Rus - Page 19 of 25 - Opinions on building highly available software businesses

Burger At The Seven Stars

I recently went to the Seven Stars for a lunch burger on a hangover day at work. It was the worst burger experience of my life and I wasn’t going to write it up due to the hangover but I’ve been assured that it wasn’t how I felt, the food was actually terrible, so here we go. I will also preface this with the staff were amazing, I’m sure I’ve had a burger here in the past that was pretty good so maybe this was just an off day, but my friend who also ordered the same burger had the same issue.

I can’t remember how much the burger cost, it was around £10 and with a pint of coke it came to £13 so this was definitely very expensive for a pub lunch, and at those prices, you expect quality.

Burned. It was probably supposed to be char grilled, but really it was just burned. The patty was also really thin, even at it’s best it didn’t give the impression it would have been great, given the cost. It felt cheap.

The bread was dry and slightly rubbery, like it had been left over night or something, really wasn’t nice to eat at all.

The level of burning made the salad taste really nasty, it was just covered in charcoal. Really not nice to eat! Just tasted of burn. The lettuce and tomatoes themselves were crisp and fresh however.

More burn! The chips were fantastic. Lovely potato, fluffy, nice taste, bit of crunch. Delicious.

Now, the reasons the photos are all in tin foil is when I took the first bite I felt it was too hideous to eat, but realised I’d need to eat something later in the day, so the staff were really nice and wrapped it for me to take back to work. Amazing customer service, just terrible food. Will not eat there again.

5 Meat Slow Cooker Chilli

by rus

2 weeks ago I came up with an idea. An entire duck in a slow cooker. I’m not sure how it popped in to my brain and I was sober at the time, but it happened. Some people called me crazy, others called me stupid, until today, when I made it, in all it’s glorious glory!

Approximate Ingredients
1 Duck Crown
2 Duck Legs
8 Chicken Thighs
400g Diced Pork
400g Diced Beef
500g Bacon
400g Diced Lamb
1 Table Spoon Mollasses Sugar
9 Fresh Jalapeno Peppers
6 Fresh Bullet Chili Peppers
3 Dried Chipotle Chili Peppers
1 Dried Ancho Chili Pepper
2 Dried De Arbol Chili Peppers
1.2kg Chopped Tomato
4 Diced Onions
1 Heaped Table Spoon Cocoa Powder
1 Shot Tequila
1 Shot Cointreau
1 Large Glass Red Wine
3 Cloves Garlic
Salt
Pepper

First brown the onions and garlic, then in batches brown the meat.

Don’t crowd the pot, keep browning the meat in sections so the maillard reaction kicks in!

In a separate pan brown the duck.

Place all the browned diced meat and onions in to the slow cooker.

Brown the other side of the duck.

Brown the chicken thighs.

Brown the duck legs.

Brown the other side of the duck legs.

Add the legs, tomatoes, chilis and all the other ingredients to the slow cooker and give it a good stir.

Place the duck on top and gently submerge it so it’s cavity fills with lovely chilli mixture!

Place the lid on the slow cooker and set the timer to low, wait 16 hours!

After 16 hours it should look delicious and somewhat fatty.

Mmmm crispy duck!

Remove all the meat with the bones in it, the duck carcass and all the legs!

So just the lovely sauce is left with the diced meat. Remove any fat from the surface so make it a bit healthier!

Remove the skin and bones from the meat, then return the meat to the pot.

Add the fresh bullet chilis.

And fresh diced jalapeno peppers!

Give it all a stir and place the lid back on, wait a further 4 hours.

After 4 hours serve with guacamole, sour cream and salsa!

If i were to do this again, I’d add the fresh chilis sooner, the dried chilis really weren’t hot enough. Also I’d debone the meat and remove all the skin before I put the poultry in to the slow cooker as to cut down the amount of fat involved.

This was delcious!

Sidey Burger at the Sidewinder

by rus

I accidently ended up at the Sidewinder in Brighton and realised I haven’t had their burger in a while so couldn’t say no as I was starving 😀 They have several different burgers, the 2 main ones being their Classic and the Sidey. ‘Why settle?’ is one of my motos so I opted for the Sidey in all it’s delicious glory!

