Dijon is, of course, famous above all for its mustard and I couldn't resist buying a couple of different flavours to cook with when I get back home.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Dijon Palais des Ducs
Dijon proved to be a very pleasant city to visit - in fact the highlight of our trip so far. In contrast to Beaune (which we visited later in the day) which has become highly commercialised and almost entirely ruined with retails chains allowed to replace the fine old shop-fronts with the aluminium and glass affairs they prefer to show off their wares, Dijon has become a far more pleasant place than I remember from my last visit (about 18 years ago!) with pedestrianised streets, a healthy food market in Les Halles, excellent shopping and a good range of restaurants.
Relaxed
Pasteur - in Arbois
A statue in Arbois celebrates Louis Pasteur. Best known for his work with micro-organisms and the pasteurisation process that bears his name, Pasteur also discovered the secret of producing consistently good wine. Before his research, batches of wine would almost randomly turn out sour (ggod enough for vinegar, at best). He discovered that good wine relies on use of the proper yeast during fermentation - and then, heat treatment (the pasteurisation process again) to kill off that yeast to prevent the wine from souring in the bottle.
You could argue that he lay the foundation for the prosperity of every wine maker since. And, as a town reliant on the wine industry for its very obvious prosperity, who better for the good burgers of Arbois to celebrat in their town square?
You could argue that he lay the foundation for the prosperity of every wine maker since. And, as a town reliant on the wine industry for its very obvious prosperity, who better for the good burgers of Arbois to celebrat in their town square?
Arbois
Leaving Strasbourg, we headed down the autoroute toward Mulhouse then to Besancon where we turned off the motorway onto cross-country N-roads. Besancon looked very interesting as we passed through (sadly having no time to stop) with a fort on the edge of the escarpment above the town and pleasant gardens and roads in the town itself.
The road south from Besancon - the RN73 - proved to be a great driving road with a succession of fast swoops and sweeping bends accompanied by truly stunning scenery - definitely a road to bank for a future car rally - just watch out for "les flics" if you decide to drive it at any speed!
The road heads over the western edge of the Jura mountains and through the Jura wine region. By chance (it was lunch time) we stopped in the town of Arbois which proved to be very pretty. We spent so much time walking around that we missed lunch completely and had to resort to buying bread and pastries from one of the boulangeries - not a bad turn of events as it happens as they were delicious.
The road south from Besancon - the RN73 - proved to be a great driving road with a succession of fast swoops and sweeping bends accompanied by truly stunning scenery - definitely a road to bank for a future car rally - just watch out for "les flics" if you decide to drive it at any speed!
The road heads over the western edge of the Jura mountains and through the Jura wine region. By chance (it was lunch time) we stopped in the town of Arbois which proved to be very pretty. We spent so much time walking around that we missed lunch completely and had to resort to buying bread and pastries from one of the boulangeries - not a bad turn of events as it happens as they were delicious.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Strasbourg - la Petite France
August 3rd, 2007: Our ultimate destination for the first week of this trip is Burgundy - about 450 miles from Amsterdam. Deciding to drive through Germany (and a fine decision it was too - the opportunity to show a pair of Porsches a clean pair of heels during one 160MPH blast along an unrestricted autobahn providing all the justification I need) we turned off the autobahn at Koblenz to drive down the Rhine Gorge.
Short on time (thanks DFDS again) we had no time to stop at any of the castles or even any of the towns proper but it proved an enjoyable enough break from the pell-mell pace of the motorways.
Arriving in Strasbourg, finding our hotel - in the Petite France old part of town - proved too difficult for us, our GPS and even the locals we asked, all of whom expressed their dismay and told us what we had already discovered - the pedestrianisation of the area has blocked all the roads you would normally choose to take to get to the hotel which we could clearly see.
Eventually, I gave up and walked through the streets to the hotel and asked the bell-hop. The answer it seems is that everybody's GPS maps are wrong - you don't ask for the hotel's published address, you ask for a square somewhere else in town then ignored the warning signs and drive down a canal embankment - et voila!
