Ti Kouka Wellington

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Whilst plotting my visit to Wellington this weekend, I naturally had to place Ti Kouka Cafe high up on the list (sadly they’ll be closed for the public holiday weekend, so I only have a short window to get my visit in).

Situated upstairs on 76 Willis St, Ti Kouka now occupies the space once taken by my much loved and much missed favorite Katipo Cafe, once the local for Tom and I during #geekflat and Amberdms startup days.

After Katipo suddenly closed, it underwent a bit of refurbishment and an entirely new cafe emerged – Ti Kouka.

Rather than focusing on the counter-culture feel and cheerful hearty feeds that Katipo had, Ti Kouka is an entirely new venture with an entirely different approach, focusing on top quality food, presentation and dining experience.

With one of the founders and main chef being ex-Logan Brown, the food is excellent and tends to be a little more varied than the usual fare found in most cafes.

I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy both their breakfast and lunch menu. Whilst the vegetarian selection for lunch isn’t huge, there are a few good options – a couple more would be a nice touch.

Ti Kouka don’t do the stereotypical huge breakfast with everything on the plate, rather choose a base meal and select a few delicious sides to go with it, or mix things up and go with a couple smaller options.

Breakfast, with a delicious pile of their famous chips. Also a bowl of their excellent mushrooms.

Ti Kouka is also where I’ve had the best pancakes/hotcakes of my life – rather than cream, it’s been served with ricotta cheese and buttery maple syrup, which must be real maple, since it tastes far more amazing than any I’ve had before.

Even dedicated pancake parlors don’t come close to this….I normally tend to go for savory meals as the cafe breakfast option due to many pancakes being served a bit too dry & plain, but this is certainly not the case at Ti Kouka and well worth trying.

This is the most delicious pancake I've ever had. Ever.

If you end up at Ti Kouka for dinner or drinks, it is highly recommend to try a side of their chips, which are nothing short of the most amazing potato based creation known to mankind thanks to a triple-frying process.

The coffee is pretty excellent too, I’ve never had a bad coffee there – even managed to order a soy latte without the nasty burnt rubbery taste that too many cafes fail with when making it.

Living in Auckland, I miss this delicious coffee, so, so much. :'(

Whilst the meals never appear huge, they are always very well executed with excellent flavor, well thought combinations, consistently good standards and I’ve always been pleased and full at the end of my meal, without leaving tonnes on the plate like I end up having to do at some establishments.

My only real complaint is that my favorite lunch time meal option of the Grilled Haloumi has been changed from when it was originally introduced with beetroot & dukkah to a new more salad focused option, which whilst good, isn’t quite as good as my original favorite from them. :-(

Sadly this menu item has changed a bit, but still good.

Ti Kouka has quickly established itself as one of my favorite places, although it does tend to be somewhere I go when I specifically want a delicious meal and relaxed dining experience, if I’m craving a big breakfast after a late night and in a hurry, better off looking at other options like Expressoholic-  you want to take the time to enjoy the Ti Kouka experience.

I’ve found that it’s an ideal location for dates, business meetings or an evening with friends for tapas and drinks (Thr-Fri only), the venue is spacious, quiet and has various table options including being able to look down onto Willis St, or one of the more private booths ideal for secluded dates.

Take a look at some of the other reviews on Gusty Gourmet, Foodie Gems of Wellie, and (as much as it pains me to link to them) Fairfax/Stuff, they all proclaim the excellence of the food and there’s a few pictures of some of their nifty meal offerings.

Posted in Opinions, Personal, Vegetarianism | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

National Bank SSL Cert Fail

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Got to wonder about your bank when they manage to upload the wrong SSL certificate to one of their webservers. :-/

hurp durp security

Every sysadmin has their bad day, but I would have thought a bank would have had a bit more of a test suite and monitoring of their certificates. :-/

Posted in Geek | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Travel Plans: Wellington Easter

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Jethro Carr

I’ll be coming down to Wellington this Easter from Thursday 4th until Monday 9th of April to catch up with family and friends.

I’m planning one main “catch up” event to meet up with lots people, this naturally calls for a decent venue with a large selection of delicious beverages, thus I propose:

Saturday 7th April at 16:00
Fork & Brewer
14 Bond St

It’s a great venue with good atmosphere and 40 or so beers on tap, so come along for a catch up and a drink. I expect I’ll be out in town till some time that evening, so send me a message if you want to catch up later that evening. And there could be post-beer curry.

If you can make it, let me know via comments or drop me an email/IM. :-) If you can’t make it, but still would like to catch up, get in touch as I’m pretty flexible on this trip and a few coffee sessions are always welcome.

