Coffeehouse.co.nz

YUM! Friday night down Brick Lane for a good ol’ curry with friends.

Always a fun experience running the gauntlet of the hard sell boys all trying to entice you into their particular establishment. “Free pompadoms!” “First drink free!” “25% off your food!”…

Hard to know when you’ve got the best deal you could, but it’s all so cheap anyway that it really doesn’t matter. We ended up with the first drink free and 25% off the food…. But then there were only 4 of us. The more of you there are, the harder you can bargain!

It is one of the experiences that make London, London, though.

Well, it was quiz night down at one of the local pubs (The Ship and Whale) where we just happened to be for a friend’s birthday.

We got third!!

Yeah, ok, so there were only 4 teams, but you know….. At least the birthday girl got a Spitfire towel as a prize/birthday prezzie!

Time for a trip through the Guinness book of records and the top 40 for the last few decades before we go back! But I think we may have to sometime. All good fun.

Good food too!

Yum, yum, yum!

We made paneer kababs for tea last night from the latest Olive magazine.

Put 250gms of paneer cheese cut up into decent chunks, half a red pepper and half a green pepper cut into squares, and some red onion cut into squares in a big bowl. Add a good dollop of olive oil, a clove of crushed garlic, tsp of grated ginger, tsp garam masala, tsp dried chilli flakes, 2tsp ground coriander, a dash of lemon juice, and some fresh coriander. Mix well and cover and stand in the fridge for half an hour.

Thread it all on some wooden skewers that have been soaking in water for half an hour, and then grill, turning now and then for about 8-10 minutes unitl they’re golden.

All good. I reckon they’d be really good on a barbie too.

Heat the oven to the standard 180 degrees (160 fan).

Mix 150g self raising flour, 50g ground almonds, 100g roughly chopped dark chocolate, and 200g caster sugar together. Mix up 175ml milk, 50g melted butter, and an egg. Add the liquid to the dry stuff. Spoon into 6 ramekins.

Mix 150g of dark muscovado sugar, and 3tbsp cocoa powder. Gradually stir in 300mls of boiling water. Spoon this over the spounge mixture.

Bake the puddings for 20 minutes. Lower the temp to 170 (150) degrees. and cook for another 10 minutes until the spounge feels firm.

Enjoy!

(source: Olive magazine)

Finally! I’ve managed to get a mailserver set up that actually works!

When I had to reboot the server so that they could replace the electricity meter downstairs (which annoyingly made me miss the target of having the server up for a whole year with no kernel issues) I had a small surprise. Appearing in my gmail account were some emails from this blog system about users and posts. How the hell were they appearing?!

Investigation showed that on the reboot the mail programmes were back up and running, after I’d given up and turned them off a while ago, and in the meantime some parts of the system had been updated and sending mail to the outside world worked.

Getting the receiving of mail to work took quite a lot longer, and a few more hairs being pulled off the head, but I think I’ve finally cracked it. Even with anti-virus and anti-spam measures in place too. Yippee!

And I can even collect it from the server using the Thunderbird email client over an encrypted connection too.

Finally, all up and running, and all from an accident!

Finally worked out how to stop lircd messages from filling up all logs except the one I want. Simple really if you know how (or RTFM)….

Putting flags(final);at the end of the log line like log { source(src); filter(f_lircd); destination(lircd); flags(final); }; stops that filtered line from passing to any other destination logs, regardless of their filters.

Voila. One more annoyance down….

Stumble Upon is a great extension for the Firefox Web browser.

It lets you “channel surf” the net by throwing up random web sites that others have liked. Great for when I can’t think of what to look up. You set a number of categories of things that you’re interested in like multimedia, cats etc, and whenever you push the button, you get a random site of interest. You can also vote for the sites you like or don’t to help others.

This has to be one of my favourite little places on the web. Penguin Web cams in Antarctica with a lot of gentoo penguins wandering around. Often they’re just basically sitting there, but they do seem to waddle around now and then.

Some of the 24 hour time lapse movies are really amazing to watch. The size and speed of some of the icebergs in the background is unbelievable!

Another web cam is here. This one is excellent to watch penguins waddle around in real time.

Well, you can really tell Christmas is coming now. Just about every third house has some form of Christmas lighting up in windows, or hanging from the house or bushes.

Not all that surprising when it’s getting dark at 4pm and any way to light up the gloom is appreciated by all. Some do go just a bit overboard though!

Not as overboard as this guy though! Check it out!

Makes me think that I should get more lights for our tree. 2 Sets just doesn’t seem enough when faced with the multitude outside. But at least one set does all sorts of fancy flashing things.

Well, I finally managed to crack a small but annoying problem on the webserver.

When anyone was requesting a web site directory URL like www.coffeehouse.co.nz/wordpress without the trailing /, then there would be an error,and not a redirection to the index page of that directory like it should.

Setting UseCanonicalName off in the Apache server settings seems to have fixed this without having to worry about any strange rewrite rules using regular expressions. Which I find still just a bit tricky to even sit down and try to learn, though I really should do.

Still, one more small problem dealt with…. Should have got around to that one a long time ago.