Archive for October, 2016

Spicy chicken marinade. This is a total winner. Make it in the morning and leave tour chicken to sit in it until dinner time. It is slightly spicy, but mild enough for pretty much everyone’s taste.

Red wine marinade. Great for red meat.

I have a new book coming out. It’s called Technical Anxiety: the complete guide to what is anxiety and what to do about it. If you have read books about anxiety, you might have noticed that a lot of them seem to be written by people who do not really seem to know what it is like to have anxiety or how it makes you feel.

Technical Anxiety cuts through all of that. It covers things like talking to your friends and family (and work), being less self-critical, coping strategies, health anxiety, social anxiety, building a lifestyle that improves anxiety and loads more. To be honest, there is too much in it.

It is available for pre-order on iBooks and Kindle.

Naming Elina Junior has been no easy task. We wanted to give her both a Finnish and an English name so that whichever country she decided to live in, she would have a name that sounded local. We also needed to make sure it was pronounceable across the language barrier. Finnish names used rolled Rs for example, which English people cannot usually do, whereas “C” is not really a letter in Finnish.

After much consideration we have settled upon:

Only time will tell whether having an actual name replaces calling her “El Ju”.

Yesterday I announced that the Leeds Restaurant Guide had returned to the iBook Store. Today, I am pleased to announce that my novel, Summer on the Horizon, is available on the iBooks Store for the first time.

It is already available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle edition, and is now available on the iBooks Store as well.

When I originally released the Leeds Restaurant Guide, I originally published it via a company called eBook Partnership. They are a great bunch of people, and get your book into pretty much every eBook store there is.

However, it was not perfectly suited to the format of the guide. We push out new editions regularly, and it was not practical for us to push these changes through in the same way we could with Kindle. Therefore, after two years, I decided to call it a day with the other eBook stores.

That changes today, as I now have direct access to the iBooks Store. The guide is back in there and will receive updates for future editions too. View on the iBooks Store.

Cook: “Here at Apple, we’re proud to announce our latest innovation. It’s called Bedtime, and it can improve your sleep quality by 160%.”
Ive: “Tim, I think bed time is already a thing.”
Cook: “NO, we invented it!”

It’s a girl!

Yeah, apparently they are a thing. It is a bunch of presents, predominantly nappies, arranged into a cake shape. I had never heard of it until Elina came home from her last day at work carrying one. Then, in a pleasant coincidence, we arrive at my parents to be handed another one from my auntie. More are welcome: you can’t have too many nappies!

As if vinegars are not exciting enough on their own, they can be made even more exciting by adding other stuff. In these bottles I am making a garlic vinegar using white wine vinegar and a rosemary vinegar using a red wine vinegar.

You blanch the ingredients for one minute before refreshing them, then inserting them into a steralised bottle and filling the rest with the vinegar.

I cannot say whether it has been a success yet as you need to leave them for two months before use!

Recently I launched a new website, Rena Men. It is deployed onto the Heroku platform and does quite a bit of cool stuff, so I thought I would document what I have done here.

Code

It is implemented in PHP, using the Rauma framework. Rauma is a project I developed for Learn Finnish and subsequently open-sourced.

Rena Men is built in several modules. There is a website, a content management system (CMS) and an image server. Because they use common functionality like the entity classes, there is also a shared library which is brought in as a Composer dependency.

The website itself is fairly straight forward. Beyond the PHP, there is only the CSS, pre-processed with SASS, and a tiny amount of JavaScript loaded in with require. The CMS is a bit more complicated, using Babel to transpile the ES6 JavaScript, and styled up with Bootstrap.

Deployment

Each module is deployed onto the Heroku platform. This makes it really easy to do as I can roll out an update just using git push. The code itself is stored in a series of private repos on BitBucket, and the Heroku build process fetches them from there.

In the case of the CMS, it also uses the Node build pack to run a Bower install. Third-party additions such as Bootstrap are pulled in on-the-fly just like we do with Composer dependencies. Heroku does not have SSH key integration for Bitbucket (it does for Github) so I’m using a ready-only account with Basic HTTP auth access.

The database is provided by one of the Heroku app add-ons. The storage is provided by Amazon S3. Heroku is built in AWS, so that fits nicely. We store originals in the file system and then crop them on-demand using the image server.

Delivery

Because cropping images is expensive, the image server originally had a local file cache where it would store each crop. However, as Heroku has an ephemeral file system, you cannot write to it, so I had to turn that off in production.

Instead, we’re using the AWS CloudFront CDN. This was super easy to implement. I just created the settings in AWS, pointed CDN subdomain at AWS and it started working. Like other web proxies, it caches your content based on the headers you send it.