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 »
Alaric, ARGON, Computing | alaric | 
Tue 11th Nov 2025 9:59 pm | 
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(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 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.
(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!)
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:
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.
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.
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.
Alaric, Computing | alaric | Tue 8th Jul 2025 7:39 pm | Comments (0)
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!
Alaric, Work | alaric | Sun 26th May 2024 4:17 pm | Comments (1)
When I lived in London, I used to commute on the London Underground and the busses. And in my bag, I always had my current reading book. And I'd sit and read for my journey, half an hour to an hour a day.
When I started working from home, I lost that; but I had to travel into London a few times a week to rotate offsite backups and things like that, so I still got a good hour and a half of reading time a week.
When I moved to Gloucestershire, I still had to go into London once a week, which provided a solid hour and a half of reading time each way plus some time on the Tube, which was excellent!
But that came to an end. When I leave the house, it's rare that I don't drive; and I detest having to manually steer a vehicle around, consuming all that energy and taking up space on the road! Whenever I can I take my bike or use public transport - but times when I'm not transporting passengers or cargo or am in a hurry are so rare. It was a rare treat when I went into town to visit the optician and I worked out it would be just as fast to go on my bike (slower moving than the car - but able to go through the centre of town rather than around, and can be chained up right by the optician rather than having to be parked further out and walking in!
As a society, we're in a vicious cycle: because most people have cars, businesses face little penalty for setting up a few large premises on cheap land outside of city centres, rather than lots of smaller ones nearer to where people live. And because businesses do that, people are pressured to have cars in order to be able to access services.
Even aside from the environmental costs of all those individual cars driving all over the place - and the direct financial costs of a significant fraction of the average person's income being spent on a vehicle, and maintaining it, and fuelling it - we have the all-too-common problem with a lot of things the ignorant call "progress": it leaves behind the people who can't take part. The young, the poor, and the sufficiently elderly can't drive cars, and so are locked out of accessing important services. And because they're the main customers for what local public transport (eg, busses) there is, that public transport is underfunded and poor.
This vicious cycle is somewhat avoided in large city centres, where road layouts laid down before the invention of the car are too hard to change now, and so public transport is the only practical option for most journeys. And it can be undone everywhere else, too, with the right incentives - the fifteen minute city concept, for instance. I'm sad people are opposing it, spreading misinformation to turn others against them - I'm not sure if that just comes from ignorant misunderstanding couple with a knee-jerk fear of change, or deliberate manipulation in order to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
I want a world where I can get to most places I need on my bike, and places further away by bus, tram, and train. Sure, there will be delivery vans, and emergency vehicles, and work vans for tradespeople who need to turn up on-site with a load of equipment; but the roads should be dominated by bikes and mobility scooters and busses (that the mobility scooters can drive onto!). I don't understand why governments want to spend so much on roads (have you ever looked at a motorway junction and thought about what it cost to build?) for people to spend so much to buy and maintain cars to drive on them, and spend so much time driving, and finding and paying for parking in parking lots that take up so much space. Public transport is cheaper and more accessible!
I want this solarpunk transport utopia not just because it's more efficient - less waste is better for the environment, and frees up resources we can use for fun things - but because it's also safer, and frees up our time to read and think and talk while on busses, trams and trains.
(Since writing the above, I had a particularly bad day visiting our eldest at University - delayed by missing a turn because I had ingrained muscle-memory telling me to drive to somewhere else, then delayed by a road closure, then delayed even more by being rear-ended when the car in front stopped suddenly to try and not miss a turning; I stopped in time by the car behind didn't... I'm now even more sick of driving than I was!)
Alaric, Society, Travelling, Vehicles | alaric | Sun 22nd Oct 2023 8:05 am | Comments (0)
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