David Morris – brassedoff.net

We were in the Winter Gardens today in Sheffield City Centre. I was stood in the queue at Zooby’s, getting Daniel an ice cream – we’d just had a nice selection of sandwiches.A little girl came up to her Mum who was stood behind me and proclaimed “Mummy, Daddy’s a dog!”. She was referring to the fact that her Dad was born the Chinese year of the dog. At least, I assume that’s what she was referring to…

If you’re Chinese, Happy New Year.

Some time ago, I mentioned that we’d been home curing bacon. Well, we’ve just cured bacon-II. This time, we salted it for less time with probably less salt, and no additional spices. Also, this meat had the rind on and wqas a bigger piece. End result: much better bacon – not salty. I’ve got some pictures which I’ll upload later.

Also, we’ve just ordered a digital photo frame from John Lewis in Sheffield. It’s the first I’ve seen in the UK. It’s a Philips 7″ frame (see it here). It displays pictures from its own ob-board memory or from a SD, MS or CF card stuffed in the back. It’s just what we both wanted. They hadn’t any in stock in Sheffield, so it’s getting shipped from another store. Caroline is already working on what the first set of photographs will be. It even has features like being able to set it to switch on and off at certain times during the day, so it’s not displaying away to itself and some on only when you’re in the house.

I’ve also had a few emails recently from people that have found Gardncam and read my appeal at the bottom of the page for help combining a series of jpegs captured from the camera into an mpeg sequence that will show a time lapse picture of the day’s happenings. Well, I’ve now, with a bit of help and prompting, set up the image capture using a cron job, a bit of bash shell scripting and curl. Next is another cron job and more scripting to drive mencoder to stick the jpegs together. I’ll post something here when it’s done and I’ll obviously include the appropriate links on Gardencam’s home page.Mark rang me to tell me he’s been reading my blog, so that’s at least one person.Thanks for reading. Come back soon.

Anyone who knows me well probably also knows that I am what is known as “geographically challenged”. Basically, I get lost when I get to the end of the road. It’s a little known medical condition :-)

However, all that is behind me now. I’ve doen some eBay selling and had a little windfall and put them together to buy a Dell GPS. Rather than buying a free-standing unit, I’ve gone for one tha works with my Axim PDA. I get a little silver box that sits on the car dashboard and has a bluetooth connection into the PDA. The maps are generated on PC and transferring to the PDA and stored on a 1Gb SD card in the PDA. Once the GPS receiver has locked on to the satellite network, a nice lady will tell you where to go as junctions and roundabouts are approached.So far, I’ve navigated to the local shopping centre and the local swimming pool (both of which I knew how to get to) without getting lost, so the unit has passed its test.

A few postings back I was on about my new contact lenses. They’re monthly disposable ones, and yesterday I changed on to a new set, but my right eye was giving some grief. I gave up eventually and went to put the old set back in. Imagine my shock when I found out that the reason the right one was so uncomfortable was that there were two lenses stuck together. I’d only managed to remove one from my eye. this accounted for why it felt so strange going in and my vision was so lousy through my right eye. I’ll watch out for that one in future.

Finally, I’ve got some more pork so bacon mk-II will be coming to a blog posting near you soon.

Does anyone read this? If so, I’d appreciate an email to david@brassedoff.net.

Thanks!

I use Borland’s JBuilder IDE a lot at work for developing Java applications and applets for our manufacturing system. Whilst I like both Java and JBuilder, I’ve come to the conclusion, not before time, that blithely using an IDE hides a lot of the good stuff from you, and can generate some ‘orrible codeWhat’s convinced me? Well, the code that the IDE generates for event handlers – things like MouseAdapters and ActionListeners especially.JBuilder produces a seperate class for each action adapter (like button and menu events) and each mouse listener (i.e. if you’re detecting mouse click events on tables to pop up context menus. I’ll show you a little example:

What this appears to do is create a class for an event then call a function back in the main class to handle the event. Whilst it clearly works, it’s horrible. What I’ve started doing is creating a single class implementing either ActionListener or MouseAdapter as required within the main class to handle the event. The advantage of this is it’s easy to use one event handler for all (or a number of) events generated and it’s tidier. But, you can’t use the IDE to set them up. However, I now have a greater understanding of the event handling process I think.The one drawback may be that it’s not easy to get access to the objects in the main class which is one thing that the above method provides. I think it should be possible to have the main class implement the two MouseAdpapter and ActionListener interfaces though. This will give my main class a single point where all its events of a particular type are handled. I’ve not tried it, but it sounds good on paper.

