Yesterday I made a batch of jam using Mr Miot's method. It's based on his standard method which is different from the method I've used myself previously.
First you freeze the lemon and the chopped and cleaned rhubarb. Freezing and defrosting the lemon should ease the extraction of pectin for setting the jam. Freezing and defrosting the rhubarb should extract water juices from it, keep just 200 ml.
Heat the sugar, juice from the lemon and the lemon along with the rhubarb juice up to boiling point (121°C). Once it's rolling along add the chopped rhubarb and return to the boiling point. Boil hard for a further 15 minutes (give or take) and then add the ginger. After removing any scum and a a few more minutes it should be ready to pot.
I jammed 2.2 Kg of rhubarb with 1.76 Kg sugar, two small lemons and 0.5 Kg of chopped crystalised ginger. Tasted okay on the night, but rhubarb and ginger takes a few days to reach full flavour.
posted 22:46 ::
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Recently Microsoft replaced their also-ran web search engine MSN Live Search with an all new Google beating search engine called "Bing". Their old search engine wasn't actually that bad, it's just that no body used it, so along with a redesign they came up with a new name that they thought would be more catchy.
Just like Google they want Bing to enter normal language and for people to use it by default - gradually pushing Google into the same obscurity as Netscape, Stac, AOL, Yahoo!, Real and countless other companies that MS decided to destroy.
So here we go with some examples of how to use "Bing".
and so on... The old MSN Live engine wasn't too bad, sometimes it was even better than Google but no one used it. Considering this is Microsoft's nth go at search it's sad that it's actual worse than it's predecessor...
Yesterday we went to a local PYO farm to collect fruit for jamming. As much as we love redcurrant jelly we decided to skip it for this year and try something new - so I spent £15 on mostly strawberries.
Strawberries are terrible to jam, they are low in pectin, high in water and (in the shops in the UK) low in flavour. If it were not for the national obsession with them, no one in their right mind would bother with them...
I decided to use the recipe of Francis Miot, who is some top French jam maker:
The method is his standard method. First heat the sugar, water and lemon (squeezed juice and whole fruit) up to a full boil (121°C), then you add your topped and halved strawberries and (deseeded) redcurrants and bring back to a full boil. You then boil on full heat for 20 minutes before potting into hot cleaned jars as normal.
For best flavour do not add butter, remove the scum with a slotted jam spoon instead. Don't soak your fruit overnight in sugar as it draws out too much water - or so Mr Miot says.
We started with 2.1 Kg strawberries and 1.05 Kg redcurrants and yielded 13 (full) 370 g Bonne Maman jars. This morning we opened a jar to test - VERY GOOD!
posted 22:56 ::
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We went for a bike ride this morning. One of the fields we went past was a lovely shade of lilac and full of Opium poppies, (presumably) grown under license for British opiate production.
If the Daily Mail knew this kind of thing went on in rural Hampshire they'd be up in arms, worried about the youth of today getting high and ending civilisation was we know it. Apparently you don't get much opium from the poppies so you'd need to inject an awful lot to get any effect - hence the industrial scale of the production.
For historical reasons I maintain two separate Perl blogs as well as Perl content on this blog. As I've been doing a lot more Perl at home and work of late I thought it best to update things.
I've blogged on use Perl; for a long time, but frustrations with the interface and the development of better syndication technology makes it less important to me and many of the people I follow.
The Perl is Alive site is a newer site, which I'm blogging on at the moment to help it grow. I need to add some more articles to it as well.
Just got back from a cracking week's holiday in Cymru (Wales). Contrary to popular opinion in England, the Welsh people we met were very friendly and it was very sunny and dry all week...
posted 20:22 ::
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We can't have lawyers muzzling science. He may or may have not made a valid argument against them, but in science you argue your case you don't litigate.
It's fair to say that the news of the housing market is highly skewed and very biased in the mainstream. If food prices were spiralling out of control and many people in the UK couldn't afford to eat that would be a scandal. When house prices balloon out of all reality it's apparently okay.
Patrick Collinson imagines what house price stories might look like if Britain wasn't under the sway of estate agents: Fears grow of house prices spiral. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek but it does show how silly the British obsession on financial reality defying house price rises has become...
posted 17:39 ::
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There are a couple of interesting house price ratios. The first is the ration of gross salary to house price, which in the UK is normally no more than 3:1 (salary:house price) as normally lenders will only lend a maximum of three times the gross salary of an individual.
The second interesting ratio is the ratio of annual rent to price of the house. A normal ratio is 14:1 (rent:house price). This is important because rental rates are more liquid/current than sale prices and so more accurately reflect the real price of a house, not the vendor's "dream" valuation.
On both counts UK house prices are still way over the normal level you would expect. Where I live a two bedroom house is available to rent for £8400 pa, giving a £117 600 sale valuation, a typical salary where I live would be £30k pa, giving a valuation of £100k (30x3 + 10% deposit). However you calculate the normal value of a property, it's an awful lot less than the the current asking prices of £180-200k. Is it any wonder that nothing is selling? and prices continue to fall...?
posted 13:58 ::
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The green shoots are just the dandelions growing out of the ruins of the British economy and not the first signs of a recovery... For too long we didn't do anything useful but simply borrowed money and spent it like there was no tomorrow. Well tomorrow is here and it wants it's money back.