Lisa won’t be with me this time, she’s heading to the Hawke’s Bay to see her family, so there will be 100% less soppy couple cuteness, but probably 200% more Linux geeking. Take your pick at which is worse. ;-)

Posted in Personal | 4 Comments

Porting to 2degrees

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Having been a long-suffering victim of poor experiences with performance on Vodafone’s data network in NZ and expensive pricing, I’ve now shifted to NZ’s third and youngest mobile provider, 2degrees.

Upgrade from 32k to 128k of SIM memory, woot! ;-)

Two major incentives – firstly unhappiness at Vodafone’s 3G data performance and secondly, unhappiness at the fact that my personal telecommunications expenses are around $350 per month (welcome to NZ, land of expensive comms) and seeking to reduce these somewhat.

I was originally paying $59 a month for my Vodafone service – 120mins, 250 SMS and 300MB data (although boosted to 3GB due to a grandfathered plan promotion). It was pretty good deal when it came out, I signed onto the plan when the first Android phone in NZ launched (HTC Magic) and good data plans for mobiles that didn’t cost a fortune were kind of a new thing.

With 2degrees, I’ve now dropped my bill down to $39 a month, which provides 220mins, 2500 SMS, 100MB data, plus an additional 1GB data bonus for the next 12 months.

There’s a bit of a loss on datacap size, down from Vodafone’s 3GB, but my smartphone and laptop use no more than 1GB all up when combined in regular use, so it’s not really going to impact me.

I also went and dropped the Telecom XT data SIM in my laptop – whilst convenient and bloody fast data, it wasn’t worth the cost for how often I need it – and I can’t really justify when my phone can pair and share the 1.3GB of monthly data it has.

Number porting went very smoothly – after requesting the port online with 2degrees, I got a txt about 3 hrs later confirming it was complete. 2degrees even went to the effort of informing Vodafone and having them close my account which was handy.

It’s been going great since, so far I haven’t encountered any cell towers dropping ~90% of packet data without anybody at Vodafone noticing yet and performance seems speedy and reliable.

Infact the performance of the 2degreees network around Auckland actually beats my DSL at times, especially for the upload, which is pretty tragic. :-/

Sadly the results for 3G performance are sometimes better than my ADSL :-/

I haven’t gone on a rural trip since moving to 2degrees, but it should be just as good as I used to get with Vodafone, as 2degrees uses Vodafone for roaming when outside of their own network zones.

Their plans certainly seem popular – I’ve had at least 2 other friends move to 2degrees, even if you want expensive smartphones, it’s often cheaper to buy the phone outright and use 2degrees no-term monthly than to sign with Telecom or Vodafone due to the savings in plan costs over 24 months, not to mention freedom and flexibility to change plans.

Posted in Geek, Opinions, Personal | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Introducing Smokegios

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Having a reasonably large personal server environment of at least 10 key production VMs along with many other non-critical, but still important machines, a good monitoring system is key.

I currently use a trio of popular open source applications: Nagios (for service & host alerting), Munin (for resource graphing) and Smokeping (for latency response graphs).

Smokeping and Nagios are particularly popular, it’s rare to find a network or *NIX orientated organization that doesn’t have one or both of these utilities installed.

There are other programs around that offer more “combined” UI experiences, such as Zabbix, OpenNMS and others, but I personally find that having the 3 applications that do each specific task really well, is better than having one maybe not-so-good application. But then again I’m a great believer in the UNIX philosophy. :-)

The downside of having these independent applications is that there’s not a lot of integration between them. Whilst it’s possible to link programs such as Munin & Nagios or Nagios & Smokeping to share some data from the probes & tests they make, there’s no integration of configuration between the components.

This means in order to add a new host to the monitoring, I need to add it to Nagios, then to Munin and then to Smokeping – and to remember to sync any changes across all 3 applications.

So this weekend I decided to write a new program called Smokegios.

TL;DR summary of Smokegios

This little utility checks the Nagios configuration for any changes on a regular cron-controlled basis. If any of the configuration has changed, it will parse the configuration and generate a suitable Smokeping configuration from it using the hostgroup structures and then reload Smokeping.

This allows fully autonomous management of the Smokeping configuration and no more issues about the Smokeping configuration getting neglected when administrators make changes to Nagios. :-D

Currently it’s quite a simplistic application in that it only handles ICMP ping tests for hosts, however I’m intended to expand in future with support for reading service & service group information for services such as DNS, HTTP, SMTP, LDAP and more to generate service latency graphs.

This is a brand new application, I’ve run a number of tests against my Nagios & Smokeping packages, but always possible your environment will have some way to break it – if you find any issues, please let me know, keen to make this a useful tool for others.

To get started with Smokegios, visit the project page for all the details including installation instructions and links to the RPM repos.