The Classic Burger

Homemade & 100% British Beef Burger topped with melted emmental cheese, a slice of bacon, roquette & beef tomato in a seeded brioche bap. Served with a side of fries and our house lime and coriander redslaw. £7.25

The Sidey Burger

The old Sidewinder favourite is The Classic Burger plus crispy beer battered onion rings with bbq sauce. Also served with a side of fries and our house redslaw.
£8.45

The presentation was great, 1/3rd burger, 1/3rd purple coleslaw and 1/3rd chips. The first time I’d encountered purple coleslaw was when I first to Brighton and the Famous Moes pizza company did it, since then it’s slowly spread. Purple coleslaw in general is very tasty, the purple coleslaw at the Sidewinder is definitely good, it’s heavy on the mayonnaise though, but the vegetables are nice and crunchy.

The chips were a little meh. Average fries, not bad by any means but they let the side down a little.

The burger was great, it could have had more cheese, I barely noticed the flavour of the elemental and the bacon. Both were visable but their flavours didn’t really come through at all. The onion ring gave a nice crunchy texture and flavour to the ensamble. The bread was nice and obviously fresh, it was lightly toasted inside giving it a squidgy and crunchy texture!

The patty itself was nice, cooked perfectly with a delicious slightly peppery taste, can’t fault it! The use of a cocktail stick to keep the entire thing together was appreciated and well thought out. It is a well put together burger and presenting it in that manner is so much more appreciated compared to simply letting it fall apart, or worse, leaving one half of the bun off the top!

Would definitely recommend if up in Kemp Town again!

Google Analytics: The site has not been registered.

by rus

In my old blog I had Google Analytics working flawlessly and have several years worth of data showing people searching for SVN or Nagios help 😉

Now I’ve moved to WordPress I wanted to keep using analytics and have had great success using the Google Analyticator plugin with my other blogs so wanted to keep using that here!

Google Analyticator has a fantastic feature that completely automates linking your site to Google Analytics, it’s one mouse click and for my other sites worked flawlessly! For some reason on idimmu.net, probably because I’d previously registered with Anaylyics, it kept throwing the error

The page you have requested cannot be displayed. Another site was requesting access to your Google Account, but sent a malformed request. Please contact the site that you were trying to use when you received this message to inform them of the error. A detailed error message follows:

The site “https://idimmu.net” has not been registered.

A search yielded the following answer.

I needed to visit https://accounts.google.com/ManageDomains

I then entered idimmu.net in to the Add a New Domain box and clicked Add domain.

The new domain will then appear on the bottom of the page where you can click on it to Manage registration.

Then just enter the full URL of your site in the Target URL Path prefix, for me this is https://www.idimmu.net. I left all the other boxes empty and clicked save.

Then I resumed using Google Analyticator as usual and it worked flawlesly!

idimmu.net moves to WordPress!

by rus

As you can tell idimmu.net has undergone a fairly hefty overhaul and is now being managed by WordPress! This offers several advantages to me namely

ease of maintenance (someone else is writing the code!!)
code i write is now usable by other people
learning wordpress properly is a new job/career skill
no more lucene bridge! (it broke a lot anyway)

All the content has been migrated, but as you can see, the theme is a standard wordpress skin, so lots to do still!

Elgg 1.8 Tidypics Group Fix

by rus

I’m creating a new community site using the Elgg 1.8 platform, but a lot of the widgets are still using the old 1.7 CSS for their displays so it means a lot of fixing.

