migrant|roo

A few months ago a small team of us (Karen, Nico, Tom and myself) at POKE built a new website for the excellent Ottolenghi restaurant.

As a "thank you", Yotam and his team at Ottolenghi kindly invited a large mob of POKE food-heads across to Leith's Cookery School for a Saturday morning lesson in mediterranean and Isreali cooking.

It was really, really nice (but also a bit weird initially) to socialise with Pokers outside of their two natural habitats: the studio, and the pub! Everyone was buzzing and it was a brilliant morning - everything was perfectly organised and the recipes were absolutely delicious (I've cooked them all since the course at home).

I tried to get some decent photos, but it was a bit manic with all the cooking - here's the best of the bunch:

The hardware

Knife skills

Red onion, cucumber and dill salad

This might look plain, but it's far from it. We salted the cucumber after scooping the seeds out to get them to release a lot of water, giving them loads of crunch. The dressing was a mix of vinegar, sugar and dill - the vinegar really took the edge of the onions. This is going to be eaten a lot this summer :)

Chicken and courgette burgers

I've always been scared of burgers - no more. It was an extremely wet mixture before cooking, my nerves were jangling.. but the lesson is to trust the professionals; after 2 minutes in the pan they firmed up enough to flip and the rest, is delicious history.

The Meal

All together, along with my favourite dish of the day: the bulgar wheat, caremlised onion and feta salad. You can see it in the background, unfortunately I was too busy faffing around cooking to get a proper shot of the bulgar salad on it's own.

Messy dessert

Raspberry and passion fruit mess, made with the infamous Ottolenghi meringues! I managed to coax a few meringue secrets out of Yotam too ;)

A fully brilliant day, capped off with a few pints in a local pub and a sleepy, sunny, gentle journey home.

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

Welcome balloon racers! I work for POKE and I was lucky enough to be part of a very talented team that created the Balloon Race Across the Internet. It's been a long and in part difficult road, but I for one am so proud of what we've managed to achieve.

I love the idea of people dropping onto here, so please say hello! If you leave the name of your balloon I'll even give you a boost :)

A project I've been closely involved with at POKE has just launched - we're all dead proud and hope you enjoy Balloonacy:

We're hosting a balloon race across The Internets, - if your balloon floats furthest (you'll be able to control and push your balloon along, too) you'll win a week in Ibiza with a gang of mates.

As well has having a balloon, you can also be part of the map itself by putting your blog or website forward. It doesn't cost anything, the race lasts 7 days and you should get heaps of visitors during that time :) The little racoon in the bottom right hand corner means this site's signed up!

So, on 23rd June when the race starts and thousands of animal balloons are floating across the internet, now you'll know why.

Play Balloonacy here

My employers, POKE, were kind enough to send me to FOWA 2007, a conference boldly titled "The Future of Web Apps".

The quality of the speakers and talks was nothing short of amazing. My head is full of ideas and inspiration after listening to the thoughts and musings of some of the leading minds in web development.

I'll do a full blog and summary of the conference as soon as I have some time (I'm going to Alton Towers tomorrow and need sleep), but here's a teaser:

Steve Souders, Chief Performance !Yahoo High Performance Websites

• Optimising the front-end is cheaper, faster and more effective at creating a more responsive application to the user as opposed to optimising the backend.
• Golden Rule, plus 14 "best practises". Most very quick and easy to implement, some can lead to drastic speed improvements for users

Dion Almears, Google/Ajaxian.com Offline Web Applications

This talk was awesome. Dion really knows his shit, and I was gripped with the plans for Gears and libraries built on top of it, and intruiged by the "sync" problem.

Matt Mullenweg Scaling

This was the most surprising talk. I've been a user of wordpress and a reader of photomatt for years, but I had no idea Matt was such a hardcore developer/architect. Loads of wisdom on "do" and "don't" to do with web architectures and a lovely outline of the "Mini-matt Cluser" - internet clouds and all.

Loved the notion of "being stateless" which allows much more instant expansion of the hardware architecture; for example instead of using sessions (which prevents distribution load/data) you could encrypt the username and password in a cookie and authenticate the user for every request. With the correct database architecture, the read on the username/password will be a primary key lookup (hint: FAST) so performance shouldn't be affected too much.

Very cool views on advertising too, and targeting only the users who will genuinely use (i.e., click) the advertising.

John Resig, Mozilla/jQuery Future of Firefox, Future of Javascript An awesome talk. Some really exciting new features in Firefox including SVG and Canvas 3D which lead to the craziest thing I saw all day: writing real C code in HTML. Yes, you heard me. Canvas 3D exposes the OpenGL C API which you can call/use directly from a web page. All proof on concept, and after being grilled about security in the Q&A session, notably tounge-in-cheek, but exciting none the less.

The new Javascript engine, Tamarin, looks exciting too with its support for Javacript 2.0. Real classes (yay, no more prototype chain hacking) and packages amongst the best.

Like I said, I'll do a full blog along with a proper brain dump of the ideas and opinions when I'm back tomorrow night.