Ingredients

• 2 skin-on Chicken breasts
• Mushrooms
• Rice
• Chicken stock
• Garlic
• Onions
• Double cream

Instructions

Follow instructions on cooking chicken, copied from the original post:

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Season chicken with Salt/Pepper. Fry quickly with skin down until golden brown. Flip over and cook for a minute. Take chicken, and put in an oven dish, and surround with the chicken stock. I put garlic in the stock as well as I love garlic. Cook for 20-25 minutes or until cooked.

While this is cooking, fry off some onion and garlic. Add mushrooms and fry them a bit. Add a little chicken stock, and the rice. Reduce. Add more chicken stock, reduce again. Repeat until stock is all soaked into the chicken. Once this is done, stir in some double cream.

Serve the chicken on the risotto bed. Should hopefuly be tasty!!

Update: It was tasty! Picture attatched…

Ingredients

• 2 skin-on chicken breasts
• Chicken stock (you can make this with Chicken Oxo cubes and hot water!)
• Mushrooms
• White wine
• Double Cream
• Spinach
• Tarragon (I had to get the Scwartz stuff as I couldn’t find any fresh)
• Garlic

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Season chicken with Salt/Pepper. Fry quickly with skin down until golden brown. Flip over and cook for a minute. Take chicken, and put in an oven dish, and surround with the chicken stock. I put garlic in the stock as well as I love garlic. Cook for 20-25 minutes or until cooked.

Melt some butter in a frying pan and add mushrooms until golden. Add white wine and reduce almost completely. Add cream, spinach and tarragon, and reduce by a third. While doing this, boil some rice.

To serve, put a bit of rice on each plate, chicken on top.  put the sauce next to the rice/chicken as I had a lot of mushrooms and spinach in mine. Yum.

Ingredients

• Strawberries
• Blackberries
• Juice (e.g. Summer berry juice)
• Ice cubes

Instructions

Well, there really isn’t too much to say about this - stick everything in, and blend until smooth… Drink straight away for a nice refreshing and healthy drink. Don’t forget to rinse the blender as soon as you can, otherwise it’s a nightmare to clean!

Clicky McClick Here

And now the fail, I don’t really need to say too much about this one, except that they’ve realised the mistake they made, and have now renamed it to “Touch Dictionary”.

Most good PHP IDEs (Eclipse PDT, PhpED, and probably Zend Studio, but I have not tried that) will support the language, which is actually pretty easy to remember and use anyway. phpdoc is just comments that are formatted in a special way. Phpdoc notation is like a normal comment, but is preceeded by /** instead of the regular /*. There are several special keywords that one can use as well to assist in documentation.

The other great thing about phpdoc is that the IDE (Eclipse PDT and PhpED do this) picks up on the variable types specified before a function, which makes code tooltips much more efficient.

Have a look at some sample phpdoc’ed code (not checked for syntax!):

<?
	/**
	 * File description goes here
	 */
 
	/**
	 * Class description goes here
	 *
	 * @name ClassName
	 * @version 1
	 * @package PackageName
	 */
	class ClassName
	{
		/**
		 * This variable holds some information
		 */
		private $SomeMember = 5;
 
		/**
		 * This function does something
		 *
		 * @param String $some_arg1 A string to be echoed out, prepended by Hello:
		 * @param OtherClass $some_arg2 The object containing a number that will form part of the division function.
		 * @return Number The value after the division.
		 */
		public function DoSoemthing($some_arg1, $some_arg2)
		{
			echo "Hello: {$some_arg1}";
			return $some_arg2->SomeNumber / $this->SomeMember;
		}
	}
?>

As you can see, just formatting the comments a bit better makes things clearer. The step after is to generate the documentation, which is an automatic process and more can be found on the phpDocumentor website.

Well its Monday morning again, I’m back at work, and Chris has given me some kind of lung death throat destroying illness. I’ve sorted through the barrage of spam e-mail and general rubbish that arrives in my Inbox over the weekend, revealing that there are actually no e-mails worth reading.

