Chris Worfolk's Blog

As a belated Valentine’s Day present, I recently took Elina to Paris for four days. We took a plane there.

Needless to say, it was incredibly stressful, but once you put aise the horror of travelling it was a fantastic place to be – these two extremes balance the entire trip out to an average response of “it was ok.”

Also, my “translator” girlfriend, refused to speak to anyone on the trip, so I had to do all the talking, despite not speaking a word of French for over a decade. Another lie in her backstory is revealed. But anyway…

Paris is a gorgeous city. We were fairly central – just five minutes walk from Notre Dame Cathedral, so we spent our nights walking the banks of the Senn and listening to groups of jazz musicians freestyle by the river. Not that you have to be central – the beautiful buildings seem to go on for miles and miles, all in the same Parisian style.

We got the open top bus tour tickets that they sell everywhere Рeven Leeds Рso we could just hop on and off, allowing us to work our way round the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and do some shopping on the Champs Elys̩es as well as seeing the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthelon, which were all only a short walk away.

I wasn’t expecting a great deal from our hotel room given my experiences in other capitols, but it turns out we had got one of their “executive suites” (LateRooms FTW) so it turned out to be massive, with an en suite that was bigger than entire hotel rooms I have stayed in in London, and a balcony overlooking the streets below.

I was also shocked at how cheap it was to eat out – the restaurants in the Latin quarter offer three course meals for €10 and there was more food than I could eat! On the last night I treated myself to the €15 menu (which is still half what I would expect to pay in Leeds!) and had an amazing duck in orange sauce (or a Canard a l’orange if you will) as well as snails, muselles and some beautiful desserts.

I recently returned from Paris (I’m not bragging or anything), and one thing I noticed was that I only saw two people wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf) the whole time I was there (four days). I saw nobody wearing a burka either, though that is to be expected given it is now illegal in France.

One explanation for this could be that there are simply very few Muslims in Paris, but given the multicultural nature of any large capitol, that seems unlikely. A more likely explanation, at least if I was to take an educated guess, is that the French have managed to create a society in which is the Islamic community does not feel oppressed (and therefore needs cultural signifiers such as head scarves) and is able to integrate. Perhaps we’ve simply got it very wrong in the UK, and the segregation many communities are seeing, is the result.

The Humanist Chaplaincy Network has just re-launched its programme. You can now find updated information about what we do and how it all working including a new “About HCN” booklet which can be downloaded from the membership information page of the website.

Tail is a useful command which allows you to see the end of a file. This is probably most commonly used when you want to look at log files as the entries of most interest are usually at the bottom. For example, if you wanted to view the last 50 lines of a log file you could use the following command.

tail -n 50 filename.log

A cool feature of tail is that you can also follow a file – that means continually monitoring it as changes come in. So if you are looking at the Apache error log for example, you could begin tailing the log and then cause an error and you will see it instantly come through on the log.

tail -f error_log

With everything that you need to cook still packed away in boxes, myself and Elina headed up to AM Kitchen & Bar to grab some dinner. It’s one of the few restaurants in Leeds I hadn’t eaten at yet, so I was looking forward to trying it.

It’s tastefully decorated with what I presume is Indian style furniture (I haven’t been to India, so I can only guess), though the window displays were all of various different vodkas. Perhaps there is something I’m missing, but I’m not quite sure what the connection was there.

The food itself was great, probably slightly more authentic than Cafe Guru and equally as good. I really enjoyed my chicken dopiaza, though I was a little disappointed with Elina’s lamb pasanda. They also had excellent chocolate mints, so I might just order a bowl of those next time.

This month’s Wendy House represented the last Wendylicious that would be taking place at Apartment 31, given we were moving out a mere three days afterwards. Sad times indeed, but enough time at least to squeeze one more night of partying in.

As you’ve probably heard about Dereck Chisora and David Haye recently came to blows during a press conference in Munich.

Officials and commentators have called it a disgrace to the sport of boxing and suggested that the two boxers should be given life time bans – not to mention that the police might want to get involved.

But actually, it isn’t a disgrace. What is a disgrace, is that in this day and age, we as a society, still condone the idea of two men getting into a ring together and knocking the shit out of each other until one goes down to the count.

Surely incidents such as this show us what is wrong with boxing as a general concept? Two men beat each other unconscious outside of the ring and it’s a criminal offence – but do it inside a ring and you’re a world champion! How does that make sense? No wonder these guys have a bit of a punch up at a press conference when there how life is based around violence.

Of course, the libertarian view is that if two people choose to get into a ring and beat each other half to death, then they should be allowed to. But that doesn’t mean we should be condoning it as a society – being racist for example is legal; the way we control it is to condem it as a society. Why should boxing receive a special exception?

Ultimately, we can only hope that boxing will go the way of Fox Hunting – we’ll come to the realisation that it probably isn’t the best idea to let two men tear into each other until one of them lies a bruised mess on the floor.

Last week, we headed over to San Carlos for Michael’s birthday. Overall conclusion – poor quality restaurant, good quality company.

The restaurant itself was very disappointing – I had the steak, which just wasn’t that nice, it was cooked OKish, but wasn’t even warm by the time it made it to the table. The sides didn’t arrive with the meals either – they were just placed randomly on the table and we had to re-arrange them.

After all that, we were still a side missing and they had Tom’s main order completely wrong. I tried to grab a waiter to ask about the extra side, but that took rather a long time as no one came to check if our food was OK and they seemed to be rather rushed around.

Finally, we decided to order profiteroles for dessert, and thinking there would be plenty for the £5.10 we were paying for them, we decided to split them. When they arrived however, we found only three on the plate.

Unfortunately, I can only conclude that this was one of the most disappointing restaurant experiences I have had in Leeds city centre.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the evening however – the turn out was good and it was great to catch up with some people I hadn’t seen for quite a well, as well as finally meet the parents who have apparently heard a lot about me – all good stuff they assure me… 😀 Big thanks to them for part funding the meal too!

Need to get a list of all the PHP scripts currently running? Actually, this technique works for everything, you just need to change the argument you pass to grep, but for the purpose of this example, I’m going to say we’re looking for PHP scripts.

ps aux | grep php

This will then produce a list of all the scripts. The ps aux command gives us a list of every processing running on the system. We then pass this through to grep and search for what we want – in this case processing which contain “php”.

I love my Moomins Valentine’s card :D.