Maurice Saatchi has an interesting article in The Times: Blame this crisis on the myth of inflation. It is well worth reading, the Thatcherite lie of concentrating on a narrow and artificial measure of inflation is shown bare and Labour's "sound fundamentals" are just the same old tosh as the previous governments tosh.
posted 13:37 ::
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I've done three batches of jam this spring. So far I've done a batch of champagne rhubarb, rhubarb and ginger and today a batch of rhubarb and orange marmalade. Recipes as previous years, though I did cut the sugar levels down this year as previous years have been very sweet and if you can increase the fruit levels it's worth it.
posted 18:29 ::
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IE is one of the most hated browsers if you are a web designer. It's buggy, unreliable, incompatible between versions and very common. To be fair, after many years of neglect, Microsoft have upgraded it and version 7 and 8 are clearly much better than version 6. The problem is that most Microsoft users don't seem to have upgraded from 6 to 7 and almost no body is using version 8.
For most of this year the ratio of IE users to Mozilla Gecko based browser has been shifting strongly against Microsoft, with Firefox and IE now at equal billing as the most common browsers most of the time. If you factor in the other Gecko based browsers, then Microsoft is no longer the most common browser almost all the time.
It's clear than IE users are not upgrading to the newer versions even though they are better. It's also clear that Firefox will be the dominant browser to visit my site and indeed many more sites by the end of this year.
Of the other browsers Opera continues to struggle, which is a terrible shame as it's very fast, works on many systems and has a good security track record. The KHTML based browsers such as Safari, Chrome and Konqeror don't seem to be making headway either, of them Safari is clearly the most common and though backed by Google, Chrome is less common than Konqeror - which is odd as Konqeror is a Linux browser and Chrome is Windows based and there are far more Windows desktops than Linux ones.
Next year's aggregate statistic may show some striking differences with last years stats.
Microsoft security expert Roger Grimes says in his blog that being different doesn't make you secure, or at least there is nothing wrong with a monopoly. He is right that just because you are different does not mean that you are automatically safe but the rest of his argument is weak.
He is arguing that if you have a monopoly that doesn't make you insecure because everyone goes for you. What makes you vulnerable is you write poor code. He has a point in as far as it goes, but for years we have known from game-theory and biology that monoculture are more profitable targets than diverse systems and hence there is more pressure to find weakness in them, which once exploited can cause chaos.
We know that the number of defects are directly related the the size of the code base and the complexity of the system. Windows has more lines of code and is an intrinsically more complex operating system than Linux, Unix and Mac OSX, therefore Windows will have more bugs in it.
Windows tends to be run by people with little or no security training and therefore tends to run in the default state. As we know that by default Windows is less secure than Linux, that make Windows more vulnerable. Both can be made a lot more secure with proper configuration and both can be made very insecure...
The various Linux/Unix systems are all subtly different from each other. Sometime this can be annoying but in a security scenario it makes each attack on them subtly different, which puts the crackers off a tiny bit more.
The result is that:
It's not surprising that over 99% of all viruses are exclusive to Windows systems.
He is arguing that Microsoft products gets the most viruses because they are insecure and the Linux gets less because it's safe, which is the opposite of the normal Microsoft position of the "we are the most common so we get the most viruses" argument.
The truth is that security is not a single dimension problem. You just can't make sweeping statements and generalisations without looking at all the facts.
For much of the last and this week I've been working on an interface between one of our pumps and SAP. It's been not the easiest process, lots of little problems but it had mostly come together by yesterday. Today we learned that the pump in question will be manufactured for at least another 6 months with three incompatible interfaces. It means a lot of unexpected work at a time when I don't have any extra time to do more work.
I think the business will be reasonable and accept a delay - they are after all getting three times the work, but that eats into following projects which other parts of the business won't be happy with.
The Perl and Unix/Linux side of the work has been dead easy. Even the SAP development has turned out to be quite simple, I have mostly just made minor tweaks to existing code. The Windows side has - as to be expected - been the most complicated and difficult part of the development. Nothing on Windows is easy or straight forward - everything is complicated and obtuse - it's no wonder most software for Windows systems is buggy and unreliable - the underlying platform is so awkward.
The current British government is trying to convince the population that we are in the grips of deflation and that the solution to our debt problems is to borrow and spend our way out of them. Because we face deflation rather than the more typical inflation we are safe to borrow and spend - which would otherwise be dangerous - indeed borrowing and spending helps to combat deflation - they say.
It is true that deflation, or a shrinking of the money supply, which normally means that things get cheaper is not a good thing. However I don't see the same deflation that the government sees, all the things I buy such as basic food ingredients are going through the roof in price, and imported goods and foods are rising even faster.
It's all a feeble attempt to prop up the housing bubble by mortgaging the nation's future to pay for the greed and ineptitude of the current ruling classes. I'm not anti-Labour or anti-Tory but I am stridently opposed the the pocket lining politicians running the place.
Come the Liberal revolution, I know who I'd have lined up against the wall...
posted 23:48 ::
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