The drawback is that you can’t use the IDE. You have to do the donkey work yourself. Is that such a bad thing?

Well, I picked up my two cases of Merlot from Springfield Wines. It was / will be the first and only visit there because it turns out the shop is closing down. Apparently the landlord won’t fix the heating system and the oroprietors don’t see the benefit in installing a heating system to have most ofthe heat disapear through the ceiling. They’ve done the sums and decided the best course of action is to sell up. Ah well. Good luck to them.

Last night, we went to the Hallam FM Sheffield Arena (hereinafter the ‘Arena’) to see the Steelers (note: looks horrible whilst loading using Firefox on Linux – I hope the Windows version looks better) play the Basingstoke Bison. The Steelers got a pasting at their last meeting – something like 7-1 to the Bison. The first period started off OK until a heavy check fetched a piece of plexi out. The game stopped until it was replcaed. After the restart, things never really seemed to get going and it got worse. Basingstoke picked up a couple of goals (Sheffield opened the scoring) and the second period was like watching paint dry.Fortunately, the last period was better and a thrilling finish saw Sheffield come out victors 5-3 in front of a crowd of no more than around 3000. Let’s hope it’s a bit better turnout tonight for the Cardiff game.

I’m off to Meadowhall for a wander around soon. We couldn’t get booked in for bowling this morning, so an alternative source of distraction was found!

Warning: this posting contains meatBack in blog 3, I said that I fancied a crack at making some bacon accord to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall?

Well, today was the great unveiling of David’s first bacon.

Surprisingly, it looks like bacon. What’s more, it tastes like bacon based on the sample we’ve just tried. It was a bit salty, but that could be because I just cooked the first slice. We’re going to eat some of the rest with a chicken salad. Mark is taking a few slices, and there may be enough for a sandwich in the morning.

If I can find an address for Hugh, I must write and congratulate him.

On a completely different subject, but still food-related, one of my suppliers at work presented me with a bottle of wine for Christmas. Because I was away from the office, I picked it up on Monday. We cracked it on Tuesday. It was a bottle of 2002 Palandri Merlot. It was one of the nicest wines I’ve tasted in a long time and we decided to try and source a case. After trawling around Majestic, Oddbins, Laithwaites, Virgin Wines, Sunday Times wine club and all the supermarkets, I gave up and rang my suppliers to see where they got it from.

It turns out it was from a small wine merchants in Denby Dale, West Yorkshire called Springfield Wines (no website). I’ll let you know how the case progresses…!

Oh, I’ve changed the stylesheet for the blog as well. I prefer this font more, plus it’s larger and easier to read.

After 12+ years of promise, we eventually moved in to our new offices yesterday. To get to it, you have to cross the manufacturing shop floor, get past the numerous security points, but it’s worth it. It’s quiet, clean and new!I went to Band practice last night, giving up on the attempt to play the Eb Bass for the forthcoming area contest, instead sticking with my trusty Bb cornet. The bass was just too much of a jump. I couldn’t handle the mouthpiece size change and different style of play after 20-odd years on cornet. Ah well, at least I tried.

Tonight, I’m going to try and finish off a couple of critical reviews of papers as part of the last part of an MSc assignment then start on my dissertation project proposal. That should be fun!

Also, I’ve just been looking on Thinkgeek at digital photo frames. There are a couple on there, including a rather nice wireless one from eStarling for 249USD. It’s only got a 5″ display though. There’s a non-wireless version with an 8″ screen for 50USD less. I’d like to surprise SWMBO with one at some point.

…or my new contact lenses!After having at the back of my mind for several months, I decided to pay a visit to the local Specsavers to see about contact lenses.The reasoning is that with cycling regularly to work and back, I don’t wear my glasses on my bike. Although I can just about see well enough to drive without them, it’s the inconvenience (I usually pack my glasses in my bike bag so they’re safe when I get to work), so I end up driving and cycling with less than optimum vision.