If you’re using RHEL 5/6/derivatives, I have RPM pages for Smokegios as well as Smokeping 2.4 and 2.6 series on amberdms-custom and amberdms-os repositories.

It’s written in Perl5, not my most favorite language, but it’s certainly well suited for this configuration file manipulation type tasks and there was a handy Nagios-Object module courtesy of Duncan Ferguson that saved writing a Nagios parser.

Let me know if you find it useful! :-)

Posted in Code, Geek, Open Source, Personal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Delicious Cookies Recipe

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Jethro Carr

I don’t do anywhere near as much baking as I would like to, mostly due to time limitations and the fact that the kitchen in my Auckland apartment isn’t particularly big.

One thing that is pretty quick and easy to make is chocolate chip cookies and whilst waiting for some vegetarian lasagna to cook last night I made a batch up.

This recipe is vegetarian (don’t laugh, I’ve actually seen cookies that contain beef fat before – looking at you New World!) and also works well with NoEgg, incase you’re allergic to eggs or wish to avoid them for other reasons. If you found a good replacement for the butter and vegan chocolate, it might be possible to do a vegan variation.

It’s originally derived from a recipe on a back of the Cadbury Chocolate Chip packets I used, but with a number of modifications to tone down the amount of sugar and other improvements – the originals would make your vision blurry with sugar overload.

These are soft-style cookies, rather than hard (of course that depends a bit on how long you cook for…. ;-)

125g Butter
0.5 cup white sugar
1 cup raw sugar
Heaped spoonful of honey
2 cups flour
1tsp vanilla essence
230g chocolate chips
1tsp baking powder
2 eggs or substitute such as NoEgg.

This recipe will make about 1 baking tray worth of cookies – fine to double up, but be aware not all mixers can handle the large volume of cookie dough well.

  1. Cream(blend) butter and sugar together. Ideally you’d use a food processor for this, but I don’t have one so I’m (mis)using an electric hand beater and trying to avoid spraying sugar everywhere. It takes a fair bit of work, ideally you want the butter to not be totally solid when you start.

    Mmmmm buttery sugar. I will confess to eating this directly from the bowl.

  2. Add honey into the mix. This adds some more sweetness, flavor and makes a mixture a bit more sticky, important particularly if using NoEgg.

    Honey, with the butter and sugar.

  3. Add egg (or substitute), vanilla essence, baking powder & flour. I tend to add the flour in 0.5 cup quantities to make mixing easier when using it by old-fashioned hand power.

    Sadly you can't just have butter & sugar cookies, so better add some flour and stuff to bind it all together.

  4. Mix well till you have cookie dough. Try to avoid eating too much of it.
  5. Stir in 200g of chocolate chips and mix. I really recommend Cadbury’s dark chocolate cooking chips (not drops), it’s much better than many of the other waxy-tasting cooking chocolates I’ve tried like Nestle.

    mmmmmmmm

  6. Melt 30g of chocolate chips in microwave.

    Best part of melting chocolate is licking the melting bowl afterwards :-D

  7. Lightly mix melted chocolate into mixture, to generate marbling effect. Don’t mix too much, otherwise the effect will be lost and you’ll just have slightly darker cookie mix.

    mmmmmm with marbeling

  8. Place mixture on greased trays – I tend to just roll a small handful into balls and then gently squish.
  9. Cook in a preheated oven at 180c for around 10-15mins. Watch the edges of the cookies, you will want to remove once the edges start going brown, leave them too long and the bottoms tend to get a bit burnt.
  10. Let delicious cookie aroma wash over you whilst they cool. Get excited at the sugary goodness to come.

    nom nom nom nom

Posted in Vegetarianism | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Google Search & Control

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Jethro Carr

I’ve been using Google for search for years, however it’s the first time I’ve ever come across a DMCA takedown notice included in the results.

Possibly not helped by the fact that Google is so good at finding what I want, that I don’t tend to scroll down more than the first few entries 99% of the time, so it’s easy to miss things at the bottom of the page.

Lawyers, fuck yeah!

Turns out that Google has been doing this since around 2002 and there’s a form process you can follow with Google to file a notice to request a search result removal.

Sadly I suspect that we are going to see more and more situations like this as governments introduce tighter internet censorship laws and key internet gatekeepers like Google are going to follow along with whatever they get told to do.

Whilst people working at Google may truly subscribe to the “Don’t be evil” slogan, the fundamental fact is that Google is a US-based company that is legally required to do what’s best for the shareholders – and the best thing for the shareholders is to not try and fight the government over legalization, but to implement as needed and keep selling advertising.

In response to concerns about Google over privacy, I’ve seen a number of people to shift to new options, such as the increasingly popular and open-source friendly Duck Duck Go search engine, or even Microsoft’s Bing which isn’t too bad at getting decent results with a UI looking much more like early Google.

