Bill Farmer

Coarse Ratatouille

This is slow cooked vegetables using whatever comes to hand.

Ingredients

• Onions, sliced
• Potatoes, sliced
• Carrots, sliced
• Whatever else is going, sliced or chopped
• Oil
• Large heavy frying pan or skillet with lid

Method

1. Warm up your skillet and put a dollop of oil in it
2. Arrange a layer of sliced onions, making sure to spread the oil around
3. Next a layer of sliced potato
4. Next a layer of sliced carrots
5. Add layers of whatever else is to hand to fill up the pan
6. Pour a bit more oil over the top
7. Put the lid on and cook gently until the carrots are cooked. The onions should caramelise on the bottom and add some delicious flavour

Download streamed video

Online video providers tend to stream the video to a javascript player, so making it extremely difficult to capture the video. This blog explains a method using Chrome to spoof the user agent string, pretending to be an iPad. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to work any more in the latest version of Chrome.

So I tried installing a user agent spoofing plugin in Firefox. It seemed to work, but the video didn’t play, so I couldn’t find the url. I next tried Firefox on my Android tablet and the video played. To find the url of the video I used Firefox remote debugging. This page describes how to set it up in detail.

Concurrency, Threads, Semaphores and Mutexes

I have written several applications in both Java and C that involve running an audio thread in the background to read or write audio from or to the audio system while displaying the results and interacting with the user in the foreground. I have used lots of threads, but never a semaphore or mutex apart from the odd boolean variable.

This issue is reminiscent of back in the day when you actually had or could get a circuit diagram of your computer and could understand it. One of the first machines I had suffered from display corruption when the display was updated due to contention between the processor and the display system. It was fairly simply fixable by using a spare inverter to reverse the phase of the display system clock to remove the contention.

Upgrading WordPress

This site has the firewall set up so that the web server has no external access. This means that I can’t use the usual WordPress update mechanism to keep it up to date. I use FileZilla for maintaining the server, and I recently discovered you can use drag and drop to move stuff around remotely.

So my easy WordPress upgrade method is:

• Download the latest zip file and unzip it.
• Rename the wordpress folder to something else, like wordpress-old.
• Upload the new wordpress folder.
• Move the stuff you need from the old wordpress-old folder, like themes, plugins, uploads, any modified theme files and your config.php file.
• Check it works and upgrade the database.
• Remove the old wordpress-old folder.

Nearly as easy as letting it do it itself.

Faggots and Peas with Onion Gravy

When I was a teenager the chippy at Preston, Weymouth, Dorset used to serve faggots and peas with gravy in those aluminium foil containers that take-away Chinese used to come in. Enough for 2.

Ingredients

• 3-5 faggots
• Frozen or fresh peas
• Truly Evil Onion Gravy

Method

1. Start the gravy first as it takes a while to render the onions down.
2. Once the onions are well done, put the faggots in a tin and place in a medium hot oven – 180° C, until they are starting to brown.
3. Cook the peas in accordance with the instructions. When they are done, use the cooking water for the gravy.
4. Serve, pouring the gravy over the faggots and peas.