my brother and his girlfriend. We had goose for Christmas dinner, a break from our usual tradition of duck. It was the first time I've had goose; it was a much less strong flavour than duck, and behaved a bit more like turkey. Also it was huge.
On the 28th I turned 27 and we went out for dinner in Greenwich, after seeing a short show at the Greenwich Observatory. I can now identify Orion's belt, and learned that all the planets are seen along one plane in the sky, which makes sense when you consider their orbits. It was a good show with a good presenter. Dinner, at a small place called Inside, was also good. I had Thai spring rolls followed by pheasant on a potato and spinach gratin, then pear sponge cake for desert.
My haul of gifts this year included Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Every Day and Veg Every Day from my parents for Christmas and Birthday respectively, in addition to Doctor Who new series 6 on Bluray for Christmas, and a small bay tree and rosemary plant for my birthday. James gave me House season 7 for Christmas and Bill Bailey's Part Troll for my birthday. Emily gave me the V for Vendetta graphic novel for Christmas (which is rather addictive reading), and for my birthday Songs of a Distant Earth (Arthur C Clarke) and the promise of dinner out at a rather awesome-sounding place that will make a following journal entry for sure.
Happy new year, everybody!
Spoiler: the world doesn't end. (The Mayan Calendar just loops back around to zero. It'd be like the Y2K or 2038 bug if the Mayans still existed and also had computers.)
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/4288.html.
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| I've been up to things |
[27 Nov 2011|04:39pm] |
Hello! This post is a whopper. Grab some tea...
What with it being Not Advent Yet, everywhere has Christmas stuff going on, and that includes the London Southbank, which has its annual Christmas market going on at the moment. Emily and I went along last weekend to check it out, and ended up riding on a Carousel, which was much more fun than I probably should let on. We also had foods there at surprisingly low prices (and avoided food poisoning) - I had a beef goulash and we shared an apple and cinnamon crêpe afterwards. There were also wood carvings and crockery and bratwurst and beer. The place was shutting down by about 20:30 though, so I think at the moment it's aimed at the going-home work crowd. Most of the sellers seemed to be continental Europeans, which makes sense since Germany and the like are well-known for Christmas markets.
  This weekend (yesterday, to be precise), we went to a tour of the closed Aldwych tube station. The 1907 station was closed in 1994 when its (pretty awesome) lifts broke down, and would've cost millions to repair or replace, more than the short fork of the Piccadilly line from Holborn could justify given its low traffic. Aldwych has been popular since then (along with Charing Cross' Jubilee Line platforms) as a set for films such as V for Vendetta and Die Another Day.
 The station itself hadn't been redecorated before its closure, so still had a very old fashioned look to it. It was originally designed to be a major interchange station, and had three lift shafts, although only the rightmost shaft was ever used for the two now-defunct elevators. The information office was even placed at the top of the middle shaft. From there we headed down to platform level, using the 160-step spiral staircase.
 The West platform contained an unpainted tube train, which could still run and was used for staff training and similar, although the electricity was switched off that day, I think to allow easy evacuation along the tunnel to Holborn should there be an emergency. While the station was built with two lines and two platforms, the East platform only managed to last until 1914 when it was taken out of use. This was the more interesting platform of the two, as it had a much more derelict feeling, partly because half the platform area was never decorated because they ran short trains there, leaving old tiling only part way along.
 
Afterwards we went to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, which our tickets to the tour provided us with free admission to. It was a nice way to round off the day with examples of all public transport vehicles right back to a 1800s horse-drawn omnibus, most of which we were allowed to get in and sit for a while. It was a good way to round off the day, although I'm glad we didn't have to pay to get in, because £13 seemed a bit steep for what was there.
My full set of photos is here: Aldwych Tube Station.
Surprisingly my knees are feeling okay today despite all those stairs. (However I said that last entry too, and then found myself aching on Monday.) I saw a physiotherapist last week, and he showed me how to use zinc tape to support where my ligament attaches to the tibia, which we're hoping will help. I have another appointment in a couple of weeks' time to report back. Last session was a bit disappointing because although my knees got a thorough prodding at the time, they weren't painful while I was at the appointment, so there wasn't a positive diagnosis of what was wrong.