How very Gallic that it's not the hotel's directions to guests that is wrong but everyone else's GPS maps!
Ho hum ... Strasbourg itself is a delight - and la Petite France in particular. We enjoyed a romantic stroll along l'Ill (that's an L, an apostrophe, an I and two more Ls) and ate in a pretty restaurant on its banks overlooking the light show played out on the old buildings.
Short on time (thanks DFDS again) we had no time to stop at any of the castles or even any of the towns proper but it proved an enjoyable enough break from the pell-mell pace of the motorways.
Arriving in Strasbourg, finding our hotel - in the Petite France old part of town - proved too difficult for us, our GPS and even the locals we asked, all of whom expressed their dismay and told us what we had already discovered - the pedestrianisation of the area has blocked all the roads you would normally choose to take to get to the hotel which we could clearly see.
Eventually, I gave up and walked through the streets to the hotel and asked the bell-hop. The answer it seems is that everybody's GPS maps are wrong - you don't ask for the hotel's published address, you ask for a square somewhere else in town then ignored the warning signs and drive down a canal embankment - et voila!
How very Gallic that it's not the hotel's directions to guests that is wrong but everyone else's GPS maps!
Ho hum ... Strasbourg itself is a delight - and la Petite France in particular. We enjoyed a romantic stroll along l'Ill (that's an L, an apostrophe, an I and two more Ls) and ate in a pretty restaurant on its banks overlooking the light show played out on the old buildings.
Leaving the Tyne
August 2nd, 2007 - the first time I've sailed out of the Tyne. On our way to France for our summer holidays, we decided to take the Newcastle to Amsterdam crossing instead of my more usual Hull-Rotterdam. It was certainly convenient driving just a few miles to Newcastle to get on board - and, let's face it, start the holiday.
On board, the staff were friendly and efficient but, though DFDS had obviously spent money tarting her up, the old ship showed her age by being so noisy (in fact, our cabin vibrated with noise) that sleep proved difficult thereby negating the whole point of taking an overnight ferry service. Arrival in Amsterdam was met by very slow unloading and border controls - added to the later than normal arrival (9:30am) this meant we weren't on the road until 10:30 - losing over two hours against a Rotterdam arrival.
I'm looking forward to sailing back into the Tyne when we return - but not the boat. Future crossings will surely be courtesy of P&O from Hull.
On board, the staff were friendly and efficient but, though DFDS had obviously spent money tarting her up, the old ship showed her age by being so noisy (in fact, our cabin vibrated with noise) that sleep proved difficult thereby negating the whole point of taking an overnight ferry service. Arrival in Amsterdam was met by very slow unloading and border controls - added to the later than normal arrival (9:30am) this meant we weren't on the road until 10:30 - losing over two hours against a Rotterdam arrival.
I'm looking forward to sailing back into the Tyne when we return - but not the boat. Future crossings will surely be courtesy of P&O from Hull.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Fame at last
One of my photos of the White House taken last summer has been chosen by Schmap to illustrate its on-line guide to Washington DC. Schmap looks like an interesting publishing exercise - an admittedly quick look suggests that most if not all of its material is user contributed or taken from "free" sources on the 'net - eg; maps from yahoo, pictures from Flickr (though the authors do take the time to ask permission from photographers who usually deny commercial use fo their photos - like me).
Schmap is an interesting example of a 'mash-up' - a web site created by combining feeds (ie, bits of) taken from other web sites and resources in the hope of making something greater than the sum of its parts.
I only get a few seconds of fame so wait for my name and piccie to appear in the Schmap widget here or look at the photo they used on Flickr here.
Schmap is an interesting example of a 'mash-up' - a web site created by combining feeds (ie, bits of) taken from other web sites and resources in the hope of making something greater than the sum of its parts.
