Spanish tortilla



Spanish tortilla, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

6 xl eggs
1 largish onion, diced
about 1/3 kilo potatoes, sliced very small
1 bell pepper, diced

Salt the pieces of potato in a bowl. Mix in the chopped onion. Heat about 100 ml of oil in a large frying pan. Turn the heat down to its lowest setting. Gently stew the potato and onion mixture in the oil for around 15 minutes. Stir in the chopped pepper and leave to cook for another 15 mnutes or so. The secret here is to cook slowly over a very low heat and wait patiently. Stir occasionally to make sure it doesn’t stick to the pan.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs very lightly in a large bowl. Just beat them enough to break up the yolks and mix with the whites. Drain the oil from the cooked potatoes and stir them into the eggs. Heat some butter and a little oil in the frying pan, then turn the heat back down to low again. Pour the omelette mixture into the pan and leave to cook slowly.

After about 15 minutes, there should be very little uncooked egg left on the top of the mixture. Take the pan off the heat, cover with a large dinner plate and deftly flick it over to drop the tortilla onto the plate. Put the pan back on the heat and slide the tortilla off the plate back into the pan. Leave for another 5 – 10 minutes or so, still at low heat, at which point it should be cooked through. Flip it onto a plate again and serve!

Microformats and TEI reference strings

Several years ago, we digitised some papers relating to the explorer and put them online as the Flinders archive. I’ve been looking at that site with an eye to redeveloping it. Firstly, the markup needs overhauling to bring it up to the same standard as sites like the prints and drawings catalogue. Secondly, it’d be nice to come up with a good model for publishing written papers online. Most of the two million or so objects in the Maritime Museum’s collections are bits of paper; log books, letters, diaries, crew lists and who knows what else. There’s a copy of the Declaration of Independence, letters from Napoleon and Nelson’s last letter to his daughter. You can see photos of these documents online, but the original text isn’t available.

Continue reading Microformats and TEI reference strings

Close Guantanamo protest in London



Close Guantanamo protest in London, originally uploaded by Amnesty International UK.

I was at work yesterday, so couldn’t go to the demo outside the US Embassy. There’s a nice set of photos posted in the Amnesty International UK photostream on flickr.

London Semantic Web meetup

Tom Morris announced SemanticCamp this week. It’s a two day thing (Sat 16th – Sun 17th Feb) centred around discussions of meaning and . No wait, it’s a two day thing centred around discussions of a practical semantic web. Something that I’m very interested in, so I signed up.

Then I read the rules:

Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. The people present at the event will select the demos or presentations they want to see.

Ok, the last time I gave a presentation was an Open Museum lecture at the Maritime Museum in 2003. It was an overview of our , as an introduction to two days of talks about current Solar System research in the UK. Prior to that, I’ve also given lectures to the Flamsteed Astronomy Society. About – what they are, how they might have formed, why the Stardust mission was so interesting, that sort of thing.

All fascinating stuff, and well worth talking about, but what on earth would I present at a semantic web workshop? Answers on a postcard please!

We’ll share a drink and step outside

A friend pointed out that , the Ian Curtis biopic, was still on at the Curzon this week. So we went to see it on Thursday, and I’m very glad that I went. It’s a beautiful looking film, shot in black and white by Anton Corbijn, based on Deborah Curtis' biography of her husband – Touching From A Distance. The music is excellent. I thought that the actors were miming to songs but, it turns out, they played their own instruments for the live scenes. They really do sound like Joy Division. I love , so it was great to hear Disorder and She’s Lost Control.

The story isn't 100% true to life, which might annoy the more pedantic Joy Division fans. Stephen Morris wasn’t actually the drummer for Warsaw when Ian joined the band, and their first TV performance wasn’t Transmission. These are minor niggles. The main story of Ian and Deborah's marriage is well told, although his manic depression is glossed over. If you’ve seen , you might remember a pissed-up Joy Division doing a drunk version of Louie Louie at a Factory party. Then there’s the story of Ian ending an argument with Rob Gretton by sticking a bin on his own head and screaming. Neither of those aspects of him come across in Control, unfortunately. Incidentally, the bloke who plays Gretton does a great job. It's worth watching the film just for him.

That said, I thought it was a moving film. I used to think Ian Curtis was a self-absorbed, cheating twat, to be honest, but perhaps I was too hasty. A very troubled bloke, desperately in need of help but who isolated himself from the very people who could help him. Probably my favourite film of 2007. Definitely one to see, even if you aren’t a Joy Division fan yourself.

“He didn't commit suicide because he had marital problems. He had marital problems because he wanted to commit suicide.”

Deborah Curtis

Another day, another dollar…



DSC00730.JPG, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

The November Amnesty book sale is behind us now and the total take was £3,250 last night. Slightly down on previous years, but our total for 2007 is over £12,000 – a phenomenal amount for two sales organised by a small number of very dedicated volunteers. Many thanks to everyone involved. We’ll be back in June 2008 to sell a fresh batch of books.

How to make Ajax work for you

Really handy overview from Simon Willison – 130 slides about Ajax. Around about slide 58 he talks about the magical power of . If you’re still using XML to pass objects and data around, have a look at this.

I’ve been using JSON at work to open up our collections databases. The Collections Online search results pages are seperated into a controller script, which parses the URL for search query parameters and pass them off to the backend data model; a set of backend classes which run SQL and generate result sets containing the results; and a HTML view page which takes a search results object, loops through and displays the list of records. Fairly straightforward design. This gives me the flexibility to write new views of the data without having to muck about writing new SQL and data-processing code.

So I’ve experimented with writing a new view page (less than 10 lines of coldfusion code) which encodes the search results object as a JSON string. I’ve then added a module to our content management system which can read the JSON object and display it as a photo gallery. Kind of cool really – an object is instantiated in Coldfusion MX on one server, but then processed and presented by PHP running on a second server. JSON is very handy for these situations where you need to pass complex data structures between systems running on different application servers.

The next step, I think, would be to come up with some reasonable, standardised representation of collections records then open up our data with a standard JSON API that can be used by anyone.

From Bristol to the Ivory Coast, then on to Jamaica…

Slave Britain is an exhibition of photos, by Panos Pictures, illustrating the reality of the modern trade in human beings, 200 years after the slave trade was legally abolished in Britain. Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty International will be displaying the photos in Lewisham Library from this Saturday (24th November) until 10th December.

The end of November will also see the opening of the new Atlantic Worlds gallery at the Maritime Museum. This new gallery deals with, among other thing, the triangular trade in African slaves.