Anyway, what with the knee and working from home (the new office now has a fibre connection, but drops packages every so often for a good few seconds, making Skype conversations tricky to say the least), I've had more time to watch through classic Doctor Who, which I've been renting from Lovefilm (watching during my lunchbreaks and would-be commute time, before anyone accuse me of slacking off). As it happens, this Wednesday was the 48th anniversary of the broadcast of the first William Hartnell episode, and this weekend I finally finished watching through all the (released on DVD) episodes of the black and white era. The quality of the episodes (in terms of script and production values) varies wildly, so I've put together a list of the serials that stood out to me:
- An Unearthly Child: The first episode of Doctor Who. While the serial that followed it was terrible (cavemen had meetings too, you know), it introduces The Doctor, and shows his confusion that his TARDIS hasn't changed appearance when it leaves the 1960s
- The Aztecs: An average storyline, but establishes that the Doctor believes that (at least some) events should not be changed, and also sees the First Doctor accidentally marrying an Aztec, which was just hilarious to watch with Eleventh Doctor hindsight.
- The Dalek Invasion of Earth: While not the first Dalek serial, this was the first time that Doctor Who did any location filming, and showed the start of much higher production values. It also shows the departure of the Doctor's granddaughter, which is one of the saddest moments in the early series, especially with new series hindsight.
- The Romans: the serial that really endeared me to Ian and Barbara as companions, finally showing some friendly-with-more-implied interaction between the two, and the first time the series had pulled off a genuinely funny performance. It's odd that it was so ill-received at the time that it took until the Tenth Doctor before the returned to Pompeii.
- The Space Museum: Unfortunately nothing special in the end, but the first time the series had done wibbly wobbly, as the TARDIS crew encounter stuffed versions of their future selves in a museum. Also features the First Doctor popping out the top of a museum Dalek; what's not to like?
- The Chase: An honorary mention as the last serial to feature Ian and Barbara, as I feel the series struggled to find a likeable male lead companion after this, especially during the First Doctor's era. Given that the female lead's job back then was solely to scream a lot, this meant the series had lost something good.
- The Time Meddler: The first time to feature another member of the Doctor's (as yet unknown) race, and some great interactions between the First Doctor and the Meddling Monk.
- The War Games: the final story for the Second Doctor and the only one of his era that I'd recommend, as I never warmed to the Second Doctor or any of his companions (sorry
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) ugerchucker, Jamie's only purpose seemed to be to flag interesting things with "Heeeeey"). The War Games finally reveals that the Doctor is a member of the (introduced) Time Lord race and that he stole the TARDIS from them. Even before it reaches that bit, the story is excellent and doesn't have any silly aliens, and the only futuristic set even looks pretty good. Plus, it features the great Star Wars-esque line from the rogue Time Lord called The War Chief: Now we can turn this savagery to some purpose. We can bring peace to the galaxy! -- eleven years before even A New Hope came out, let alone Revenge of the Sith
Next week: Third Doctor!
Anyway, that's quite enough blogging for one day, I think. Stay tuned for next month's exciting instalment!
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/4000.html.
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| Insulted by Stormtroopers |
[30 Oct 2011|05:58pm] |
 Hello! Yesterday I went to the London Expo with Emily, and we also met up with Luke, Sel, DC, Sarah and the GANG. On the way out a Stormtrooper beckoned as over to ask whether we were in love, then noted that he saw what I saw in Emily but couldn't see what she saw in me. Insulted by a Stormtrooper, guys! I've checked THAT one off my list.
Also at the Excel Centre this weekend was a fashion expo for UK's Next Top Model, so we had trouble telling who was a fashionista and who was just in cosplay. Those fashion girls, they sure dress wacky. MCM Expo has also spun off a smaller show which they were letting MCM ticket-holders in to for free this first time, which sounds generous until you realise that it's basically stuff that used to be in the main one anyway, like the celebrity autographing and Delorian/TARDIS photo shoots. On the plus side, having two halls rented meant there was a lot more space so the whole thing seemed less crammed than it did last year.
I also got to see Anthony Daniels, Warwick Davis, and Freema Agyeman, who all looked basically how they appear on screen, except that Anthony Daniels isn't a droid. And Agyeman probably looked better, on account of not wearing Martha Jones' stupid purple leather jacket.