I only get a few seconds of fame so wait for my name and piccie to appear in the Schmap widget here or look at the photo they used on Flickr here.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
5-4-3-2-1
To Beaulieu for the UK Maserati Club "Spring Event" - now named after the sadly missed former club president, Cameron Millar.
One intriguing part of the weekend was the appearance of examples of all five types of Quattroporte, including the ultra-rare Series II with the V6 and Citroen hydraulics that was painstakingly tracked down and is now lovingly owned by Edwin Faulkner.
Yes, that's me next to the blue QPIV
One intriguing part of the weekend was the appearance of examples of all five types of Quattroporte, including the ultra-rare Series II with the V6 and Citroen hydraulics that was painstakingly tracked down and is now lovingly owned by Edwin Faulkner.
Yes, that's me next to the blue QPIV
Sir Stirling Moss
Got the opportunity at GPLive to interview Sir Stirling Moss on his experiences in various Maseratis over the years - synopsis: he loved the 250F, hated the 450S (in all forms) and greatly enjoyed driving alongside Fangio.
Full interview will appear on the MRC site in due course
Full interview will appear on the MRC site in due course
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Fresh fish
In most of Europe and the U.S. when we say "fresh" we mean food that was caught/picked/plucked some weeks ago and then preserved by freezing or removing all the fluids for transport to our far away homes.
Even though I've seen it many times before, it still comes as a surprise to see what the Chinese shopper defines as fresh food.
In this fishing village on Lantau island, the morning's catch is sorted into plastic bowls and kept alive by pumping air through the water (you can see the plastic pipes feeding the air in the photo but not the electric pump and attached car battery under the trolley).
To the locals, "fresh" means still alive when bought.
Even though I've seen it many times before, it still comes as a surprise to see what the Chinese shopper defines as fresh food.
In this fishing village on Lantau island, the morning's catch is sorted into plastic bowls and kept alive by pumping air through the water (you can see the plastic pipes feeding the air in the photo but not the electric pump and attached car battery under the trolley).
To the locals, "fresh" means still alive when bought.
Fresh meat anyone?
In more recent visits to Hong Kong (it was a regular stop-over for me during the 1980s) I've struggled to find any of the old flavour of the place. Wander through the glitzy shopping malls on the island or Kowloon and you could be in almost any developed city on the planet, surrounded as you are by shop after shop selling over-priced designer goods in an effort to pay the naturally exorbitantly high rent.
Heck, even Mong Kok - once home to professionals (photographers who came for the specialist camera shops and hookers who worked the brothels that lined the narrow streets) is now the location for 5-star hotels, computer supermarkets and Starbucks.
So a trip into the New Territories was taken. It's years since I was last in this hinterland of Hong Kong's administrative region and, to be honest, had never really understood why the British Government had felt so compelled to hand the whole of Hong Kong back when the lease on part of the territory ran out. Until I saw what had become of the area I remembered as sleepy villages and gentle farm land.
The whole area is a sea of high-rise apartment blocks with fast train access into Kowloon. All became clear - the "independent" territory that would have remained would have consisted of millions of people with nowhere to work and no way to feed themselves.
Anyway - tucked away in one of the newly developed streets was this "traditional" street market. Traditional, not in the sense of having been there since the Tang dynasty (the street itself looked no more than 30-40 years old) but in the sense that traditional Chinese shopping values remained intact.
Fresh food was piled on stalls all along the street for passers-by to pick up and examine (see the lady in the photo who I watched pick over an entire tray of pork chops until she found one she liked) and the sale of hopelessly useless (as well, it's fair to say, unrealistically cheap) goods.
Needing fresh AA batteries for my camera I bought a dozen Chinese zinc-carbon examples (the best available) from a stall for a few HK$ (around US 5c each) discovering over the next couple of hours that each and every one of them was completely devoid of electricity.
Some things never change. Hong Kong enterprise - gotta love it!
