test please delete

[NickFitz]

Nearly seven, and it's still not properly dark out

That means it'll be even lighter at eight next week after the clocks go forward

[DoctorStrangelove]

X7 home.

Jiggety Jig.

Tea/dinner this evening was more of yesterday's beef, which was nice enough.

The sprouts are getting a bit old though.

It was followed by another one of the Muller not fruit corners which I have to consume just to get rid of them quickly.

It was as uninteresting as previously.

The evening's entertainment was "Identity" with John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet.

Identity (2003) - IMDb

It was rather good in its way.

Pleasantly adult.

Though quite why it was necessary to have 3 copies of it is inexplicable.

Maybe I need more mushrooms.

[NickFitz]

Ribs and chips for tea

And it's cooling down quite quickly out: down to a reported 6°C already

[NickFitz]

I spent a good part of this afternoon and evening wrestling with the business of converting a Chef cookbook from using recipes to using custom resources; a recondite matter, but it's the done thing nowadays. To be honest, I'm both pleased and amused that their oh-so-cute culinary metaphor, which they dragged out beyond the limits of any sensible person to endure, has itself proved to be so unenduring that we are now recommended to a technique for which they never bothered dreaming up a tricksy name appertaining to cooking, yet which is in fact the one thing they were trying to do in the first place

Anyway, the cookbook in question is to do with provisioning the capability to connect an application to a PostgreSQL server which is running elsewhere, which is a solved problem in terms of just doing it, but suffers from muddied waters in Chef-land because most if not all of the quasi-official cookbooks do it the wrong way or some over-complicated way, so I had to sort the damn stuff out from scratch based on working out what they'd done wrong. (Well, wrong on Ubuntu 18.04 anyway. It worked on previous versions because they'd made unjustified assumptions, which I've been warning people about ever since I suffered a day of hassle because a colleague assumed that all IBM PC clones preserved registers across BIOS calls, which even the IBM PC didn't do.)

Furthermore, it's a bit complicated for obscure reasons to do with Ruby package management (in which packages are called "gems"; this whole cute-system-of-metaphorical-names thing is an unfortunate habit of the Ruby developer community as a whole; though Python isn't completely immune from the same regrettable tendency, at least the Python library everyone uses for making HTTP requests is called "requests", whereas the Ruby equivalent is called "Faraday" for reasons nobody can understand). And I still haven't bothered creating a proper test framework to support it; but hey, it works

After that, I decided to have a small glass of wine and watch the first episode of To Play the King (1993), being the second part of the original House of Cards trilogy starring Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart. But that turned into having a bottle of wine, and watching all four episodes; and very good they all were, including the bottle

Goodnight all

[original PM]

Morning All...

Given the lateness of the last NF post I guess we won't be seeing him until after lunch..

Happy Tuesday.

[WTFH]

Morning all blue skies and snow.

[DaveB]

Morning all

A bit grey and overcast now, but there was a light sprinkle of frost first thing.

Doggo appears to have entered her teenage years. She is now no longer bounding out of bed as soon as she hears the alarm and refuses to come down for breakfast when called, preferring to stay in her bed.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Sunny.

Dry.

Bright.

Frosty.

The weather's still borked.

<brief pause and interstitial hiatus>

One is pleased to see the latest incarnation of Gricer in the dental implant thread.

<rather less brief interstitical hiatus>

Is the ape still abed?

[NickFitz]

Afternoon denizens

Bit cloudier out there today

Given the lateness of the last NF post I guess we won't be seeing him until after lunch..

Ooh, lunch! Excellent idea

Is the ape still abed?

[original PM]

Well I only surprised this has not happened before given my experience of college sports teams.

University of South Wales shuts down all four men's rugby teams as police investigate allegations - Wales Online