 It also turned out that friendship is a bit magic, whatever that means. I also ate Applejacks (beg your parden). Stand-out cosplay included a pacman being chased by two of the ghosts. Sorry, Jostein (and other video gamers), I can't remember which two. There was also a nyan cat.
Here's some other things that have happened this month:
- Emily and I went to Borough Market and bought Apple and Beetroot juice, yoghurts, and falafel. All the above were tasty.
- Emily showed me how to make beetroot risotto, which was also delicious. And simple. (One pot meals)++
- Apparently the Euro EXPLODED and then DIDN'T EXPLODED and it will NEVER EXPLODED again.
- My leg is still being a pain in the arse. Or more specifically, a pain in the knee. However, I'm not really noticing any suffering after being on my feet after Expo all day yesterday, which is perhaps a good sign. I'm in two minds about whether to book another GP appointment about it.
- It's dark at 1700. Boo.
- Prrrrromotion. My new job title has been finalised. My business card (if I had one) reads Lead Search Architect.
Edit 2011-10-31 11:50: I am noticing suffering last night and today, arrrgh, so unbelievably frustrating.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/3659.html.
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| Patching, more patching. SO MUCH PATCHING |
[21 Oct 2011|03:00pm] |
Another code post, but don't worry, I have things to talk about for my regular update too.
I've been trying to set up a captcha field - specifically Google's ReCaptcha - on a not-as-old-as-you'd-think Pylons project which uses ToscaWidgets for rendering forms. I'd link you to Pylon's page as well but it merged with Repoze and apparently maintenance is hard. I'm pretty frowny about this but that's for another day.
On top of that, the 0.8 release of tw.recaptcha, which is supposed to make it easy to add recaptcha into ToscaWidget forms, didn't work, due to two things:
* You have to give it the remote IP in the Validator's constructor, while the Validator needs to be created before you know that.
* Formencode (apparently) validates every form twice for some reason, and of course this doesn't work on things like captcha where the correct answer changes per request.
Anyway, someone kindly left a comment on the wiki page for tw.recaptcha and although Google managed to mangle it by forcing WikiMarkup on people, I managed to reconstruct it into something that works. Below is a diff that can be applied to the 0.8 release in Pypi and makes it approximately 20% cooler.
( Diff and code below )
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/3362.html.
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| Autoview .ics iCalendar (text/calendar) attachments in mutt |
[05 Oct 2011|03:13pm] |
We interrupt this journal to bring you an important NERRRRRRRRD update.
I've been vaguely trying to figure out how to display text/calendar ical meeting invite attachments in mutt, which I receive from colleagues sending requests from their fancy-pants graphical email clients. If you've looked at a vCalendar/iCalendar file you'll know it's not a very pleasant thing to read, especially since Outlook seems to like sending invites relative to Eastern Time from and to people located in the UK.
Outlook used to send a text summary along with the attachment so this hasn't been particularly high on my priority lists until lately, now that both the iPhone and the latest versions of Outlook simply send a blank message (in both text and HTML parts!) with the invite attached.
I found a collection of Ruby scripts after a few attempts to get my head around a couple of Python vCalendar-parsing libraries without much luck. The viewical.rb file included in that package worked fairly well, but had a rounding error causing HH:30 to turn into HH:29 and didn't compensate for Outlook insanity, so I've fixed that (at least, during daylight savings, we'll have to see what happens after that). The package from the page above also provides some utilities to Accept/Decline meeting invites, but I don't have any personal use for them at the moment so I haven't set them up. My copy of viewical.rb now looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems" # apt-get install rubygems
require "icalendar" # gem install icalendar
require "date"
class DateTime
def myformat
(self.offset == 0 ? (DateTime.parse(self.strftime("%a %b %d %Y, %H:%M ") + self.icalendar_tzid)) : self).