I’m not the only one who is ill though, Chris was the originator, and he’s passed it onto Sii, Jon and myself. In turn I’ve passed it onto Hannah, and its likely Jon has passed it onto Jake has he had a lift this morning. What makes this worse, in a matter of minutes, we’ll all be going into our weekly meeting and spreading the lung death throat destroying illness even further.

Have a look at the Element Four website for more info! I’m also interested in finding out how much this thing costs…

Update [4th Oct]:

I e-mailed the company asking for more info, and where it will be distributed in the UK, and aboute the solar version. The response was that it can be run of a 600 Watt solar panel, and it will retail at $1299.00 (I assume Canadian, about £680 Sterling) and be available February 2009. Nothing specific was said about UK distribution, but £680 is a hell of a lot to shell out, as well as buying a 600W solar panel… it’s definately a long term investment, and as I’m still in rented property, I doubt I’ll be getting anything like this any time soon!

The Tech Track 100 is published annually and ranks Britain’s fasting growing private tech companies over the last three years. Netbasic started in 2003 and in 2004, the company made £255,000 in sales, which soared 235% to £9.6 million in 2007.

This huge increase makes Netbasic rank at number 3, just below Lovefilm International, which in my eyes is a damn good feat!

The Star L85A2 and G&G L85A2 are the expensive ones. There have been rumours that the G&G is a bit unreliable, but it does have a cool automatic blowback feature (which I don’t know if the Star version has). The Star version, I hear, is a very solid weapon, and fits the SUSAT (Sight Unit Small Arms, Trilux), unlike the G&G which you have to file. All very good, but these guns are upwards of £350…

I did a little more research and for some time ICS have been developing their own L85A2 (pictured above). Supposedly it is released now and available to buy for £285. It’s cheaper, and a lot newer. I might wait a little while for some reviews to appear…

I’m not sure if it’s direct competition to the new iPhone platform, but I really wouldn’t be suprised if Google had a good try at it. In fact, I really hope they do, and I hope it’s ten times better than the iPhone. If it is, I might pull myself away from Orange and get some T-Mobile action with the Google Android fun…

First, let me give you an overview of how the flags work underneath. A flag in my example is the number 1, shifted n steps left. I have a list of flags that represent different weather situations, that could happen simultaneously:

define("WEATHER_CLOUDY", (1 << 0));
define("WEATHER_FOGGY", (1 << 1));
define("WEATHER_RAINING", (1 << 2));
define("WEATHER_SNOWING", (1 << 3));

These values, displayed as binary are 1, 2, 4, 8 respectively. The important part however, is not the decimal values, but the binary values, which are 0001, 0010, 0100, 1000 (with leading zeros for ease of understanding).

Lets look more at this, without looking at any more code. What if it was raining AND cloudy? The advantage of using binary is that it can be cloudy and raining. All you do is set the cloudy and raining bits. This would result in a binary value of 0101 (decimal 5). The correlation is simple, the first bit is the SNOWING bit, the second is the RAINING bit, third is FOGGY and the last is CLOUDY. If it’s cloudy, the last bit will be 1, if not 0. And so on… I think you get the picture.

I’ve written (and believe me, it didn’t take long) a couple of functions that allow you to manipulate a value in this way without worrying about the dynamics of it.

function bv_is_set($bits, $bit)
{
	return ($bit == (($bits) & ($bit)));
}
 
function bv_set_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits |= $bit;
}
 
function bv_unset_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits &= ~$bit;
}
 
function bv_toggle_bit(&$bits, $bit)
{
	$bits ^= $bit;
}

These functions do what they say on the tin. Say you want to store a value that represents a cloudy, rainy day, you would do this:

$weather = 0;
bv_set_bit($weather, WEATHER_CLOUDY);
bv_set_bit($weather, WEATHER_RAINING);

The binary value of $weather is now 0101. You could store this single number in a database or something, the minimum space you would need to store the fact that it is cloudy and raining, is just 4 bits. Thats tiny!!

If you wanted to run a function only when it was snowing, you would use bv_is_set to test this:

bv_toggle_bit($weather, WEATHER_SNOWING);
 
if(bv_is_set($weather, WEATHER_SNOWING))
{
	start_snowplough();
}

The toggle function literally toggles whichever bit. The is_set function tests wether a bit is set or not, the set bit will set a bit, regardless if wether it was set or not previously, and the unset does the opposite. Pretty self-explanatory really.

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture.
Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)
Include these instructions.

Don’t I look a happy bunny! My beard is also a bit skwiff today, eep! And for anyone who is wondering, yes those are Team Fortress 2 posters on the wall, and no, they weren’t my choice.

I’m trying to monetize it a bit to cover the cost of hosting for my various websites, but now that my Matched.co.uk ads are paying out quite well, I’m considering dropping them to help make the site look a bit cleaner. I am earning a very small amount from the Adsense units, but I think it might be better to just get rid of them for a nice clean site look…

What do people think… obtrusive? Shall I get rid of them? Or keep them?… I wonder…

I hope that Blizzard try a bit harder to make it not just another World of Warcraft-style game, and give Diablo 3 a really good dark and realistic look and feel. I hope they make it so grim and foreboding that it receives an M (for Mature) rating, not some pansy T (for Teen) rating.

All I have to quench my thirst for Diablo 3 until probably next year is some screenshots, the Gameplay video, and this beautiful Cinematic teaser/trailer…

Oooh… nice

common_table:

uncommon_table:

Joining these is a standard operation, and if we wanted all records, that may or may not have a postcode, we’d:

SELECT * FROM common_table c LEFT JOIN uncommon_table u ON u.customer_id = c.id

And that would give us:

Note carefully the fact that the uncommon_table values in the second row are NULL. We can use this to distinguish which records have entries in the uncommon_table, and which don’t. Then we can form queries based on this, for example if you wanted a report of each user with their postcode, ignoring those without postcodes:

SELECT * FROM common_table c LEFT JOIN uncommon_table u ON u.customer_id = c.id WHERE u.id IS NOT NULL

And converseley, find those people who haven’t got a postcode entry:

SELECT * FROM common_table c LEFT JOIN uncommon_table u ON u.customer_id = c.id WHERE u.id IS NULL

Knowing this can be handy, and sometimes quite powerful.

The problem is when I come to install some pieces of software, I get “Error 1327: Invalid Drive P:\“. A useless error message, and fustrating.

The cause of this error is that my Pictures, Video and Music folders are stored on a NAS drive (mapped to P:\). When running a setup program in elevated security using the UAC, it appears Vista does not know that P:\ is mapped any more.

There are two solutions:

• Disconnect current drive. Run command prompt as Administrator, and “net use P: \\path\to\share”. Then map your drive as normal. I’m not sure if this sticks, or even works, as I’ve also done the other method which I think is more likely to have fixed it.
• In regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\. Change whichever mapped locations you have (e.g. P:\Music) to the full UNC path (e.g. \\path\to\share\Music). Basically, don’t use mapped drive letters, use the UNC path.

Find out more here: bbc.co.uk/thebox

Anyway, there are other reasons I could list, but for now I’m going back to Firefox as Chrome is sort of hampering me at the moment… sorry Google, I just need stability for now…

Ingredients:

• 750g Gammon (for 2)
• Honey
• English Mustard
• 1 Leek
• 1 Carrot
• White Cabbage
• A red onion
• Gravy - Bisto, flour, stock cube

Instructions

Loosely wrap the gammon in foil, sealing to ensure it’s airtight. Cook at 160 degrees for 50 minutes. Chop the veg and onion up. Mix a bit of mustard into some honey and put aside ready.

When 50 minutes is up, open the gammon, score it with a knife, and smear honey over. Keep it uncovered, and put it in for 30 minutes at 210 degrees. Steam the veg, caramelise the onion (cook it really slowly, about 30 mins or so on low heat - it tastes YUMMY!). Gravy mix is Bisto, flour, a stock cube and the gammon juices.

Simple, and (hopefully) very tasty!