Nutch on AWS

dantagg — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:49:31 +0000

Trying to get nutch to work on AWS.

I’ve got nutch and tomcat to “work” on Ubuntu 10.04 on AWS. I can see the admin pages. The search doesn’t return anything though .
I kind of followed these notes although had to make a lot changes as The versions of Ubuntu, Java, tomcat and nutch have all changed. When I’ve written the script to do it I’ll post more.

It doesn’t get tougher than this

dantagg — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:25:34 +0000

A couple of weeks ago our oldest had her birthday. I was going to take her and six friends ice skating but I heard a radio programme about the risks we don’t see and I saw the high risk of apologising to an angry parent about the bit missing from their child.

She loves Masterchef; mealtimes have been punctuated with John and Gregg comments like “That’s an ugly plate of food” and “it shouldn’t work but it does.” So we decided to “put ourselves to the test”, “see if “this guy [and gal] can cook” and give her a Masterchef party for her and about 15 friends. Here’s the menu

10^th Birthday Masterchef Dinner

MENU

An Appetiser of Nachos

Home made tortilla chips, tomato and haricot bean sauce, and melted cheese

Starters

Sweetcorn Beignets with Salsa

Fritters of sweetcorn, sweet peppers, and coriander leaves, served with a juicy fresh citrus salsa

Fish Cakes with Caper Cream sauce

Rich fishcakes made with cod, prawns and salmon, and flavoured with lemon grass and parsley. Served with mixed leaves.

Onion Tart and Roasted Autumn Tomatoes

Succulent onions, pine nuts, goats cheese and pesto, baked in a butter pastry case. Served with red, orange and yellow roasted tomatoes.

Mandarin Sorbet

Mains

Chicken Ballantine

A gently poached chicken breast stuffed and rolled with mushrooms and green beans, and served with sauté potato and fresh vegetables.

Mediterranean vegetable pasta stack

Sheets of homemade egg pasta layered with spinach and peas, mushrooms, and mozzarella. Served with a wild mushroom cream sauce and salad leaves.

Braised chorizo with roast asparagus and mash

A scrummy Spanish sausage flavoured with paprika, cooked in red wine and tomato juice, served with asparagus roast with salt and olive oil, and buttery mash.

Desserts

Chocolate Éclairs

The old favourite freshly made with double cream filling and chocolate fondant icing

Pear Tarte Tatin with Marsala Cream

An upside-down puff pastry and caramelised pear tart.

Spanish hot chocolate

Thick and dark….

And finally…

Homemade chocolate truffles

Coconut pyramids

It turns out we can cook; à le Masterchef it was one plate between three with a fork each.

What a success. Friends who turn their noses up at risotto and stuff when they come round for tea tucked in with gusto, lots said it was the best party they’d ever been to and they all enjoyed themselves immensely. I think they really liked being treated older than their age, having a chance to dress up and having something special. Hopefully we’ve educated a few palates too.

If you can stand the effort I’d definitely recommend it. My wife’s two brothers cooked some courses too. The guests all wrote comments on what they tasted and gave a score. No prizes for guessing the winner and runner up – chocolate éclairs, followed by hot chocolate.

I cooked the Onion Tart from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking but using the pastry recipe from the next recipe in the book. Ballantine is Masterchef favourite so I had to cook that; it was surprisingly difficult to find a decent recipe though. In the end I modified a Galantine recipe, I think from Francis Bissell’s Times Cookery Book which seems to be out of print, probably because they sacked her. I’ve just read that “Long before she became a food writer, [Bissell] had been methodically taking notes on a daily basis of every meal she has cooked, whether it be a meal for herself and Tom, her husband, or a full-blown dinner party. She notes down costs and all ingredients used. This record acts as a useful reminder…” She should blog. I can’t remember where I got the sorbet recipe, Antonio Carluccio or possibly Marcela Hazan I remember I had to leave out the Vodka!

Why doesn’t the BBC have a decent Masterchef page to link to?

Dan Tagg

Nutch on AWS

It doesn’t get tougher than this