One think I love about where I live is the proximity to a big supermarket with a decent-sized discount refrigerator section! Off I nipped, and just my luck – there was a perfect piece of monkfish, just right for one, going for about £2. (Monkfish is never a cheap fish – this was reduced from about £5 – but you definitely get what you pay for.)

I got the basic idea from here, but used what I had anyway. This meant lime instead of lemon, and sweet pointed red peppers, raw, instead of roasted bell peppers – these worked really, really well and I’d recommend that variation. I didn’t have any thyme, but there was some fresh basil (one of my fave herbs) from the discount shelves as well: I put that between the pepper and the fish, as well as some between the pepper and the pan. It all ended up in the sauce, as I’d had to slice the peppers longways to get the seeds out and fish in. Turns out that monkfish expands and curls up when cooked, so this pushed the peppers open and everything went everywhere. This was not a problem tastewise!

The recipe is essentially steaming the fish in wine, instead of in water vapour – I’d recommend the general approach for monkfish again, as it came out very tender, moist and melty. Boiling would have removed the taste, grilling or baking would have dried it out too much. I’ve only ever had monkfish fried before, but prefer this. I would advise sticking closely to the measure of wine – I just did “a glug” which turned out to be rather more sauce than I needed. The monkfish loses some juices in cooking, so you really only need a small amount of wine for one serving, if you add some double cream to the sauce. Do pick a decent white – it’ll go really well alongside the meal!

For reasons of time and hunger, I just did oven chips and a pre-packaged salad along with the fish and peppers. The sauce went really well on the chips, and – surprisingly – was also really great to moisten the salad leaves. I ended up mopping up sauce with spinach and chard – mmmm.

Lastly, you might need to give the fish longer than 12 minutes – mine was still only lukewarm in the centre after that time. Possibly I ended up overcooking it, but it didn’t feel/taste bad for that, and I wanted to play it safe with a piece that was on its use-by date!

Basically it parses the HTML structure of the page and turns it into a set of colour-coded nodes in 2D space. Try looking at this site’s graph (should be complete in <1min), or if you’ve got a lot of spare time, the Beeb homepage. Facebook’s AJAXy interface makes its graph surprisingly simple.

I’ve been blogging far less than I’d like in the last few months. Suffice to say that there really isn’t much spare time around my job for such things: (personal) email, feed-reading and facebook have all been relegated to fairly infrequent tasks. But I think I imagine far more mental effort in writing here than is actually required. Now I’m typing again, it all comes so easily. I’ve got a bunch of rough drafts of more interesting posts that I might, if I’m lucky, get around to expanding before I go back to work. Thanks are due to the vulpine scribe that (accidentally) reminded me why I should keep this going.

Merry Christmas to all, and I hope 2009 treats you well. Oh, and looky, new site theme! Additional static content may follow.

Ingredients:
4-6 good-quality sausages (I used Tesco ‘Finest’ Pork and Sweet Chilli bangers, which inspired the sauce)
200g (or a little more, depending on hunger) of tagliatelle.
2 medium onions, chopped in half-rings (ideally 1 red, 1 white)
Some mushrooms, chopped as appropriate (to taste)
Cider
~100ml single cream
1/2 red chilli, finely diced, or equivalent of fresh chilli-from-a-jar. Leave seeds out unless you really like hot food.
(optional) some sweet chilli sauce

Instructions:

1. Heat a shallow frying pan to medium, add oil and slow-cook the sausages, turning as necessary. Slower is always better with sausages!
2. In a deeper frying pan, heat some oil until fairly hot, and bung in the onions and mushrooms. After a minute or two turn the heat down and leave them on a low heat for 5 minutes, or until soft and browned.
3. Stir in the red chilli and/or sweet-chilli sauce.
4. Add a long splash of cider, enough to half-cover the onions and mushrooms. Adjust the heat as necessary and simmer the pan’s contents until the cider has reduced quite a lot. At this point, if you like, you can add another splash of cider and re-reduce.
5. While the cider is reducing, boil water and cook your tagliatelle as per pack instructions. When done, drain and return to saucepan, tossing with a little olive oil.
6. By now, your sausages should be done. Remove them from the pan and cut them up into chunks, roughly.
7. Add the sausages and some single cream to the deep pan and stir to coat everything.
8. Lastly, add the tagliatelle and toss thoroughly until coated with sauce. You got the right amount of cream if the tagliatelle is well coated but there’s no excess sauce in the bottom of the pan. Add a bit more cream and/or cider (to taste) if it’s looking a little dry.
9. Serve on warmed plates, enjoy!