new_offset(Rational(Time.now.utc_offset - 60*60, 24*60*60)).strftime("%a %b %d %Y, %H:%M")
# - 60*60 to compensate for icalendar gem/Outlook mismatch
end
end
cals = Icalendar.parse($<)
cals.each do |cal|
cal.events.each do |event|
puts "Organizer: #{event.organizer}"
puts "Event: #{event.summary}"
puts "Starts: #{event.dtstart.myformat} local time"
puts "Ends: #{event.dtend.myformat}"
puts "Location: #{event.location}"
puts "Contact: #{event.contacts}"
puts "Description:\n#{event.description}"
puts ""
end
end
Put that in your PATH somewhere, then put this in your .mailcap:
text/calendar; icalview.rb; copiousoutput
And this in your .muttrc:
auto_view text/calendar
Now whenever you view an email with a text/calendar attachment, mutt will display it in-line where the message usually appears (above the message, if there is one).
As an aside, it was frustrating to find out that although Google Calendar has an "Import Calendar" function on their frontend, there's no equivalent call in their API, so my idea to write an application to just pump the attachment directly to my Google Calendar account fell rather flat on its face.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/3147.html.
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| Pot-luck jammy nasturtium office spider walk. |
[01 Oct 2011|04:48pm] |
Here's what my garden looks like at the moment!
As you can see, the nasturtiums that were all but dead after not much rain during the summer have sprung back to life, and are currently desperately trying to take over the rest of my front garden. However, that area is reserved for MOAR BEANS. Some of the ones I planted when I discovered an unharvested pod a few weeks ago have sprouted, which has put me in a dilemma because I wanted to put a lot more soil down where they are. I may have to perform surgery.
I've finished up the last of the two jars of blackberry jam I made with foraged blackberries a month or so ago. That's coincided with the end of the summer (not that you'd know it was the end of the summer by the 28°C sunny weather we're having, but you don't hear me not complaining). I've bought Damson jam to try, which Prince Charles tells me is a sweet jam, so I should like it.
I'm still working from home while the new office is being set up. I don't know what my new title is yet either, but I have a meeting with bossman and Matt (the crime busters of the sea why is that in my head) to discuss it. It seems likely I'll be Lead Search Architect.
A couple of weeks ago my friend Rachel invited me to a pot luck lunch at her new place in London. Mistakenly thinking there were some vegetarians attending, I made Sweet potato and peanut gratin and despite having no meat in it, it seemed to go down a treat. I'd been meaning to try more of the recipes on that page, even though Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has somehow lost all of his hair. I'm ending up eating less meat myself naturally at the moment, and it's nice to know what recipes can be tasty without meat. Emily and I made stir-fry using pak choi and broccoli with black bean sauce last week, and it was so good I'm going to watch it again.
Meanwhile, I am thoroughly enjoying the number of spiders around at the moment. There are two in my garden at the moment and I have named them Bob and Fred. I don't think you can give spiders much more fanciful names than that. I watched another spider near the Enchanted Woodland building his web nearly from scratch, which was rather fascinating. Then the next day he was eating one of his friends. I guess everyone's allowed to treat themselves every now and then.
And finally, about four weeks ago I did a 14km walk from Farningham Road to Dartford, and apparently my knee didn't like it much, because it's been achey since then. I saw the GP about it last week, and they said I have chondromalacia patellae, which seems to translate to "my knee hurts". It should go away fairly quickly as long as I don't overwork it and ideally keep off it as much as possible. When I go out I have to wear a knee support, which is annoying but also makes me guiltily feel like one of the cool kids with SPORTS INJURIES.
That's all!
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/2855.html.
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| Kenilworth, Ayacon, HP7pt2 and Zapp |
[04 Sep 2011|12:23pm] |
It's been a busy month!
In the middle of August was Ayacon, an animé convention that proved fun last time as well as a good excuse to meet up with Luke & Co (I should probably stop referring to the group like that but I lack a better term). I decided to take the opportunity of going OOP NOORF (or, well, UP MIDLANDS at any rate) to stay in the countryside for a few days for some R&R for a few days beforehand.
Kenilworth
 I spent two nights in Kenilworth, a small town about an hour outside Coventry, in the lovely Castle Laurels Guest House, named after the medieval Kenilworth Castle, which it was a five minute walk away from. Kenilworth itself was a nice town, and reminded me a little of Canterbury insofar as it having a historic area with old buildings and the like, contrasted with a new area with a decent shopping area. Rather like how I imagine Dartford would be if anyone actually invested in the area.
