Life on the beach

French Onion Soup is the best if your feeling under the weather, bear in mind - everything in the kitchen that can smell of onions will do after you make this soup….
(serves 3-4)
Ingredients

• 5 medium onions (finely chopped)
• 1 tsp Granulated Sugar
• 2 Cloves of garlic (crushed)
• 2 Pints (1.2 ltr) Good Beef Stock
• 70g Butter
• 1 glass (125ml) dry Vermouth

Method

1. In a big enough pan add a lug of olive oil and melt the butter and sugar
2. When this is very hot add the onion and garlic stirring when needed
3. When the edges of the onions start to go brown turn down the heat and leave for about 30 mins
4. Check for brown caramelized onions on the bottom of the pan (if not leave longer or turn up heat a little)
5. Add vermouth to pan and stir, make sure you get all the brown stuff off the bottom of the pan - thats the flavor!
6. Add the beef stock
7. season as needed (if using supermarket stock go easy on the salt as it will be salty enough)
8. leave on a low heat to simmer for about an hour
9. serve with toasted French bread (or make croûtons by rubbing the bread in olive oil and baking them till crispy

To Serve
Sometimes i like to put cheese on my croûtons and melt it in the oven, arrange the croûtons in the bowl and spoon in the soup.

I have a good casserole dish with a lid that can go on the hob and in the oven, I use this pan more than any other I own and its the second best thing I have ever purchased for my kitchen (after my knives). It cost me £25 from Marks and spencers and was a very good investment. I use it for this recipe
Spanish Chicken and Bean Casserole
(serves 4)
Ingredients

• 4 Chicken breasts (with skin)
• 1 medium leek
• 1 medium onion
• 150g chorizo (pealed and cut in to small cubes)
• 1 heaped tsp smoked paprika
• 2 heaped tsp tomato puree
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 1 medium carrot chopped
• 3 cloves garlic chopped
• half a handful lemon thyme (leaves only)
• 1 Bay leaf
• 2 tbsp fresh chopped parsley
• 1 tin butter beans (drained and rinsed)
• 1 tin mixed bean salad (drained and rinsed)
• 275 ml hot vegetable stock

Method

1) Add a good lug of olive oil to the pan and get the pan hot.
2) Fry the chicken breasts untill the are cooked on all sides and set aside on a plate for later.
3) Add the onions leek and carrot to the pan
4) Add the bay leaf and put set the heat to low and cover for 10 - 15 mins.
5) Stir in the chorizo
6) Add the paprika
7) Turn up the heat and cook together for 3 - 4 mins stiring when needed.
8) stir in the thyme garlic tomatoes and the tomato puree
9) Season as with salt and pepper to taste
10) Stir in the butter beans and the mixed bean salad
11) Add the chicken back to the pan
12) Pour over the hot stock
13) add the saffron
14) reduce the heat to low and cover, leave to simmer for 20-25 mins

At this point you should be left with a great smelling casserole that is rather orange in colour.

15) to serve, lift out the chicken breasts on to the warmed serving bowls before stirring in the parsley and spooning over the sauce.

I’ve Just completed my first propper cvs to subversion migration and thought i might report on my results….

I’m back working on a project that i started working on a few years back and one of the things i have been tasked with is migrating there cvs repository to subversion. there is 4 years worth of history in there and probably well over a million lines of code. to do this I used the cvs2svn script (http://cvs2svn.tigris.org) script and can say that im pretty impressed with it. it took 6.4 hours to run on our repository but it seems to have managed to convert the whole lot (branches tags and all) over to a new subversion repository. here is some interesting stats from the script about our repository.

Total CVS Files: 20308
Total CVS Revisions: 100077
Total Unique Tags: 1183
Total Unique Branches: 125
CVS Repos Size in KB: 8122881
Total SVN Commits: 40694
First Revision Date: Fri Dec 20 18:47:42 2002
Last Revision Date: Wed Mar 1 13:58:17 2006

I think this has to qualify as a pretty feckin big repository ! the only real issue i had running the cvs2svn script was getting a working and complete python installation to run it with, i was working on a solaris 8 box to start with but gave up after about 2 hours and coppied the repository over to our build server (a linux box with a complete and working python install) an after doing a little housekeeping on the repository the script ran flawlessly. all in all 10/10 for the script and 5/10 for python on solaris !

Finaly managed to get pics up from Amsterdam ! now the gallery is fixed here are the pictures :-) we had a fantastic time doing all the tourist stuff that I never got around to doing whilst living there. I think Amsterdam is possibly the only other place I could live apart from Brighton, I love the place.

After a hell of a lot of messing about trying to figure out why my gallery had stopped working I found that I have fallen foul of a “feature” of php 4.4.1 talked about here personaly I think this is a bug but i guess time will tell !

Amsterdam pictures to follow…

I was eating dinner with my good mate Bob Boothby AKA Big Bad Bob (Soft as a puppy realy) and he came up with a few more CVS Types the best of them i think has to be the “Historic Finger Pointer”

The Historic Finger Pointer is somone who has truly let the power of there version control system go to there head. at the drop of a hat or the first sign of a code reversion they are ready to issue a cvs history command (in fact there day is not complete unless they have done this at least once to prove there point) in order to aportion blame on some poor unsuspecting sole who only “Fixed” to match with the buisness requirements.

More to follow….

I have just noticed that I’m not actualy AAA compliant anymore since the introduction of my pictures…
I will have to look in to this at some point but it apears that images should be seperated by more thatn just whitespace ? not sure why - will post my findings when im done investigating !

During the past few years I have had occasion to work on several large parallel development projects, all of them have use CVS for there source control, in a recent project I’ve been working on in my spare time I have started to use subversion (and I think it is fantastic!). Whilst getting to grips with subversion I thought about the different problems I have come across with source control and parallel development, and the different opinions people have had about the best way to manage source control. I think people can be divided in to two types.

The Mergephobic

A typical mergephobic is genuinely scared to branch because they are terrified of running in to problems later down the line when they have to merge two concurrent developments back together. These people have often been victims of multiple merges that went bad but often can’t see that their merge aversion is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will put off a merge siting reasons like “We are to busy right now� or “best leave it until after the next Integration build� this only leads to the inevitable situation of the branch becoming so out of step with the trunk that the inevitable merge is a order of magnitude more difficult that it should be and therefore an order of magnitude more likely to fail.

The Branchaholic

The contrasting individual to the mergephobic is the branchaholic. They are ready to branch at the drop of a hat without any consideration as to where the development they are branching from is headed and what state it is likely to be in when they need to merge there changes back to that development. They have seen small successes with parallel development using branches and are keen to apply what they learnt to every project they work on from then on. Often this is a false view of when branching is the right way to go, they use branching as if it where a bucket of water in an attempt to make every problem look like a fire.

Both are bad – they put little thought in to why they do what they do and the consequences can be dire. I’m sure there are more types; perhaps I will list them as I come across them :-)

This set came from my cousin Noel it’s not often you get so many Heavers in the same place…..

These pictures came from Jo’s Camera and i think you will agree they look great - I have yet to see a bad photo of Jo but Jim our wedding photographer assures us that he got one of her with her eyes closed….

Incidently Jo caught Becky’s flowers….