Dave Holland's weblog

Orange or lemon cake

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:26:10 +0100

100g margarine
150g sugar
1 lemon, grated and juiced (or an orange)
1 egg, beaten
100g SR flour
7" tin, greased and lined (or save effort with a silicone tin)

(also works well with everything doubled, in a bigger tin)

Melt the margarine in a saucepan and mix with the sugar. Take it off the heat and mix in the lemon rind, then the beaten egg. Fold in the flour and put the mixture into the tin. Bake at 180°C for 25-30 minutes. In the same saucepan (to save washing up) heat the lemon juice and "some" sugar. Stab the cake all over with a fork and pour the syrupy mess over the cake. Try hard not to take it out of the tin until it's cooled.

Weather forecast in the Gnome panel, revisited

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:18:16 +0100

About a year ago I threw together a hacky mess of Perl and gnome-swallow-applet to display the BBC's 3-day weather forecast in the Gnome panel. I recently rewrote it to use Perl's Gnome2::PanelApplet which seems to have had the relevant bug(s) fixed since I last tried.

There are still some rather rough edges: you'll still need to change the feed location from the coded-in one for Cambridge to something suitable for your location; and don't look at the code dealing with the use of a web proxy. Still, the embarrassing match-happy regexp error which meant that Sunday was always displayed as being sunny is gone...

It needs a bunch of Perl modules, including Gnome2::PanelApplet (from CPAN, or Debian packaged for i386 by me here). Drop this script in /usr/local/bin and this applet description file in /usr/lib/bonobo/servers and you should be able to do the usual right-click/add to panel.

Have fun. If you fix any FIXMEs please let me know.

Response to DCSF's "Home Education - registration and monitoring proposals"

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:08:55 +0100

The Department for Children, Schools and Families is consulting on proposed changes to registration and monitoring of home-educated children.

This is my response, which was allocated number 2284. Many thanks to friends and others (including the Family Education Trust) for suggestions and ideas for points to include. Please feel free to borrow from it if you want - if it encourages you to reply to the consultation, so much the better!

Kwiki title bug

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:10:52 +0100

Note to self:

Kwiki has a bug in the tabnav theme where the page title doesn't get set properly. To fix, edit theme/tabnav/template/tt2/kwiki_screen.html and change page_id (line 9 or so) to be page_name.

Simples...

Spam of the day

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:17:43 +0100

Subject: INVITATION TO SUPPLY ONE MILLION BATH TOWELS

Do you know where your million towels are?

Weather forecast in the Gnome panel

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:04:13 +0100

It's annoyed me for some time that the standard Gnome weather applet doesn't display forecasts for the UK (it's a long-standing bug). So I scratched the itch.

Given that I'd be hacking something together in Perl, the Gnome2::PanelApplet module seemed like a good place to start. It didn't take long to get something that mostly worked. But, er, either I'm doing something wrong or there are still some lurking bugs; my applet wouldn't add properly from the Gnome menu, only if I started it from the command line first.

So I resorted to gnome-swallow-applet which is a clever (but revolting) hack to "swallow" any X window into the panel, and wrote a script to parse the BBC's weather RSS feeds and display icons for the upcoming days. This is what it looks like. You can download the script; change the feed URL for your location, and enjoy. If you fix any of the bits labelled FIXME please send me a patch!