 The main purpose of my visit, along with the scenic castle, was that I'd spotting a couple of series of geocaches that made an ideal walking route through the countryside. They mostly coincided with local walking routes, but I quite like having a purpose for going out and about, rather than just rambling for the sake of rambling. I had one full day in the town and I took a 20km circular walk to nearby Honiley and back again, via some entertaining place names. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the countryside, with friendly locals and places where you can see for miles without any built-up areas.
Anyway, I made a video of my geocaching exploits, since I was counting down to my 100th geocache at the time. It's ten minutes long so I don't blame you if you don't want to watch it! For the curious, here was the route I took.
[http://youtu.be/WSgZLAFrTu4]
And that brings me nicely on to...
Ayacon
After collecting the Warwick Union Cam webcam cache (thanks Emily!) on Thursday afternoon, I checked into my en suite campus accomodation (it had a bath! Those lucky Warwick Uni students) and by good fortune bumped into Matt and Hope who were also staying on campus for the convention, unlike the rest of the GANG.
 Ayacon itself was as great as I remembered it from 2009, which made me happy. This time I tried to do as much as possible that appealed to me, as I'd missed a few opportunities in Amecon last year and ended up a bit bored. The highlight of the long weekend was easily Superfun Iron Cosplay Time, a workshop where four teams were given some rudimentary cosplaying bits and bobs (materials, gaffa tape, and cardboard boxes, mostly) and each given half an hour and an Internet meme, with the aim of coming up with a character that would battle its physical presence in some horrific final showdown. Fortunately my team weren't the one which had to fight goatse. Anyway, watch and learn. I made Waffledog's hand. *nod*.
[http://youtu.be/JtmGf7vbk_g]
Another highlight of the weekend was Matt Mercer, voice actor and director of There Will Be Brawl, who is entertaining and funny enough for a three-hour Q&A panel with him to fly by.
Surprisingly I also slept really well in the Warwick accommodation, which also made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable! Full photos here.
Harry Potter 7 Part 2
 I finally got around to watching Harry Potter last weekend, looking forward to what I'd found a rather emotional final book. However, I was left a little disappointed. The film lacked any kind of emotional punch, despite so many characters getting killed off. It felt like there was just too much going on for any kind of atmosphere to be built up, and considering they split the book into two films to avoid this, wasn't really excusable. Still, there were some good lines and it didn't feel like it was a complete waste of time spent.
Zapp
 What makes a man turn neutral? Who knows, but I have a new desktop computer now, replacing an ailing Zoidberg who keeps on overheating when I try to do so much as watch video or use Google Street View (Decapodians - cold blooded and so unable to regulate body temperature). To replace it, I got a shiny barebones PC from Novatech, then padded it out with hard drive and graphics card to turn it into  Zapp. Hopefully it won't mutiny against me too much.
Right, that's about all for this month! Stay tuned for more TALES OF INTEREST.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/2789.html.
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| Petrichor (picking a word for the subject out of the air) |
[07 Aug 2011|05:57pm] |
Okay, so I'm a bit late for this update, but never mind.
Some things have happened:
- Garden
- Earlier this year I planted broccoli, broad beans, rosemary and carrots. The broccoli bolted (the ladybirds and butterflies seem to be enjoying the flowers, at least) and the rosemary never germinated, but in the last couple of weeks I've harvested the broad beans (made a lovely pilaf) and the carrots (some huuuuge ones, mostly dinky; they will become carrot soup later this evening.) I've also planted some ailing basil out where the rosemary was going to be and have bought some thyme to join it.
Next I need to consider what to plant in the garden this autumn/winter.
- Geocaching
- I'm up to 70 caches found now! I need to find more worth using my few favourite points on, though. Made two more short Youtube videos, if you can stand to look at my FACE for a couple of minutes:
- Ecotricity
- My electricity and gas are now provided by Ecotricity, a green energy company that invests heavily in renewables, and I'm pretty impressed so far. They price match the major suppliers of electrickery and gas (although I'm paying a little more for the extra green package), and despite not having an online account management tool, their call centres where I spent all of about twenty seconds in the telephone queue and had a nice polite person on the other end of the line makes up for that. Anyway, I figured I'd just about squeezed all the energy savings out of my house, so this is the next thing.