Heck, even Mong Kok - once home to professionals (photographers who came for the specialist camera shops and hookers who worked the brothels that lined the narrow streets) is now the location for 5-star hotels, computer supermarkets and Starbucks.
So a trip into the New Territories was taken. It's years since I was last in this hinterland of Hong Kong's administrative region and, to be honest, had never really understood why the British Government had felt so compelled to hand the whole of Hong Kong back when the lease on part of the territory ran out. Until I saw what had become of the area I remembered as sleepy villages and gentle farm land.
The whole area is a sea of high-rise apartment blocks with fast train access into Kowloon. All became clear - the "independent" territory that would have remained would have consisted of millions of people with nowhere to work and no way to feed themselves.
Anyway - tucked away in one of the newly developed streets was this "traditional" street market. Traditional, not in the sense of having been there since the Tang dynasty (the street itself looked no more than 30-40 years old) but in the sense that traditional Chinese shopping values remained intact.
Fresh food was piled on stalls all along the street for passers-by to pick up and examine (see the lady in the photo who I watched pick over an entire tray of pork chops until she found one she liked) and the sale of hopelessly useless (as well, it's fair to say, unrealistically cheap) goods.
Needing fresh AA batteries for my camera I bought a dozen Chinese zinc-carbon examples (the best available) from a stall for a few HK$ (around US 5c each) discovering over the next couple of hours that each and every one of them was completely devoid of electricity.
Some things never change. Hong Kong enterprise - gotta love it!
Thursday, March 22, 2007
XP Media Center
Let’s cut to the chase – Windows Media Center (at least in XP guise – I haven’t tried Vista) is, if not quite a disaster, a long way from being capable of acting as a reliable living room device. Even ignoring the product’s shortcomings (restrictions on the number of tuners it supports; poor support for digital terrestrial television in UK/Europe among them) the darned thing crashes far too often.
Being (humbly) pretty good at setting up my PCs and strict at avoiding the installation of software that causes so many reliability issues, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to give a “three-fingered salute (aka Ctrl-Alt-Del) to my PC and the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) is almost never seen in these parts. Media Center (sic) reset all these expectations by frequently requiring the use of Task Manager to shut it down when it froze and far too frequent reboots of the entire machine.
That’s not to mention Microsoft’s habit of releasing “security updates” to the operating system itself that cause the PC to reboot all by itself – a more than annoying activity when it interrupts a film or sports program you were recording overnight.
Problems with Media Center include:
- The program is so tied to Microsoft via its Internet connection that almost any disruption to the network connection causes a crash.
- Miscellaneous and meaningless errors: eg, the program frequently refuses to record a program showing in the guide, claiming that “the guide does not contain information on this program” – even when it patently does – stopping and restarting the Media Center shell allows the recording.
- Microsoft doesn’t think people outside Seattle watch TV. Specifically, the program’s ability to tune in digital broadcasts in UK regions is at best patchy. Reading independent web sites reveals similar problems in many regions along with the registry hacks(!) necessary to allow or force the tuning software to work with local broadcasts.
- It supports at most two tuners – unless you’re prepared to hack the registry (and do so every time it downloads an update). In this multi-channel age, it’s far from uncommon to find several appealing programs broadcast across different channels in the same peak viewing slot and with DVB-T tuners available for a few measly pounds/dollars it’s hardly unreasonable to expect support for four or five.
- Playback of a recorded DVB-T program within which signal quality fell causing dropouts causes a crash necessitating a complete reboot of the machine.
I could go on (and on, and on …) but suffice to say that I have given up with Microsoft’s Media Center and replaced it with something rather better.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
PVR to Media Centre
While music and photos were being streamed wirelessly to the bedroom, the good old VHS video recorder had been replaced with a hard-disk based PVR (Personal Video Recorder) – at first a Humax device that also incorporated a DVD player then a Digifusion unit.
The impact of these devices on TV watching habits can’t be overstated. The ability to “point-and-shoot” (where have we heard that phrase before? ;) ) at a program and have it reliably recorded is addictive – in fact, it’s far too easy to quickly build up a library of hundreds of hours of recorded TV that you will never have time to watch! More usefully, a 14 day program guide meant that I could easily and reliably ensure that I need rarely miss a Grand Prix just because I was away on my frequent travels.
All good and great but …. how do you get the recordings out of the box? Ok, you can buy PVR units that have a built-in DVD recorder (so sons that forgot to record the Grand Prix for themselves might be sent a copy) but any thought of watching recorded programs in another room rely on old-fashioned video distribution and those infra red remote extender gizmos. Hardly “bleeding edge” and not at all in keeping with the thinking round here.
So, just over a year ago a moment of weakness in PC World made me the new owner of a Sony VAIO XL100 Media Center PC – a reasonably smart (silver and black, almost hifi-looking) unit that runs Windows XP Media Center edition.
Media Centres
To a software/networks/gadget geek with a deep interest in music and film, the lure of having access to my music, videos, photos and a choice of independent radio anywhere in the house is just too much to resist. My CD collection has slowly been migrating to one of the servers in the garage for a couple of years now (I have a lot of CDs!) and my photography and occasional forays into video went digital years ago but finding ways to distribute these files around the house has occupied many an hour.
A couple of years ago, I bought first a Linksys WMA11B network media player (NMP) and installed its companion software on one of the PCs to act as the stream server. That never worked too well – the low (802.11b WiFi) network bandwidth restricted it to music playback only; photos took an age to appear and it had no support for video at all. Worst of all, its proprietary server software consumed far too much CPU overhead and was incompatible with other devices.
The Linksys was replaced fairly quickly with a D-Link DSM320 NMP that supports 802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi and works using open standards (UPNP) to replay music, videos, photos and streamed Internet radio stations. It also has a captive 100Mbps Ethernet connection. That worked well connected to a PC running the separate Windows Media Connector freebie (now incorporated into Windows Media Player 11). Music (including CD quality WAVs) played back fine over the WiFi connection and it was even possible to watch MPEG and DivX encoded movies – as long as you ignored the lack of lip-sync!
The Outlook is circular
Remember the start of this epic voyage of email and PIM updating started with a desire to move away from Outlook. Where has it ended up? Back with Outlook, that’s where.
A few reasons:
- Try as I might, it’s hard to escape Microsoft’s marketing muscle – in this case translated into compatibility with the portable devices I use (IPAQ and Nokia phone/PIM) and others that I might consider using in future. The sheer market weight of Outlook means that manufacturers are compelled to provide at least some level of data interchange with Outlook and, while I did discover products and add-ons to programs such as Thunderbird that aim to do the same thing, they are all affected by the problems that surround Open Source “products” (which I will get round to discussing some time soon, I promise).
- Office 2007 appeared and is a substantial step forward for Outlook. While still some way from my ideal (that I can’t find elsewhere in any case) it is better at organising tasks and calendar and, even in beta form, proved more reliable than the alternatives (Thunderbird, The Bat, Eudora, Pocomail) that I tried – several of which lost data (or would have, had I not been strict about keeping backups.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
So … which Linux distro got the job?
Well, it took a while but I finally have a mail/groupware server alternative to Exchange Server in the shape of Kerio MailServer6. But what to run it on?
If you’ve been following this saga, you’ll know that the initial brief I set of replacing Exchange Server expanded into a need to replace the underlying Windows server operating system as well with one of the many Linux variants out there. But which?
Fedora Core 6 is the answer – at least for me. Being based on Red Hat it had the blend of server functions and management tools I was looking for as well as access to the latest stable versions of Samba.
In praise of Kerio
To refresh my knowledge of Kerio MailServer I downloaded a copy of the latest version 6 from the company’s web site and loaded it up on a test server. All the things I remember liking about the product are still there and it has improved and solidified in several key areas. The product can run on either a Windows or Linux platform.
