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Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk . Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn't really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked. The site is a pretty standard e-commerce / classified ad site tailored to bicycles. But as with every project there are some special requests which makes it interesting to work on, like the payment and billing system. For me it was especially nice to do all the programming from beginning to end on my own and being able to choose the technologies I like to work with. Anthony pretty much lets me decide all the technical bits. The site is build completely on open source technologies and I might be able to give something back in the future too. CentOS for the server OS Fedora on the development machine PHP as the language MySQL database memcached symfony 1.4 as the web framework, with some plugins sfImageTransformPlugin and sfImageTransformExtraPlugin for image transformations swCombinePlugin for JavaScript and CSS optimization ioMenuPlugin for the menus ... jQuery JavaScript framework colorbox plugin for overlays dataTables for Ajax tables jcarousel for slideshows git as source control Eclipse IDE bugzilla a bug tracker The current version is just the first milestone and there is still a lot of work to do. But first I am looking forward to see if there is any interest in a site like this and what the users want from it in the future.

Today I tried a restaurant which has been on my list for a while. Firstly because it is just one block away from my flat and second because it seems to be one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants in Barcelona. Can Kenji is located in an ugly tower block near Passeig de Sant Joan in the Eixample district. If you don’t know it is there it will be difficult to find. The restaurant itself is pretty small with just a handful of tables and a bar at the tiny kitchen. I took a seat at the bar with good view on the magic happening in the kitchen. I choose the medium tasting menu, which consisted of: a vegetable salad with soy sauce and razor clams, stir fried noodles with clams and mussels, a seared beef fillet, a selection of sushi and finally a ball of sesame ice cream. All together with a water for €17.40. This was the best lunch menu I had in my time in Barcelona. Every dish was fresh and I was able to watch while it was prepared. The sushi was the best bit, finally a nigiri with rice which didn’t taste three days old and fish which melts in your mouth. The stir fired noodles were also amazing. If I had to nitpick I would say the beef was a bit stringy and the ice too frozen, but I would take it again any time. You find the restaurant at C/Rossello 325, 08025 Barcelona and on-line at: www.cankenji.com .

Checked out another Asian restaurant this Friday. The menu contains a selection of Korean, Thai and Malaysian dishes. I went for the lunch menu again, which was a Laksa Lemak soup as starter and a merluza with sweet sauce. The soup was nice, the merluza rather bland. The deserts were the usual yoghurt/flan/cake selection, so I went for a coffee. Because they are one of my favourite dishes I also ordered Thai spring rolls. These are served cold and show their ingredients through their translucent rice skin. Very nice and I will be back to see if the other a la carte dishes are as good. All together ~ 12 Euro for the lunch menu and 6 Euro for the rolls. You can find it at C/Valencia 454 or on-line: http://restaurantbatik.com/ ...

Onion Bhaji Last week I finally checked out Bembi. It is supposed to be one of the few good Indian restaurants in Barcelona. As with Chinese restaurants it seems to be very difficult to find a good one in the rather large selection of Indian restaurants. I went for the lunch menu, which probably doesn't represent the overall quality because it is rather cheap at about 14€. The restaurant itself is nicely decorated and non-smoking. For starters I had the a bit greasy Onion Bhaji, fried onion fritters with a sweet sauce. The mains was Chicken Assadh, a green curry style dish with a saffron flavoured rice. And for desert the Gulab Jamun, a very nice cinnamon flavoured ice with milk caramel. Overall the lunch was a good average experience and made me want to check out the taster menu, which is a bit more expensive but probably better quality. Bembi www.bembi-barcelona.com Consell de Cent 377 08009 Barcelona Chicken Assadh Gulab Jamun Menu del Dia

I treated myself to some nice new toys and I am very happy with them, so here comes a short review. Logitech G9x Laser Mouse I already have a G9 at home, which is the best mouse I ever used. It is really a gamer mouse, but the high resolution laser, free rolling scroll wheel and the cable make it perfect for programming and desktop use. It also comes with adjustable weights, which helps to make it feel just right. I just bought a new one because I wanted to replace the G5 I had at work with this one. The G9x is pretty much the same with a better case and higher resolution. The new colour scheme also goes better with the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (which is the only Microsoft product in my house). As the G9 and G9x are the same price, the choice is really easy. With the G9x you can also adjust the colour of the LEDs and as everyone knows: a gadget is not a gadget if it has no blue LED. Nokia microSD/HD map 16GB MU-44 This is a memory upgrade for my Nokia N79. And when did memory get so small? The size of this is just silly, you can breath it in if you are not careful. SHARKOON SATA QuickPort PRO The main reason for this order. I needed another USB backup drive, because I want to make a backup before I do the Fedora 13 upgrade. I looked around for 2TB external USB drives or NAS, but they are all much too expensive. I also usually have some old hard-disks around that are leftovers from computer upgrades and needed a use for them. The Sharkoon is a dock where you can insert "naked" Sata drives directly. You connect it with e-sata and/or USB to your computer and that is it. It also acts as a USB hub with two ports and has a slot for SD/MMC/MS memory cards. It also has a switch to turn it off when not in use, which is a lot better than the usual external drives. It is also bloody fast over e-sata (they do a simpler version which just has USB). And that is it already. I am backing up everything now so Fedora 13 is next.