- Eating Out
- My parents have taken me out for dinner twice this month, the first time with my brother to Brasserie Blanc in Portsmouth to meet my cousins who live there, and the latter for Dad's birthday at the Whitstable Oyster Company with my brother. At the former I had the most amazing fillet steak and a shared chocolate fondue with strawberries for dessert. Definitely worth going there if you're in Portsmouth. In Whitstable we were tempted by all the food tents at the yearly week-long Whitstable Oyster Festival, but in the end my parents had lobster, my brother had Cock Crab (huuuuge. *cough*.) and I had good ol' fish and chips (although I felt guilty after remembering that cod's one of the no-no fish at the moment).
- Meeting and Eating
- Last week I met up with Emily a few times.
On Tuesday we decided to get pizza from Lupa, a small chain in London that does AMAZING pizza, and eat it on the South Bank. We went past the place a couple of times before realising that this garage under the London Bridge railway arches happened to be the London Bridge outlet (Hampstead's actually has a shop front!) but fortunately they also took orders from there as well as just delivering. The pizza was proper italian pizza, not thick-crust deep-fried pizza hut stuff. South Bank was really pretty at night, it almost made me want to live in the city.
On Thursday we met up at Somerset House on the Strand where they had an open-air showing of Scott Pilgrim. Not a bad film, all in all, but I can see why it flopped. I thought sitting outside for watching a film would be odd, but it turned out to be a really good experience, and the weather held out for it too, which was useful!
- Jam Jam Jam
- I went blackberry picking on Friday night and got a half-kilo of blackberries from The Enchanted Woodland nearby. They turned into two jars of jam (and a few extra servings in a third) on Saturday. I tried it with my crumpets this morning and it's GREAT. Not as sweet as supermarket stuff (despite all the sugar that goes into it!) and much more obviously containing fruit.
- Lovefilm
- I'm ashamed to say I got DOOR-TO-DOOR-SALESPERSON'D!! on Friday by someone from Lovefilm (postal DVD rental) with an iPad. They had an offer of three months for £10 introductory price (normally £10/mo) and a free year's membership to Gourmet Society, which I was discussing with a friend earlier this year and is apparently worth having for discounts. If anyone fancies meeting me for dinner in London, let me know!
 - I've been promoted at work! I shall soon have a super-new job title, something along the lines of "Senior Search Developer" or "Lead Software Developer for Search" or something like that when my boss makes up his mind about it. My actual job hasn't actually changed, but bossman wanted to make it clear that I'm the man when it comes to working on the search engine. And we might be able to hire me a junior developer or year-in-industry student soon. Woo!
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/2415.html.
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| Dreamin' |
[20 Jul 2011|08:18am] |
Had a odd dream last night that won't fit into the 140 character buffer I usually use for such things:
Someone from Google had managed to log into my computer and wrote me a message telling me to come to the chat forum I apparently had hosted on nivan.net. I visited the URL he'd sent and sure enough, it took me to what looked like a shared-editing version of vim on which the code for one of my websites was being viewed. Somehow we chatted out loud via this interface. I understood implicitly that I was being invited to their offices to have an interview.
Finding myself now in the interview room, a living-room sized place with strip windows around the outside looking out into another brightly-coloured space, I was introduced to some Google employees, one of whom was appearing via a video link. She gave me the first task: I had to act out some improv story based on a guy who was to be going out to find... well let's say a mate... but after which he goes to his friend's place and ends up falling for them instead.
My acting wasn't very good - it largely involved me making odd "expression faces" and wondering why on Earth this was an interview task for a software engineer.
After that was a lunch break, which was delicious but seemed to mostly involve gloopy meals like how japanese/chinese food is served by canteens.
After that I seemed to find myself walking along a woodland path that resembled the the just South of the Darenth Park Valley orchard I went geocaching in the other week (more on that in a later post). Then I found myself back at my current job's workplace, except it seemed to be a small toy shop now. I found myself talking to a coworker (can't remember which one) that it was a bit rude of Google to ask someone to turn up for an interview with no notice in the middle of the day.