The first thing to like is the clean and simple management interface. For anyone used to Microsoft’s muddle of tools spread across different management consoles, Kerio’s approach will come like a bolt out of the blue. A single console window provides access to all functions of the server from configuration, choice of protocols, user management through to logs on its behaviour. Setup is a breeze – complete a few forms to set up the domains and users you want to give access to (with convenient import functions for large setups) and you’re up and running. Safely! Which brings me to the second thing to like …
Antivirus is built in to the mailserver itself. You can either use the supplied McAfee with its automatically updated database or one of several alternatives from the likes of Sophos, Grisoft etc that you supply separately. You can even use several AV engines in tandem if you want. Spam is equally well covered with a comprehensive arsenal of filters, blocklists, repellents, caller-ID lookups, SPF checks and SpamAssassin bult in. Less than 2% of spam gets through even the lightweight configuration I have implemented with very few false-positives.
The server’s database can be automatically backed up and archived without user intervention. It can retrieve email from other servers or external accounts (such as Yahoo or Hotmail) and drop the messages into recipient mailboxes directly. It can handle multiple identities and email addresses, aliases at individual or group level. And it has good status and logging functions that keep this administrator well informed of what is going on.
The latest version even has ActiveSync functionality built in so sync’ing a Windows based PDA or mobile phone over a Bluetooth or wireless connection is automatic and seamless. Wonderful!
But the very best thing to like about Kerio MailServer 6 is that it just works. It sits there and does its job of delivering, sorting and sifting emails, storing calendar, tasks and notes while demanding zero attention from me.
And that makes it worth every penny of the price I paid for the licence to use it.
Choosing a Linux distro (part 2)
By now I’d done my fair share of reading up on the current state of Linux and how to get it to work as a server back-end for a Windows desktop environment. I was pretty confident that a recent Linux build with recent Samba version would handle the domain control (network authorisation) and file sharing tasks. So my mind turned back to the choice of software to replace Exchange Server as my email and PIM back-end.
There are a number of Linux based email server products that claim at least some level of Exchange compatibility:
- Open Exchange (http://www.open-xchange.com/EN/developer/)
- Scalix (http://www.scalix.com/)
- Kerio Mail Server (http://www.kerio.com)
For links and reviews of most of the competitors try the ServerWatch web site at http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/index.php/TWFpbA==
I had just tried Scalix with the Xandros Server product that I had been forced to send back. Exchange “compatibility” can mean many things it seems. To Scalix it seems to mean that they might provide (I never found it) an Outlook plugin that makes their back-end server look like Exchange. Of the promised migration tools there was no sight. I was not alone among the user forums in experiencing a distinct level of underwhelment with Scalix!
Open Exchange looks like a possible contender. It’s available in commercial and free variants with an Outlook plugin (the “Oxtender”) that – again – promises to make the back-end look like Exchange to Outlook. I haven’t tried it.
The reason is that I – somewhat belatedly – remembered that I have previously used Kerio MailServer as a (then) cheaper replacement for Exchange Server in several client installations - and all had worked very well. Again the product relies on an Outlook plugin (this time called the “Kerio Outlook Connector”) to connect the Outlook desktop client to the back-end server.
Why all these connectors? Well, Microsoft being Microsoft, OE not only use proprietary protocols to communicate with each other, MS keeps the details of the protocols close to its corporate chest. In the Open Source arena there is a surprising and woeful lack of standards for groupware message exchange. This is a subject I may come back to in a later post as – to this grey-bearded old software designer – it encapsulates a lot of the problems that beset the Open Source community and prevent wider up-take of the technology and product offerings.
So – anyone who wants to provide a back-end email/groupware server and wants any kind of market share needs to address Outlook (I haven’t looked up the figures lately but it is surely the dominant email client in the corporate world) – and that means at the very least writing a connector to bridge the gap.
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