If anyone cooks this and comes up with any modifications, please mention in the comments. I threw this together on the hoof without formulating a plan at any point – as such, although I was very pleased with the results, there are probably things that could be done better!

• SSHFS mounts SSH-accessible remote filesystems, locally on your PC with transparent read-write access. Since I have shell accounts with the University Linux system (which I use for backup), and with the SRCF (where this website is hosted), this could be rather useful.
• WikipediaFS is similarly just what it implies – mount Wikipedia locally with read-write access to the pages (you need to know the MediaWiki markup tags). However, it can be used with any MediaWiki installation… so if I was to set up a personal wiki, this might make it rather more useful for notetaking, etc.

When I have a functional linux system of my own again – probably a dual-boot laptop – I’ll have a play with these and perhaps mention how they work here! Thanks to FOSSwire for the heads-up on these…

Oh, and a bit of an update on life in general will follow at some point; suffice to say that I’ve been busy!

Ah well…

The box was recently upgraded from 512Mb to 1.5Gb of RAM, so it is now officially sweet. I.e. it actually COPES with having Firefox, OpenOffice and Foobar open, and now takes less than 30s to start up or shut down. Part of the motivation for upgrading (apart from just getting bored waiting for it to do stuff) was that I’ve decided I’ll probably sell it and get a laptop after exams. I spent around £1000 on the parts when I built it, in about 2003/04, and although the graphics card now seems laughably outdated, the general specs are still not to be sniffed at. It’s also quite light and looks good. A laptop is going to be a lot more use for me in the near future – my computing needs have changed an awful lot since VI form!

Do please get in touch if you might have a use for an ATX tower in black aluminium, with 2.16Ghz Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5Gb RAM, Radeon 9600XT (AGP, DVI- and VGA-out), onboard 5.1 surround sound and dual gigabit ethernet, fast DVD-writer and CD-writer IDE drives, optional digital-terrestrial PCI TV/capture card, 120Gb IDE h/d, SATA/RAID capable, firewire and more USB 2.0 ports than you can shake a stick at, efficient cooling, screwdriver-less upgrading, and front-panel access to USB/firewire/headphone/line-in. Comes with Labtec wireless keyboard and mouse, black, with media/internet buttons and a mouse-recharging station, and a ViewSonic VG712b (black) 17″ TFT DVI-/VGA-in monitor, no dead pixels and durable enough to survive a working tour of Europe unscathed. Available from early June.

I have worked out a potential means of fixing the laptop, though. What’s broken, I believe, is that I don’t have either of Gnome or K desktop managers installed, only XDM, which I think Fluxbox doesn’t really support. So I have a window manager with nothing behind the scenes to take control when I actually *click* on a menu item. If I can reinstall GDM or KDM, I might be OK, but without an optical drive or means of internet connectivity (also broken), I can only see one (comical) solution. Download the DPKG on another machine, and transfer via USB stick or floppy disk (!), then install locally. Great. I’m not even going to bother, I’ll just spend hours faffing when I could just be doing all my research analysis and report-writing elsewhere.

Result: I’ve installed MiKTeX on my XP desktop, and intend to ssh to pip.srcf for certain necessary operations. And now I’m going to get on and try to actually view computers as means again, rather than ends…

(FYI, I’ve been running a heavily bastardised *buntu-based linux installation on my oldish Dell C640 for some time. I’ve messed around with the packaging way too much to call it Ubuntu or Kubuntu – indeed, at various times I’ve tried not just the GNOME and KDE packages, but Xfce as well (Xubuntu), and then settled on Fluxbox with GDM underneath. This was before the concept of Fluxbuntu existed. After spending a lot of time yesterday customising the Fluxbox interface, I succeeded (somehow) in removing all display managers. I then put XDM on, and now Fluxbox comes up, but without functional menus… so I can’t even launch a virtual terminal. Ah well…)

My longer term aim is to actually build a linux install from the ground up – I want Fluxbox, but I probably don’t want a lot of what comes with Fluxbuntu. This might signal my first change from *buntu for some years…

Oh yeah, and to conclude my previous post, Airset is vastly overengineered for my needs, but does sync well to Palm devices, so I’m using that. I plan to set up some complicated iCal sharing at some point between Airset, facebook, Google Calendar/Mail, and other webapps, which could be quite cool.