Then I woke up. I know, right? Dreams always end up that way.
I bet this post ends up being found by people searching for details about what Google's interview experience is like. Well, I'm sure it's exactly like this. Yeah.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/2216.html.
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| Monthly |
[26 Jun 2011|10:02pm] |
Hey look, it's the last weekend of the month and time for what's becoming a monthly update. I'll try and put in things Facebook hasn't already seen, too!
First off: phew, what a hot day! My garden thermometer in the sun was reading 32°C at 17:00 today. I had a friend over to watch the F1 with and we braved the sun to do a little bit of geocaching too. I'm up to 44 caches found now. Here's me a month ago on a long trek around Crayford Ness - I redubbed it, if you're wondering why the sound seems out of sync:
Last weekend I went out on my bike to Joydens Wood in Bexley where, ignoring the weather forecasts, I got caught out in a thunderstorm:
As you can see, thunderstorms clearly make me lose my sense of time. After making that video, I decided the rain wasn't going to clear up any time soon and cycled back to Bexley Station, downhill through the mud, as fast as I could. Needless to say, the sun had come out and there was no trace of any clouds by the time I'd made the ten minute cycle. However, I looked like this:
A quick shower later, I walked to Bluewater where there are supposedly some more caches, but didn't find any. However, I did buy more crumpet rings, which sped up my crumpet making (yup, I'm completely addicted to them for breakfast at the moment), some swimming trunks (I might even use them this year), and I managed to take the following pretty cool shot of one of Bluewater's lakes, which is below along with a photo of some knit graffiti someone had put up in Dartford today and made me smile.
 
Oh, and a special mention for the Canadian F1 Grand Prix last weekend, which lasted four hours due to suspension caused by rain, and had a stonking finish - really great to see cars still racing right up until the checkered flag!
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/1913.html.
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| Geocaching |
[30 Apr 2011|03:39pm] |
Yesterday was a bank holiday due to a certain event I shalln't lower this journal into mentioning, so I decided to go for a cycle ride and hunt out some geocaches. For the uninitiated (amusingly referred to as muggles by geocachers), geocaches are small containers hidden around public spaces, containing a log book to record your visit and often a few trinkets you can swap one out for something of your own. Their GPS locations are published on geocaching.com, where you can look up clues and photos if you're stuck.
I aimed to find several caches while I was out: three in Foots Cray Meadows; one or two, time depending, in Joyden's Wood; and perhaps one in Dartford Heath if I had time. I ended up looking for just the first four since I was starting to get thirsty by the time I got to Joyden's Wood. I found one, my first! Some of the others have been found since, so perhaps I still haven't got the hang of where these things get hidden.
Despite having a GPS and being within sight of houses, I managed to get utterly lost in Joyden's Wood after turning down what I thought was a path but turned out to be an inescapable tangle of ivy, vines and ditches. Carrying a bike through that kind of stuff isn't much fun, especially when your GPS phone tells you it's running low on batteries. I found my way back to a path eventually (head in the same direction forever, chances are there'll be a path) and soon found myself at Bexley Park, where -- thankfully -- there was a corner shop I could get some bottled water from.
By then I didn't fancy tackling Dartford Heath, so zoomed back home past my old secondary school and through Dartford town centre.
Here's the eventual route I took. I think in practice it was more than ten miles, since I was walking around a bit to find the caches, and the bit where I got lost in Joyden's Wood. Clicky for interactive:
The whole excursion took me from about 14:30 until 18:00, and to treat myself I ordered a pizza when I got home. I'll probably do a similar route at some point, since there are several caches in Joyden's Wood and Dartford Heath which I want to do. Plus it's good exercise and good fresh air.
Meanwhile, my garden is going pretty nicely. Everything I've planted so far has now germinated, with the exception of the rosemary, which apparently doesn't like me. I may just buy some ready-grown ones if they don't come through soon. Still, I should have broccoli, broad beans, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and carrots by the autumn, plus apples from the apple tree which is doing considerably better this year than last.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/1264.html.
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| Doctor |
[11 Apr 2011|09:19pm] |
I dreamt last night that I was in an episode of Doctor Who (I know, you'd think my subconscious would have something better to do).
