April 2010 Archives

This week saw a visit to The Harwood Arms - a gastro pub in Fulham, recently awarded a Michelin star. It is round a few corners from Fulham Road, on a quiet suburban street. From the outside the place looks like a pub, but inside it is set up like a restaurant. Apart from the bar and a small sofa area, the entire floorspace is occupied with tables. So I can't imagine your meal would ever be interrupted by casual drinkers, although there is a quiz night every Tuesday.

The menu focusses on British produce with a special emphasis on game, most of which is apparently hunted or caught by the owners. For a starter I had a wild mushroom soup with mussel fritters. There was a surprisingly large amount, although it was so nice it certainly was not a problem to get through it all. The main dish was shoulder of deer for two with celeriac mash, vegetables and a little salad. It all came on a large platter so that you could carve the shoulder yourself. However, this wasn't at all arduous as the meat was so beautifully tender it just fell off the bone. Again, a large amount of delightful food. After that I was too full for dessert, but I'm assured the sticky toffee and date ice cream with lemon curd was delicious.

The Harwood Arms had a pleasant atmosphere, not quite a pub but still welcoming. Service was prompt and courteous. The cost was reasonable for a top restaurant (by London standards!), dinner for two (starters, main and one dessert) with wine was under £100. Excellent food and well worth a visit.

Available on iTunes and OU Podcasts

This Open University series examines theatre during the time of Classical Greece. In particular it details the production of the world's oldest surviving play The Persians by Aeschylus, first performed in Athens at the Theatre of Dionysus in 472BC. Like the other OU podcasts, this series is a set of short documentaries to accompany lectures. There are 4 video podcasts totalling around 40 minutes in length, with the individual videos ranging from 7 to 14 minutes. They are available in iPod or a larger (640×360) format. There are also transcripts. The visuals are mainly talking heads interspersed with shots of theatre ruins, vases or in later episodes modern productions of The Persians.

The first video details what the Theatre of Dionysus would have looked like in the 5th century BC and what it would have meant culturally to attend the theatre at that time. Performances would have been important events, it is estimated that the theatre could probably hold around a third of the male citizens of Athens (it is not certain women were allowed to attend). The second video covers the actors and chorus in Ancient Greek theatre. Ancient Greek plays only had 2 or 3 actors, who would each play multiple parts while wearing masks. The next video examines how some Greek plays have managed to survive 2500 years - only 7 of Aeschylus' estimated 90 plays still exist. The last episode discusses some modern interpretations of The Persians.

A good short podcast series, but probably only for people particularly interested in Ancient Greek theatre.

I just got back from a holiday to Greece (Athens and Hydra mainly). Here are the best photos from that trip. The set on Flickr is here.

In another of my recent series of generic utility Java classes, I present a multi-channel asynchronous throttler. My project connected to an external webservice which imposed draconian restrictions if usage went above a certain level - defined as whether there were more than X service calls in Y seconds. I was determined to stay under this level. Furthermore, some types of service calls were more expensive than others and had their own limits in addition to the overall limit. That is for certain types of service call I had stay under two limits - a call specific limit and the overall limit that applied to all calls. I refer to this as multi-channel throttling. Also, I wanted the throttler to be asynchronous, that is I did not want to stop procesing while waiting for the webservice to respond to my call. Looking on the web I found a number of throttlers, but none that matched my multi-channel, asynchronous requirements.