Today was a Italian spinach and ham tart that was quite like the recipe used in one of Jamie Oliver’s books, it was good but not as good as the Courgette tart (or Zucchini tart) I cooked the other day.

Others have been Goat Cheese and Leek and a Spinach and Blue Cheese tart. Next up is a Red Pepper one I think.

I think it is something to do with being a father, wanting to provide food is probably one of those fundamental instincts, though I must admit I like the eating myself. Christmas is just around the corner so I could do with the cooking practise.

Some day I will put the recipe up at fork full or somewhere.

• Goat Cheese and Leek Tart, for today.
• Brownies – These are more of a desert brownie, great with icing sugar and a little cream.
• Roasted White fish with leek – A classic kind of Jamie Oliver dish, I used cod.
• Potato supper, a simple dish of Bacon, Potatoes, Onions to which I added a good quality Italian sausage. The idea came from Nigel Slater’s book Appetite
• Spinach and Blue cheese tart. Next time I will use the recipe from here I think.
• Chicken chow mein – not up to the standard of a really good chinese, or the rest of the food here but still perfectly nice.

Next up is chicken cacciatore and a sausage dish that I saw being cooked on one of Nigel Slater’s programmes – with roasted onions and bell peppers. Awesome.

We haven’t decided upon a name yet, trying to work out something that works in English and Swedish is not that easy but we hope to have something soon.

Here are some photos taken just after the birth:

We went out for a meal at Sjögräsin Södermalm ( south Stockholm ) and it was really good. I had a nice Reindeer steak with Hazelnuts and Cranberries, and then a Run tasting for desert. Next time I will go for a starter as the portions are quite small in this dish, though I saw a couple of tables over a huge portion of what looked like a salad being served. Anyway I would recommend it.

This weekend we went to Paladar de Cuba again, this time for a friends leaving party. Love the food there too.

At home last night I cooked a lovely Roast Lamb which I think was almost as good as anything I have eaten out recently though it did serve to show me that I really need a meat thermometer. Getting lamb the right temperature in the middle is rather tricky when its not on the bone.

In the past week I have also been playing around with my hackintosh, a seriously easy build and a great way to get a fast and inexpensive OS X solution.

It seemed to be when they changed it to support sync to Google Reader – not a bad idea by any means, but releasing the software before it was full tested and working was a huge mistake. Trying to push it to people before it was ready was an even bigger mistake.

Now twitter & fb are full of messages about problems with the Mac OSX and iPhone version, and it really needs to be sorted out. I know its free now, but as I have said before I paid for it a long time ago and it worked, if its a question of money then release it as a paid version. Not too expensive ( VersionsApp – take note ) but working.

Do not recommend it at the moment, which is such a pity as it used to be one of my favourite applications.

So the big news is that we are expecting a baby, and this has really consumed most of the thoughts over the summer and changed our behaviour somewhat! Everything seems to be about getting ready for the big day (In November) and the huge changes that will come with it.

But we managed to go on some picnics and tried to make the most of the short summer here in Sweden.

I have been working on the bedroom which I can say is finally just about ready. The door way is filled in, decorated and the plasma screen put up on the wall. I wallpapered the other couple of walls and painted everything else. We both think it looks good. I have also been sorting out a desk to work from at home, and the network and geeky computer stuff – probably will post about that at some other time.

That took up some of the holidays, then we went to Bulgaria for some sun and relaxation – it was nice but I don’t think that we will be going again as the Bulgarians seem to have ruined their own countryside in the name of tourism.

For the last part of the holiday Mum came to visit us in Sweden and we took her in to the countryside and a good time was had by all.

So now its the big run up to the baby being born!

I am following the suggestions here:

http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/wordpress-hacked-eval-base64_decode-_serverhttp_referer/

And it seemed to work.

Basically in the .ssh folder in your home directory you can create a file called config with which you can put all sorts of configuration information for your ssh client but the real benefit for me was to use this to give extra information to hosts such as defining a different port number to connect on. For instance:

This means that instead of typing:

I can type:

No need for nasty aliases in the shell or anything like that. This also works for the sshfs program on the Mac that makes use of MacFuse. Yes that’s right you can use different ports with SSHfs.

You can also change a much wider range of parameters than I have shown here, but often its probably better to introduce them on the server. But here is an example and have a look under the options flag in the Man page for SSH

This little util allows the use of version control (bzr, hg or git) to track changes to /etc and with the Ubuntu version integrates with apt and dpkg so that new package installs are tracked.

To install just install the following, it will take care of the dependancies:

The Initialize the repository:

And do a commit of the files to the repository.

After each change to file(s) in /etc

Now I just have to back up the files from the repository for a good way of rolling back and forth between versions. Probably onto a USB key

• Backup server (with Apple Time Machine)
• File server
• NNTP server
• iTunes server
• Database server (mainly PostgreSQL)
• VMWare server

The hardware is mounted in rackmount chassis with space for 12 drives, 6 of which will be populated straight away, has a 64bit processor and will have 3Gb of RAM (The maximum on this old hardware).

I have installed Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition on it, and I must say that it went very smoothly except for the fact that Python 2.5 on Ubuntu 9.04 is a pain, often breaking. Here are some useful commands:

Having two installations of different version of python and switching between them:

To undo:

To force a change of version:

Then this will be the main server in the house, with lightweight front ends (This will have over 4Tb of RAID with expandability to 12TB). My old book will retire until I think of a good use for its out of date hardware.