The Eleventh Doctor had decided that the only possible way to solve this problem was to explode River Song. So he handed her a cartoon-style bomb with a long fuse, and she looked at us all rather upset while the wick burnt down.
While it was doing so, we were saying to the Doctor, "but we already saw her getting written out in the Vashta Nevada episode, how can you kill her off now?" I think the Doctor just wanted to get rid of her, because his reply was a rather blasé, "oh, timey wimey. Whatever. I don't know."
After she exploded, we all felt like we should pay her some respects, and she'd written us each a personal letter, and one to the whole group. None of were very bothered, but we managed to get through the group letter before getting bored and sodding off.
Anyway moral of the story: I guess I don't like River Song! SPOILERS!
In other, more substantive, news: I finished planting up my garden this weekend, with the exception of the forget-me-nots which are in a seed bed until later in the year. Annoyingly they're also the only plant, aside from the odd carrot, which has actually emerged from the soil yet. I'm probably being impatient but I'll be annoyed if none of the seeds grow!
I've also put down chicken wire, since the cats were having a field day on the dug out soil. I wouldn't mind so much, but cat poop doesn't even make good manure, in fact from what I've read it's actively bad for the soil. Bloody cats.
I now have a Dreamwidth invite code. Prod me! First come, first exploded.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/839.html.
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| Sandpits for adults |
[02 Apr 2011|05:28pm] |
A couple of weekends ago I decided to cut down the two bushes at the front of my garden since I never liked one of them, and the other was more-or-less dead since I tried to cut it back last year, and the snow this winter had finished it off.
Here's what they looked like a year ago; the left one hasn't changed much, and imagine the right one without any green on it.
My neighbour, who happened to be doing some work outside at the time, lent me a saw to get through the thickest branches, which was much appreciated, and after an hour or so I'd cut both back down to near ground level. The picture to the right shows what it looked like; the two stumps are to the left and right of the pots I put in there (remove .small from the URL for full size if you're particularly interested).
Last weekend I dug up the stumps and roots of both bushes. That was harder than I expected, and I ended up spending several hours on both days on that. Digging up all that soil around the base made me realise that gardening is basically sandpits for adults -- the fun bits, anyway. Here's how it looked afterwards, complete with the two uprooted stumps (one on the garden bed, the other on the patio at the bottom of the frame):
This last week I've been pondering on what to do with the newly created space. I've planted carrots on the area I used for beans and onions last year, and I decided to use this new area largely to plant more vegetables too. Today I've been out preparing the soil for seeds, which has been quite involved since the two bushes have put down a lot of leaves and twigs, which needed to be cleared. That's taken me about four hours this afternoon.
Here's how it looks now. I've created four areas, separated with some wooden stick and logs I've had lying around under the bushes since I moved in.
In the leftmost area I'm going to plant some forget-me-nots, the only non-edible contribution; I've started them off in an improvised seed tray this weekend and apparently they'll be ready to replant in a few months. In the top area I'm going to plant some nasturtiums; I've accidentally ordered a climbing type from Suttons so I'll have to improvise something for them to grab onto once they're planted. That'll have the nice side-effect of shielding the rest of the garden from the pathway, I hope. In the rightmost area I've planted a line of rosemary bush seeds, since rosemary is a great herb that I don't use enough of in my cooking.
In the centre area, I'm going to grow broccoli and broad beans. The area that's got chicken wire over it hosts three lines of planted broccoli seeds, and I'm waiting for Suttons to deliver the broad bean seeds, which will fill up the rest of the area.
My main worry, assuming any of these seeds actually germinate, is that the ground-elder (aka goutweed, aka BASTARD GOUTWEED) I spent digging up and covering up with weed-proof mesh a few years ago will creep into the new area. I removed a couple of leaves from the house-side flower bed earlier; this stuff just never gives up.
When I cleared it up in 2009/10, I think it'd only spread to the paved area, but as you can see, it got pretty close to the new area, and I'm not sure the wooden mini-fencing will have kept its rhizomes out. At any rate, I didn't find any when I was digging it over this afternoon, so fingers crossed.
This entry was originally posted at http://flexo.dreamwidth.org/533.html.
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