Also, it restricts what I can do for other pastimes. For instance, I can’t wear polarising sunglasses for fishing, leisure cycling (vs. commuting) is a bind…

Caroline’s had contact lenses for some years and I decided to give it a try. Hats off to Specsavers at Crystal Peaks.I went in on Wednesday, got a cancellation for an eye test and contact lens assessment on Thursday and got a call on Friday to say my lenses were availabel for collection. I missed the call, but picked them up on Saturday and had them in for four hours on Saturday afternoon (yesterday). I’ll be going for eight hours today and will be driving for the first time with them in and taking Daniel bowling to Centertainment Hollywood Bowl.

We went swimming yesterday instead of our usual Sunday morning trip so we could accomodate the bowling.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

I’ve just responded to a Usenet posting on comp.databases.pick about a guy who needed to get remote access (via telnet) to a client’s system to enable him to do some urgent maintenance. The people on this group tend to, understandably, be fairly evangelical about multivalue databases and I suppose I have my moments too.What was annoying about this instance is that he was asking for support on what I’d term a fairly simple networking / router issue. If I was acting as a consultant for a remote client, I’d want to make sure I could answer these types of questions, i.e. I’d make sure I had some networking skills. Yet, many people seem to get away with only selling part of a service. Maybe I’m at fault for being something of a jack of all trades. Whilst I’ve got 20+ years multivalue experience, I can also configure a firewall to permit some basic stuff; I can configure a router likewise. I also understand enough about VPNs to get by as well as being able to accept when it’s right to use a relational vs a multivalue database.

One of the books we got for Christmas was the River Cottage Family Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

The book suggests a number of projects that can be undertaken by the family with nothing special in the way of equipment or skills to produce everyday groceries. The first thing that caught my eye was the production of butter. Equipment needed: clean jam jar; ingredients: double cream. Seeing as we’d got a glut of cream in the fridge (it was Christmas after all), I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, we ended up with some lovely butter.The method couldn’t be simpler. Put some double cream in a clean jam jar up to about half way up the glass. Shake until it produces butter!

The cream goes through a thick (whipped cream) stage then starts to go yellow. Eventually, it goes gungy, then starts to form a solid lump in some runny liquid. This state could take 10 minutes or more to get to. The solid yellow stuff is butter, the runny liquid is buttermilk.

Take the butter out of the jar, press it to remove any lingering buttermilk (which will cause the butter to go sour if not sorted out) and enjoy!

If you wanted salted butter, put the salt in before you start shaking.

Hugh also has a recipe for home-produced dry cured bacon. I sense a visit to our local butchers coming on!

I’m making a New Years Resolution this year to start and maintain a weblog. To help make me more likely to keep it up to date, I’ve decided to write the blog software myself, and this is what you’re seeing now. I hope you find the odd interesting posting. Over time, I’ll be developing a few more bits and pieces so in time, you’ll be able to leave feedback on specific subjects.I’m not holding out any hope that many people will read it. Maybe if I can persuade Caroline to start one as well, hers will attract more interest from the on-line knitting and spinning communities :-)

What are you likely to see in here?

Well, you may find something about my cooking exploits. For instance, I’ve just made some butter, starting with cream, and it was rather tasty.

You may find something about my work where I’m gainfully employed by Allvac Ltd.

You may find something about my XBox modding exploits – I’ve just chipped mine for instance.

You may find something about my studies. I’ve just started the dissertation phase of my MSc at Sheffield Hallam University.

You may find my writing about the Geograph project where I’m one of many contributors of photographs to this excellent resource.

I might be writing about updates to this blog software (it’s written in PHP and back-ended with mySQL on a Linux box – aka LAMP).

On the other hand, you might find me having a rant about road users being inconsiderate to cyclists (I’m a cycling commuter), or you might find me waxing lyrical about British waterways, having recently discovered the delights of canal cruising (you can read more about our exploits on our web site.

Whatever it is, I hope you find something interesting and come back soon!