Modelling data with relations (by alaric)

So, I've been thinking about data. I'm going to explain my thoughts with enough background so that non-programmers should be able to follow along, but don't worry - I won't be going on huge tangents with basic tutorials, so if you already know everything about pointers in C and SQL databases, you can just skim over the early paragraphs! Read more »

Pumpkin and Paneer Stew (by alaric)

Equipment

1. Knife for chopping veg
2. Chopping board
3. Large hob safe cassarole dish or pan or a crock pot. With adaption it can easily be cooked in an over or slow cooker as well.
4. Oven gloves or mitts or heat proof cloth (Sarah here - ok so I also bought us knew halloween/autumn oven gloves but this one is because Jean's university house mates accidently set fire to the pumpkin ones we've had the last five years or so... so this purchase does not count for halloween decor budget ok!)

Ingredients

• One small pumpkin (sold as a "cooking pumpkin")
• Two courgettes
• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 3 teaspoons of smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon of garlic salt (or separate salt and garlic, we just happened to have some nice garlic salt to hand)
• 1 tin of red kidney beans
• 1 tin of chickpeas

(Sarah here - whilst Al did all the cooking I made sure we stayed hydrated with ths lovely Spice Pumpkin Pie Sticky Chai from Bird and Blend made in the pumpkin tea pot that we got several years ago - no it doesn't matter that I am the only one who drinks tea - shhhh!)

The Why

The weather is turning autumnul, and Sarah has been nagging me to buy this pumpkin-shaped cast iron casserole dish that she's heard is in Lidl...

(Sarah here - it is £25!!! for a 3.7L oven and hob enameled metal cassarole dish compared to the Le Creuset one which is like £300 and smaller and though it is not going to be the life time cookware of the Le Creuset it has a 3 yr guarentee and Sainsbury's etc... all have cute pumpkin cassorole dishes but they are ceramic or stone ware and I have not had good luck with seasonal cookware that is ceramic - we have been lucky if it survives two years and cracks much quicker than normal cookware - we may just do a lot of this type of cooking compared to other households. Having said that Sainsbury's one is apparently £15 but I am out of halloween budget sadly! And I had already gotten us a mushroom serving bowl from ASDA for £10 back in August so doesn't count right? It was a different season! Besides I kept waiting till pans and dishes were worn out to get a nice set but Alaric keeps buying replacements so I think getting the pots and pans we like when they are affordable is the way forward rather than getting standins and never getting the nice stuff. On a more serious note I feel that the heavier the pan the more ergonomic the handle needs to be and whilst not perfect the Lidle pan has a better handle for me to grip with my sometimes defunct hands though I do prefer the style of the Creuset ones! Now back to the Alaric:)

So today I bought one, and made a pumpkin stew in it.

The recipe

(Sarah here - ok sorry we promised we would always do no nonsense recipes without the the long life stories before you get to the recipe but... but... I had to defend my honour!)

• One small pumpkin (sold as a "cooking pumpkin")
• Two courgettes

Chop 'em up into cubes of at most 2cm on a side and put them in your cooking pot, with a couple of table spoons of olive oil. Put the top on the pot and put it on a hob at high heat. Stir every few minutes while you work on the next bit:

• 400g of paneer

Chop it into 2cm cubes, and in another pan, fry it with a little oil, turning frequently until it starts to get browned on the sides. Then add 1tsp of ground black pepper, stir, and turn the heat down to minimum.

The veg in the stew pot should be looking browned in places now, and generally soft and mushy, so we can proceed to the next stage.

• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 3 teaspoons of smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon of garlic salt (or separate salt and garlic, we just happened to have some nice garlic salt to hand)
• 1 tin of red kidney beans
• 1 tin of chickpeas

Add all these things to the vegetables, stir to mix it all up, and put the lid back on.

Wait ten minutes.

Add the paneer to the stew, stir, and put the lid back on the stew.

Wait five more minutes (I used this time to heat a gluten free tiger loaf in the oven, at gas mark 4)

Serve!

Oh, and the pumpkin seeds I scraped out of the pumpkin, once manually seperated from the slimy strings and rinsed, were spread on foil on a baking tray and baked at gas mark 4 for about half an hour, making them golden and crispy; they're a snack on their own:

A sensible version of this recipe will appear on Salaric Cooking for you all here.

Who cares about user interfaces? (by alaric)

Developing user interfaces to software systems is incredibly rewarding.

If your software system has a user interface at all - and most do, even if it's just for service engineers - then interacting with a human is, presumably, part of its function. And since humans generally pay the bills or otherwise reward and motivate the development of software, I'd hazard a guess that whatever interaction your system has with the user might be the most important thing it does. So having a poor user interface might well mean that whatever else is wonderful about your software is meaningless, because nobody can use it.

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The weird and wonderful world of corporate finance (by alaric)

Ok, so, let me start with this: I'm an engineer. I'm not an accountant or an economist or a hedge fund manager or anything.

However, I have studied those worlds from time to time for various reasons, and I've always kind of enjoyed it because it's a complex world of systems, and there's a lot of engineering behind it. But it's all explained in weird jargon and kind of inaccessible to engineers.

So, this blog post is my attempt to document the aspects of corporate finance I understand, but explained in a way that makes more sense to me, and hopefully to other engineers, or people who think they aren't engineers but are really.

If that sounds interesting to you, buckle up and let's get started!

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The Tangled Tale of My Career (by alaric)

I've been feeling a bunch of despair, boredom and ennui about my career lately; so I've decided to attack it in the way I know best - by writing about it.

When I was little, I wanted to be a scientist. Of course, that wasn't what I actually wanted - but popular media had created this vision of a mad scientist labouring in a lab making weird and wonderful things. I later learnt that what I wanted to be was called an "Inventor", which is a kind of engineer; the application of science to make things - the goal of building a fantastic machine is to get that fantastic machine, not to test some hypothesis. So it's definitely not science.

This was fed, in part, by the reading material I had around the house. My maternal grandparents had been an electrical engineer and a science teacher, respectively, so I had a mixture of O-level science textbooks and old cloth-bound tomes about electrical power distribution networks. Plus, my mother was a science fiction and fantasy fan, so I had stories like E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman books (epic space battles, written by an engineer so tending to linger on the technical details) inspiring me. I saw technology as a way of solving real problems, and I found learning about it fascinating, and the challenges were engaging - and what's even better, I found I had a knack for solving them. The future looked exciting!

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