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Eclipse/WOLips tips

I have been running a WebObjects introduction course this week, using Eclipse (as I have been for the past several years). As I don’t always use Eclipse for development, this has served to remind me of a lot of basic functionality that I otherwise will forget between courses. If anyone is interested, I have a lot of projects that I continue to maintain using Xcode on MacOS X 10.4, as there is no reason to port them. Continue reading ›

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Objective C Unit Tests

A few notes here: I don’t use Unit Tests as much as I should (probably true of most of us, I guess).  I had built a good, functioning example for a Cocoa class a year or two back, and wanted to make use of that in a new project.

There’s a reasonable guide on the ADC site, at ADC—Automated Unit Testing with Xcode 3 and Objective-C.  There’s also a lot of out dated guides, which sort of get in the way.

I hit a problem with my build: "<SenTestingKit/SenTestingKit.h> no such file".  After a certain amount of thrashing around, finding several mailing list posts from people with the same problem, and no help from careful reading of the ADC guide, I found the solution: make sure that your test classes are in the Unit Tests target, and not the main project target (look at the check boxes under each target).

Another useful link is: Chris Hanson’s Xcode unit testing articles updated.

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Including Twitter on a web page

This is easy.  I did some Googling, and found several Javascript solutions:

http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ (jquery)
JavaScript: Simple Twitter Feed
Add Twitter to your blog (step-by-step)
Adding Twitter to Your Web Site with JavaScript (this is a summary of several).

We went with Remy Sharp’s solution (number 3 in my list).

Example usage:

<!– PV Tweet Demo  –>

<link href=”/PressVaultDemo/pvtweet.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link>

<div id=”heading”>

<p><h4>Our four most recent tweets for the games industry<img src=”/PressVaultDemo/images/spacer.gif” /></h4></p>

</div>

<div id=”tweet”>

<p><h3>Loading now… </h3>

</div>

<script

src=”http://twitterjs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/twitter.min.js”

type=”text/javascript”>

</script>

<script type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8″>

getTwitters(‘tweet’, {

id: ‘indigopearluk’,

count: 4,

enableLinks: true,

ignoreReplies: true,

clearContents: true,

template: ‘”%text%” <a href=”http://twitter.com/%user_screen_name%/statuses/%id%/”>%time%</a><p>

});

</script>

<!– End PV Tweet demo –>

Next…

You might also want to have a “Follow me” link.  First, I want an image, and there are a lot of free ones, including the official Twitter badges, and  Twitter goodies/buttons.

181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You …
Free Twitter Buttons | Siah Design
35 Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons
Free Twitter Graphics | Randa Clay Design
50 Free and Exclusive Twitter Icons
mysocialbuttons

A lot of these are the same, and it’s not clear where they started from.

The Twitter link itself is almost trivial, see How to post a link to your Twitter account from your website.  Just use http://www.twitter.com/username, where username is the id of the twit you want to follow.

my bread, Jim Lahey

There’s been a lot of buzz about Jim Lahey’s techniques over the last couple of years.  There’s no doubt that he’s a dedicated baker, and that his approach is worth considering; not least because it’s a set of simple rules that will give more consistent results, and good results, than a novice baker can hope to achieve without a lot of effort, practice, and guidance.
The book itself breaks down into three parts: the first section is the usual discussion of ingredients and inspirations, backed with the core no-knead recipe, with plenty of photographs of the stages to follow.  The second part is a series of chapters with different bread recipes, largely based around a loose connection with Italian bread baking, but as applied to the New York market – lots of sandwich breads, for instance, and “white pizza”.  The final part is a series of non-bread recipes to make Anerican-style deli sandwiches.  In some ways, this is the part of the book I like the best, although it’s not what you’d expect to find in here from the title or cover.
The central matter is the famous no knead recipe.  This turns out to be a combination of several well known “tricks”.  The first is that, as Dan Leppard has espoused for years, a well mixed dough will develop its gluten given time, without kneading, although Leppard prefers to give short kneads over an extended rising period.  Lahey goes for a very highly hydrated dough; most of his recipes are 75% (baker’s percentage), whereas most domestic bread recipes are 60 – 65%.  High hydration is desirable, as it gives a well textured end result, but a very wet dough is extremely hard to handle.  Given that handling of the dough is kept to an absolute minimum, this shouldn’t be a problem for the novice.
The next trick is an extended rising time, between 18 and 24 hours for most recipes.  This allows more flavour to develop.  Instead of giving a vague test like watching for doubling of the dough, or the time taken for a thumb dent to refill, Lahey’s test is to watch for bubble on the surface and a slight change of colouration of the dough: much easier to use to stop at the ideal time.  The next stage is tricky, shaping the loaf, as the dough is very loose and wet, but it works.
The final trick is to bake in a pre-heated cast iron pot – a dutch oven, in American terms, but a casserole works fine.  In fact, a ceramic casserole works just as well, but cast iron  is easier to handle.  The effect is to control humidity to give a better quality finish to the crust, something that is very hard to achieve without using a commercial bread oven (or hand built brick oven).  If your casserole has a plastic knob on the lid, it WILL burn at Lahey’s baking temperatures, and the smell isn’t pleasant (and is somewhat dangerous).  I would strongly advise using a pot with a metal knob/handle if at all possible, or simply removing your plastic knob.
All in all, this book is a good buy for bread bakers, novice and experienced alike.  The basic technique is the closest to fool-proof that I have ever come across, and the chapters of recipes are good – I particularly enjoyed the Pan co’Santi (walnut bread), and the sandwich recipes are excellent.  But these are well known techniques, just used in an entirely novel way.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Jim Lahey’s techniques over the last couple of years.  There’s no doubt that he’s a dedicated baker, and that his approach is worth considering; not least because it’s a set of simple rules that will give more consistent results, and good results, than a novice baker can hope to achieve without a lot of effort, practice, and guidance.

The book itself breaks down into three parts: the first section is the usual discussion of ingredients and inspirations, backed with the core no-knead recipe, with plenty of photographs of the stages to follow.  The second part is a series of chapters with different bread recipes, largely based around a loose connection with Italian bread baking, but as applied to the New York market – lots of sandwich breads, for instance, and “white pizza”.  The final part is a series of non-bread recipes to make Anerican-style deli sandwiches.  In some ways, this is the part of the book I like the best, although it’s not what you’d expect to find in here from the title or cover.

The central matter is the famous no knead recipe.  This turns out to be a combination of several well known “tricks”.  The first is that, as Dan Leppard has espoused for years, a well mixed dough will develop its gluten given time, without kneading, although Leppard prefers to give short kneads over an extended rising period.  Lahey goes for a very highly hydrated dough; most of his recipes are 75% (baker’s percentage), whereas most domestic bread recipes are 60 – 65%.  High hydration is desirable, as it gives a well textured end result, but a very wet dough is extremely hard to handle.  Given that handling of the dough is kept to an absolute minimum, this shouldn’t be a problem for the novice.

The next trick is an extended rising time, between 18 and 24 hours for most recipes.  This allows more flavour to develop.  Instead of giving a vague test like watching for doubling of the dough, or the time taken for a thumb dent to refill, Lahey’s test is to watch for bubble on the surface and a slight change of colouration of the dough: much easier to use to stop at the ideal time.  The next stage is tricky, shaping the loaf, as the dough is very loose and wet, but it works.

The final trick is to bake in a pre-heated cast iron pot – a dutch oven, in American terms, but a casserole works fine.  In fact, a ceramic casserole works just as well, but cast iron  is easier to handle.  The effect is to control humidity to give a better quality finish to the crust, something that is very hard to achieve without using a commercial bread oven (or hand built brick oven).  If your casserole has a plastic knob on the lid, it WILL burn at Lahey’s baking temperatures, and the smell isn’t pleasant (and is somewhat dangerous).  I would strongly advise using a pot with a metal knob/handle if at all possible, or simply removing your plastic knob.

All in all, this book is a good buy for bread bakers, novice and experienced alike.  The basic technique is the closest to fool-proof that I have ever come across, and the chapters of recipes are good – I particularly enjoyed the Pan co’Santi (walnut bread), and the sandwich recipes are excellent.  But these are well known techniques, just used in an entirely novel way.

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Supper for a Song, Tamasin Day-Lewis

I wasn’t going to read this book, being acquainted with Ms Day-Lewis’s writing of yore for the Sunday supplements. In my mind I hear a hectoring, strident voice, talking about the fashionable issues: organic, sustainable, seasonal, Aga, farmhouse kitchen; listen to her Amazon video if you’d like to hear exactly what nightmare runs in my mind. Most of the other reviews talk about what “for a song” means to a woman of privilege, where economy means doing your own shopping in Harrod’s/Fortnum’s, and not sending the help out to do it.

It’s true that the principle of economy is spoiled by the little additions. It also seems that the book came up a little short, and a number of the recipes were flung together out of the larder and pantry at the last minute, and further supplemented by a few luxury recipes rather than parsimonious ones. Her simple tea bread is jazzed up with Earl Grey tea and Fortnum and Mason’s mixed dried fruits, but is otherwise identical to Mary Berry’s Bara Brith recipe. But she does start with the classic “how to get three meals out of a roast chicken”, and has a fair swathe of ways to use up left-over mashed potatoes.

This isn’t a book for people lacking kitchen skills: some of the recipes are complex: take a look at the bay, honey and lemon cake, for example; and you need to know how to prepare cake tins and make a cartouche. But she name checks the right people: Elizabeth David and Anna Del Conte, and comes up with authentic seeming Italian recipe pastiches. The photographs are mostly of the actually recipe mixtures (this isn’t as common as you might hope), although I did spot a couple of discrepancies, like a cake using what seemed to be fresh dates when the recipes calls for medjool dates.

I’ve cooked a few of these recipes in the past couple of days, and I am impressed by her combinations of flavours; not just on the page, but how they work out in practice. The sausage and mustard casserole with cabbage and chestnuts, for instance, works out to be rather more subtle than the blow with a sledge hammer that it reads as. Time and time again she uses chestnuts, chocolate, chick peas, ground almonds, chilis and the aforementioned mashed potatoes – some of my favourite things (ok, not the mash!).

Approach this book as a collection themed with an international peasant background, with a sure touch for flavour combinations, and you won’t be disappointed. If you do this, it’s probably a good idea to ignore the recipe introductions, and stick to the heart of the book, the recipes, instead. A proper table of contents would have been a good idea, too.

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Good Eats: The Early Years, Alton Brown

I am a big fan of the Good Eats show, even though my only access to it is via YouTube, and I have Alton Brown’s three previous books from the series. There are 80 episodes covered in this first installment of three books (not two, as the Product Description claims), each with a short discussion of the themes of the show, a couple of recipes (called applications in the book), and some quotes and trivia. The recipes have all been reworked, some substantially; a few that I have checked have been exactly as given in the shows. Recipes have been adjusted to use weights (hurray!) rather than cup measures, where it is appropriate.

If you are looking for a basic cookbook, then this isn’t it; but then, it doesn’t claim to be. If you want to dig out some recipe that you half remember from an episode, or just would like a souvenir of the shows, you’ll be very happy. I have made a number of the recipes; most work out very well, but some have quirks that give inedible results (for me) – I’ll refer you to p156 and the “Duck!” recipe – which has become known in my household as “rubber duck” for an example. But I should emphasise that most recipes work well, especially the baking recipes.

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iPhone app – Huddle

Huddle is a network of Online workspaces that brings project management software, online collaboration and document sharing together.

I’m putting this up as the support URL pro tem for Huddle.

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Getting Online – how hard can it be?

I have a hate/hate relationship with BT Openworld.  Let’s be clear; I have no choice but to use them, as they have access points at all the places I visit and might need a connection.  All the old coffee shop access points in my area have been converted to BT Openworld, taking them at a stroke from free to expensive.  From the café’s viewpoint, an access point should surely only be a cheap box dropped onto their existing network, only a minor expense, but BT must be doing some hard sell about how difficult it is to maintain and secure, and selling them a separate line with some magical remote configuration options at a price, which requires a special redirect to a log in web page – showing how complexity just escalates if you ignore the obvious solution.

So take an iPod.  Imagine that you’re in a café somewhere, which happens to have a BT Openworld access point, and you have a burning need to connect – but you don’t have a BT subscription.  Pre-3.0, you’d open Safari to any page, you’d be told to pick an access point, and you’d be redirected to the BT login page.  From there you would have been able to navigate to anywhere BT would allow you, which would have included all their subscription plan pages.

But with 3.0, when you select the access point, you are taken to a special log on page within Settings.  For some reason your ability to navigate from there is restricted; possibly intentionally, or possibly by some sort of time out.  Whichever it is, you won’t have enough time to sign up for a subscription (unlimited time at BT Openworld access points is £12.50 per month, minimum contract 18 months, and you have to give multiple addresses as a credit reference – despite having given them your credit card details as well, which I consider to be needlessly intrusive).

The solution to this problem is to sign up beforehand – which is stupid.  Next problem is that I couldn’t get through their payment pages using Safari, on iPod or Mac OS X (Firefox on Mac OS X worked, in the end).  When you succeed, you get two separate emails sent to your mail address, as well as a page showing the user name and password, which you really need to write down, on paper.

So why write it on paper?  Surely you could copy and paste the strings directly from email, assuming that you had a connection while taking out the subscription?  Well, if you have this special log in screen, if you switch out of it, say to mail, to copy it down, you lose the connection and have to restart – and with two fields to copy, that’s not going to fly.

You could copy them both into a Note, on the same line, and remember how long the password/user name is, then copy and paste it into the two fields.  Password fields are obscured, so you have to remember the length.  If you gave up on that (I did) and are retyping from a scrap of paper, you’d better remember that the user name field is going to be auto-capitalised, and the log in page doesn’t show you an error message when it fails (Safari, JavaScript validation buttons, take your pick).

It is all too hard.  Part of the problem is Apple’s, who haven’t thought through the login process very well for the proportion of their users with iPod touch rather than iPhone, and making a retrograde change to the process; but it’s mostly BT’s fault for making it actively hard for people to buy their product.

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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L Frank Baum

It has taken me some time to get around to reading this book – close to 40 years, if I remember that far back clearly (which mostly I do). I remember seeing the great film classic version when I was young, many times; to be honest, it didn’t really grip me, although the switch into Technicolor was just as much of a wow for me as it must have been to those early audiences, and “Over the Rainbow” was also a key moment. But the Munchkins, flying monkeys, wicked witches didn’t insert themselves into my dreams as much as they did to most Americans. I tried to read it a few years later, when at boarding school – one of the benefits of an old library – but I found the turn of century American voice of the author much harder to deal with than the equivalent Victorians who I had come to enjoy.

What moved me to restart reading after so long was a growing appreciation that it really was a classic; and Baum wrote so many sequels, there must have been something to it; and watching a wicked witch/flying monkeys gag on Two and a Half Men, which was my trigger.

The plot is remarkably close to that of the film; common now in an era of slavish adaptations, where the most successful movie adaptations are those closest to the book, but exceedingly rare before Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter. There was the slight conceit of having the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow played by Dorothy’s friends from Kansas, which wasn’t taken from the book. Then a lot of repeated, very similar events where each of the companions does basically the same thing in different parts of Oz.

My overall take on the book is very good; it’s a fun children’s story written some time ago, with some very vivid characters. But every moment I expect some sort of missionary to leap out from behind a rock; that comes partly from the chapbook moralising on loan from Pilgrim’s Progress, but I also catch a whiff of the Kellogg about Baum. That’s not a problem to enjoying the story, just something that I can appreciate now that I know a little more about the background of that era.

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The Compleat Angler, Isaak Walton

Anglers talk of this book with reverence, or did so when I was in my teens.  Back then I can recall taking a look, and finding it rather impenetrable, written in an archaic style.

All of this is still true, but I found it an interesting read none the less.  There is certainly a lot of talk of different fishes, from salmon and trout through pike and perch to eel, roach, tench, carp, chub, minnows and “sticklebugs”.  For each he gives their habit, how to fish for them, and even how to cook them – and he has many recipes for the most coarse fish.

The real interest for me was in how accurate his observations can be, contrasted against how he had no idea of what happens to (what we now know to be) migratory birds during the winter, and the ideas of generation of fish from mud and slime, or geese from barnacles.  Some things, however, never change; he describes the chemical dosing of bait to better attract fish, and the secrecy of top anglers as to exactly how they construct their bait.

The book is structured as a dialogue between two men, known as Piscator (the narrator) and Venator, his student.  Complete with interludes where they sing songs in the inn, and donate the lesser of their catch to local farmer’s wives.  The initial chapter is more formal, as these two discuss the relative merits of their sports with two others in a structured style.

This style makes it hard to read, but you can pick up a feel for his life and nature from hints that drop – so many references to his angler friends who are now deceased, and his happiness and content to be, as he claims, of modest means and content with his lot.

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