However these alternatives all suffer from the same fundamental problem – they’re centralized gatekeepers who can be censored or controlled – and then there’s the fact that a centralised entity can track so much about your online browsing. Replacing Google with another company will just leave us in the same position in 10 years time.

Lately I’ve been seeking to remove all the centralized providers from my online life, moving to self-run and federated services – basic stuff like running my own email, instant messaging (XMPP), but also more complex “cloud” services being delivered by federated or self-run servers for tasks such as browser syncing, avatar handling, contacts sync, avoiding URL shortners and quitting or replacing social networks.

The next big one of the list is finding an open source and federated search solution – I’m currently running tests with a search engine called YaCy, which is a peer-to-peer decentralised search engine that is made up of thousands of independent servers, sharing information between themselves.

To use YaCy, you download and run your own server, set it’s search indexing behavior and let it run and share results with other servers (it’s also possible to run it in a disconnected mode for indexing your internal private networks).

The YaCy homepage has an excellent write up of their philiosophy and design fundamentals for the application.

It’s still a bit rough, I think the search results could be better – but this is something that having more nodes will certainly help with and the idea is promising – I’m planning to setup a public instance on my server in the near future for adding all my sites to the index and providing a good test of it’s feasibility.

Posted in Geek, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Takapuna Beach Low Tide

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Jethro Carr

As part of my regular exercise routine, I wander along Takapuna beach - the size of the beach will vary a lot depending on whether the tide is in or out, but the amount it varies is quite dramatic.

This is the first time that I’ve lived right next to a beach and it makes you realize how it’s possible for people to get into trouble with walking along beaches and getting trapped when the tide rises.

Low tide showing off the gradual slope of the entire beach

Normally the waves are lapping up against the rocks by the cliff. Will have to time a trip to walk down past the rocks and onto the other beach one day.

Quite weird to be walking along areas that at times I’ve been swimming in… From what I can tell, the beach continues on a long way at this decline, there were a few swimmers out even further during low tide, so it certainly continues on like that for some way.

Posted in Outdoors | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Paranoia Justified

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Jethro Carr

It’s human nature to be friendly and trusting, we want to assume people are generally good, and we want to help out others where we can.

However this makes us prime for social engineering attacks – from calling up pretending to be the IT help desk asking for passwords, to not questioning people who we don’t know walking around the office carrying laptops.

Computer geeks tend to be a little more security minded, but even we’ll do stupid things like open the door for the pretty girl who smiles at us without a keycard from time to time, whereas we might question that seedy looking guy in a hoodie due to incorrect assumptions we all make.

Living in an apartment complex in Auckland has been interesting, since the complex is quite security minded and there is camera surveillance at the entrances and magnetic card access to the building.

Whilst an apartment complex means your neighbor count increases dramatically, you rarely ever meet or talk with any of them, resulting in little idea whether or not someone is a neighbour or a stranger trying to sneak in. In contrast, when living in a housing suburb you might not know everyone, but there’s a lot less foot traffic normally, and having someone sneaking around peering into windows gets noticed pretty quickly.

 

With this in mind, I’m one of those annoying few people who refuses to let people tailgate me into the complex unless I can clearly see their access card & key already in hand.

You get some interesting stories from people trying to explain why I need to let them in, such as “My mum/dad/husband/wife isn’t home so she can’t buzz me in”, to which one must wonder what good getting into the building will do if they don’t have anyone at home to let them into the apartment itself (also get a key sorted people!).

At times this leads to feeling a bit like the apartment nazi, however earlier this week I got my approach validated:

An A4 sheet on the wall is what appears to pass for an incident report these days.

The car one is particularly annoying, the problem with the garage door system is that they take forever to open or close, leading to a large window for anyone to follow through after a car has already gone.

However maintaining door entry security is a lot easier and just requires a bit of forcefulness with people who just attempt to tailgate in, even it seems a bit mean at times.

It’s a good reminder that these exploits do happen in daily life and that we should be aware of them and keep mindful.

Posted in Geek, Opinions | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Mozilla Firefox “Pin as App”

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Jethro Carr

In a moment of madness, I decided to RTFM the latest Mozilla Firefox Feature List and came across this nifty ability called “Pin as App”.

nawww baby tabs!

It’s pretty handy, I’m using it to maintain tabs of commonly access websites or web applications that I need many times a day, easy to find since it’s always on the left in the defined order, and much smaller than the full tab size.

Only issue is that you need your remote site/app to have a decent favicon – if they don’t, you’ll just end up with a dashed square placeholder and there’s no way in Firefox to set a custom icon for that pin that I can see.

Posted in Geek | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments