The Best (and worst) of Cooking

The Internet is a great resource for anyone interested in cooking. There are so many different recipes out there, many of which would be unlikely to appear in any regular cook books.

Some, like Latka, have become a regular part of our cooking, others such as Loco Moco have given me a new favourite "junk food" type snack.

There are some great resources out there. Old Scrote's Real Food Cookbook is one of the best old-fashioned cook books going, with a range of UK and International recipes and cooking tips, with the added benefit of a good dollop of British humour.

So, as you can tell, I enjoy cooking, and I definitely enjoy trying out new recipes. Today's new recipe was one for Chocolate Mousse. This is a really easy one to make from scratch and proved to be a hit with the whole family (again, a big thank you to Old Scrote for that one).

Out of interest I had a bit of a search around to see what alternative recipes for Chocolate Mousse they were, and happened upon this "gem".

The crux of the above recipe is this: make up a packet of instant mousse, pour into glasses and eat.

I hate to point this out but THAT IS NOT COOKING!!!

This is one of my pet hates - convenience food that isn't convenient. Let me give you an example: Yorkshire Pudding mix, just add milk and an egg. In other words what you've got is a small packet of very expensive flour with a touch of salt. It is cheaper and just as fast to make a Yorkshire Pudding from scratch. More convenient? Not really.

As Old Scrote appears to be off-line at the moment I'll finish with his recipe for Chocolate Mousse - enjoy!

Update: Old Scrote himself has been in touch, his site is now available at http://www.oldscrote.talktalk.net/.

Chocolate Mousse

There are not many recipes for desserts in Scrote's repertoire but this one is a cracker, very easy, impressive and despite the tiny portions, devastatingly rich. You need a whisk of some sort and a bowl which you can set over a pan of boiling water (i.e. not plastic) to melt the chocolate. For four servings you need a large ½lb bar of plain chocolate (200g) and four eggs. The eggs must be very fresh.

For each person allow 1 egg & 2 ounces of ordinary plain chocolate. (Do not use cooking chocolate, it is a completely different stuff.) Break the chocolate into small pieces and set to melt in a bain marie- a pyrex glass bowl over a pan of boiling water. Meanwhile separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs, into separate containers. When the chocolate has completely melted, remove it from the heat and mix into it just the egg yolks (the whites are used later). The chocolate will become stiffer and take on a 'greasy' appearance- this is correct. Cover & set aside for 15 minutes to cool a little. In the mean time beat egg whites with a balloon whisk until eventually the mixture becomes white & stiff, so that it stands up in soft peaks. After the 15 minutes, fold the beaten egg-white a little at a time into the chocolate mixture, mixing very thoroughly.

Pour the resulting creamy chocolate mousse mixture into serving glasses (short glass tumblers or wine glasses are ideal) & put in the fridge to chill for 2 hours and set. Serve with a generous pouring of single cream. (Ruth puts a dash of Armagnac in and then adds the cream to keep the alcohol in!)

Fun with a Sun

One of the joys of working in I.T. is the sheer variety of tasks that can await you.

Today I've had the pleasure (ahem) of dealing with a disk upgrade on a Sun A1000 raid controller, connected to a Sun Ultra 60 running Solaris 8.

On paper the job is straight-forward. Simply add the new disks into the array, use them as a raid 5 set, configure a new partition in the new container and adjust the vfstab to mount the new partition at the correct point on the system.

Easy, no?

Stage 1 was started last night. To check how our raid was currently set up we went to check the Raid Array Manager software that comes with the A1000. Not installed. How about disksuite them? Nope. Not installed either.

We couldn't locate the Solaris 8 install CDs but found the Raid Array Manager install CDs so we installed that, and as per the instructions halted and re-booted using "boot -r". And heres where the fun begins.

Now it couldn't see the existing partitions on the Raid, even though the Raid Array Manger showed that the Raid was connected and that the individual drives were healthy.

If you ever find yourself in the situation where you need to see what SCSI devices are attached to your Sun box then this might help.

After halting your box (so you are left at the "ok" prompt) do the following:

setenv auto-boot? false
reset-all
probe-scsi-all
setenv auto-boot? true
boot

Depending on the circumstances you may need to do "boot -r" instead of just "boot". The difference is that "boot -r" will detect and re-create device nodes as needed.

After a bit of investigation (thank you Google) I removed the Raid Array Manager software, at which point "boot -r" rediscovered the existing partitons. For some reason though it has re-named the device nodes for the RAID disks so I still had to edit the vfstab (after creating a backup of the old one just-in-case) before the server would boot again correctly.

So the alternative is to locate the Solaris 8 media and install DiskManager.

I can see why my colleague had trouble locating the disks. In the end I found them in an un-marked cardboard box, on top of a disused filing cabinet, right at the back of our software store-room.

Disksuite is now installed and the partitions are still visible, so we are now ready to try putting in those new disks. . . . .

Dramatically increase your visitors - yeah right!

This year I've decided to try and boost my blog audience. Now, I've got to admit that my stats are slowly increasing, but I'd kind of like my daily viewing figures to be in the triple digits or higher.

So I've started looking at ways of boosting my readers. Some of them like BlogRush I've already said about as much as I need to (they don't really do much). Others (like BlogCatalog) actually do seem to help bring some visitors in, providing you actually take part in the various discussions.

Well, here is another way to boost your earnings beyond your wildest dreams: T-2000 Ultra!

Let's take a look at some of the claims, and as it is a free service let's also see how it works.

Explode Your Income!
Boost Your Sales by upto 4000%
And Drive 1 million Visitors to Your
Site Every Month!
All Totally FREE!

Any alarm bells ringing yet? Apart from abuses against capital letters, punctuation marks, spelling and grammar, does any of this sound too good to be true?

Damn right!

So how does this work in practice.

Well, once you've got past the scam-style verbiage (not to mention the poor spelling) there are six adverts that need clicking on, these should be opened in a new window and will take you to someone elses site, but with a black border at the top of the page. After ten seconds or so an "Ad Code" will be generated which you use as part of your sign-up process.

Fill in the six required codes, enter your details (and those of your one-line advert) and click submit. As a side note, all the sites listed were, without exception, Make Money Online type sites. As if I'm surprised.

At this point you'll need to confirm your name and email address again before the confirmation emails are sent to you.

If you can't find the confirmation email then it's probably in your junk folder (take that as a hint folks!).

Now, it could be that this is entirely on the level and that millions of readers are going to land on my site any minute now, start reading my blogs and I'll be an overnight success. If you believe that to be the case (and I'll provide updates to this over the next 30 days) then feel free to click the referrals link below and sign up too. I certainly wouldn't recommend it though.

Warning - Referrals Link - Warning

What are you waiting for? Millions of readers are waiting for you.

As if!

Remember kids: We are willing to sign up for crap so that you don't have to!

Update:

It has been pointed out to me that this sort of thing isn't a good idea if you want to use Adsense on your site. Although you may increase your page views (although I have my doubts about that) any increase would almost certainly end in you loosing the chance of using Adsense in the future. Plus, it would be a bit dishonest now wouldn't it?

So, rather than not blogging on things like this (and personally I think that it is a story that could do with being told) I've taken off all the advertising from this blog.

Once things return to normal (and I'm pretty sure that it won't take too long for that) then I'll consider putting the ads back on.

Just like I did with BlogRush I'll make weekly posts updating on how well (or not) this is doing. If anything amazing happens between then I'll be sure to let you know.

Update 2:

Just to keep track on the stats I've added a statscounter link to the blog. I'm keeping the results hidden (for now) and will reveal the number of page impressions at the end of the 30 days.

Update 3 - 12 hours on:

Well, there has been some extra traffic - all from BlogCatalog. Even then we are only talking about an extra five or six visitors. So from the point of view of people reading this post - great! As far as the extra traffic gained by T-2000 - not so great. No extra traffic at all.

Update 4 - 48 hours on:

There has been no increase to the traffic by having the link etc on the site (although telling people not to click on it probably weights things against me) so I've cut this short and removed the referrals link.

I'll decide the future of adverts on this site later on, but for now remember, as a rule of thumb for any scheme to increase your traffic: if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is!