The existing tidypics/views/default/tidypics/groupprofile_albums.php suffers from this problem but is simply fixed by changing

photos_enable != 'no') { echo '


';

echo '' . elgg_echo('link:view:all') . '';

echo '
' . elgg_echo('album:group') . '
';

echo elgg_view('tidypics/albums', array('num_albums' => 5));

echo '

'; } ?>

photos_enable != 'no') { echo '



';

echo '
';

echo '
';

echo '' . elgg_echo('link:view:all') . '';

echo '
' . elgg_echo('album:group') . '
';

echo '
';

echo '
';

echo elgg_view('tidypics/albums', array('num_albums' => 5));

echo '
';

echo '
';

echo '

'; } ?>

BackupPC ping too slow

by rus

Whilst adding a new remote server to our BackupPC configuration, it threw the following error

Contents of file /Volumes/2TB/backuppc/pc/www.server.co.uk/LOG.102011, modified 2011-10-25 13:10:23

2011-10-25 12:00:00 ping too slow: 22.21msec 2011-10-25 13:00:01 ping too slow: 49.63msec 2011-10-25 13:10:23 ping too slow: 47.79msec

and refusing to back up the server! After browsing the documentation I discovered the following configuration option

$Conf{PingMaxMsec} = 20;

Maximum round-trip ping time in milliseconds. This threshold is set to avoid backing up PCs that are remotely connected through WAN or dialup connections. The output from ping -s (assuming it is supported on your system) is used to check the round-trip packet time. On your local LAN round-trip times should be much less than 20msec. On most WAN or dialup connections the round-trip time will be typically more than 20msec. Tune if necessary.

After altering the host’s config file and adding that parameter with a value of 200 the server then started to back up!

Linux Command Line AVI Repair

by rus

Recently I had an avi file with a broken index that needed to be repaired. After a quick search and read of some man pages I discovered these handy flags for mencoder to get the job done!

mencoder -idx homemovie.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o homemovie-repaired.avi

bamo!

List Contents Of An RPM Package

by rus

Often when building RedHat RPM packages I want to make sure that the package built correctly and all the files are present before I actually install the RPM, but I do keep forgetting the command to do this, so here it is for prosperity!

rpm -qlp

e.g.

root@build:/usr/src/redhat/SPECS# rpm -qlp ../RPMS/noarch/servicemap-0.16-1.noarch.rpm /var/www/html/servicemap /var/www/html/servicemap/amq.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqfail.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqreportingprov1prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqreportingprov1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqreportingprov2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqreportingprov2prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqsdrprov1prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqsdrprov1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqsdrprov2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqsdrprov2prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee1fail.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee1prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee2fail.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqslee2prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqvqeprov1prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqvqeprov1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqvqeprov2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqvqeprov2prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqwebserviceprov1prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqwebserviceprov1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqwebserviceprov2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/amqwebserviceprov2prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/checks.php /var/www/html/servicemap/config.php /var/www/html/servicemap/hash.png /var/www/html/servicemap/index.php /var/www/html/servicemap/nagios.php /var/www/html/servicemap/script.php /var/www/html/servicemap/sleevipactivenotok.png /var/www/html/servicemap/style.php /var/www/html/servicemap/ttprov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttprov1prov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttprov2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttprov2prov1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttprovfail.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttslee1.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttslee1slee2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttslee2.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttsleefail.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttvipactivenotok.png /var/www/html/servicemap/ttvipactiveok.png

O’Reilly’s Fedora Linux covers everything you need to know about dealing with Redhat systems and is a recommended read for anyone who wants to seriously get in to Redhat administration.

Cheese and Bacon Burger at The Victory

by rus

Recently I went to The Victory with some mates and watched as they ate an epic burger in front of it, so when I went back recently I had no choice but to investigate!

I opted for the bacon and cheese accessories, of course, and it comes with a massive portion of straight cut fries on the side and a small pot of bbq sauce too!

This was the first burger I’ve tried in a long time that I actually had to eat with a knife and fork. It was completely impossible for me to get any of it in my mouth, so I opted for the cutlery option rather than the messy option, I don’t feel this impaired my experience at all.

The bread was delicious, and the salad was fresh, there was lettuce and tomato involved. The burger was delicious, very flavourful, and it was huge. The chips were entirely unnecessary and I would have been very happy with out them, but being the person that I am, I pretty much ate them all anyway even though just the burger filled me up. The chips weren’t great, typical thin fries, and let the burger down a little, but again not really a problem.

Would I eat there again? Definitely, but I’d take a crew of people with me to palm the chips off to 🙂