Idle State

This is the second abject-lesson-in-mediocrity meal experience that I have had at the The Butcher Shop & Grill in Doha (located in Villagio Mall in the food court area). You would have thought that I would have learned the first time. The menu does indicate that patrons should be prepared to wait for their meals as "consistency takes time". Unfortunately true, as the restaurant was consistently bad with both visits.

Ultimately, the food is stunningly overpriced. Obscenely overpriced, actually. The service amateur. The ambience is fine, if you like the noise and ambience of eating in a tiled bathroom with 100 screaming kids echoing around the cold impersonal walls, although if you prefer to have any warmth and intimacy suited to dining with friends, eat anywhere else but here. The overall experience, despite great company, was mostly underwhelming.

The Food
The menu is extensive and lures the unsuspecting punter on a promise. Soup of the day: mushroom. It was pleasant enough - about as pleasant as soup from a can - and nothing like the Mushroom soup to be had at neighbouring restaurant Le Petit Quotidien or the simply superb mushroom soup from Biello, across town.
Between us we had the seafood platter, lamb shanks and the double roasted lamb for main courses. The seafood platter lacked variety which is fairly inexcusable in this part of the world. The lamb shanks and double roasted lamb were appreciated. The portions seemed overly large at the expense of really well prepared and presented food. What we received was really on par with a pub counter meal or cafeteria style food.
Although it is advertised that meats may be selected from the Butcher (located in the centre of the restaurant) on both occasions that I visited, the butcher shop was embarrassingly empty with no fare at all being displayed.

Service
The service was poor, as it is in many Doha restaurants. Staff with little or no training, that forget to bring dishes (still waiting for the baked potato...), that interrupt conversion at the table, clear dishes away before all the patrons are finished (and even clearing a soup plate from which one of our party was simultaneously trying to eat!), not knowing who had ordered which drink or meal and staff who mistake constant interruption nervous "is everything ok?" queries as being good service.

The bill includes a non-optional 10% service charge on top of already exorbitant prices - which riles me no end - particularly if, as in the case of The Butcher Shop, the service resembles a country circus act rather than service for a pleasant dinner.

The Ambience
Here is where The Butcher Shop & Grill really fails to shine. The restaurant is located within a food hall - a cavernous tiled featureless space with few redeeming features. There is no division between the restaurant space and the thorough-fares of the food court leaving the restaurant patrons feeling uncomfortably exposed. Less than twenty metres away are the gaudy signs and less-than-fragrant smells of a number of well known fast-food establishments. The tables have a ridiculous molded bevel (as wide as a paperback) around them making them completely impractical for sitting comfortably without continually feeling like glassware and personal items are just about to slide off onto the floor. Most of our party were overly, uncomfortably cold, even while wearing sweaters and outdoor jackets inside.

The Bill
As I mentioned earlier, The Butcher Shop and Grill is simply overpriced. Similar meals in more comfortable climes around Doha may be had for less than half the price.

Overall - it's not surprising that the restaurant was not particularly busy. It has few redeeming features and you certainly won't walk away from dining at The Butcher Shop feeling satisfactorily well fed.

And one more thing: The Butcher Shop & Grill is hardly the "one and only" if it's franchised all over the place is it? Sheesh.

...so if this pos.t isx a l1ttle sl0 and hard to reqd it's becase Im tping from the Mddle Est. Not really. The sand storms are making it hard to read my screen. (No kidding - it's really windy and cold here at the moment.)

In the last two days, some dudes in ships have "accidently" dragged their anchors through three submarine cables providing network to us here in the Gulf and some of India.

See Blogger News Network

So for the past few days the internet has been noticeably slower than it's usual Middle East 'net slowness. All my favourite sites are timing out fairly frequently the international telephone is fairly unreliable. Strangely I don't feel particularly disconnected from the rest of the planet although it would probably be different if we had no connection at all.

Side Note To App Designers In The US: not everyone has the benefit of the speeds that you have for net access. A few infamous web applications that constantly run into trouble because their designers underestimated the response times in locales like ours: Facebook (interminably slow), Google Reader (constantly times-out too quickly on Ajax requests), Blackberry by Etilasat (DNS lookups can take time - be more patient and get the freakin' email delivered rather than just giving up), DVorak.org (so much crap on the page that it takes forever to load - and then you have to reload the page because the cretins don't give you the content until your referer is their own site !?!)

Oh. And while I'm ranting, all you in the US who think US $10 per month internet is expensive: Here in Qatar we have an entrenched carrier and we pay over US $100 per month for 2048/512 DSL that has about one 9 and four zeroes reliability. So quit griping.

There's probably some fabulous CIA or anti-terrorist plot or another price-of-oil conspiracy theory or maybe there's just a a coincidently high number of sailors with particularly bad seamanship in West Asia at the moment. Not sure. Anyhow, if you can't contact your local bank's outsourced call centre over the next few days, that's why.

Update: I received loads of traffic from searches for "cable cut conspiracy". Seems like there's now a fourth cut cable and Egypt are claiming that there actually wasn't any ships in the area that where the cable runs. As far as I can tell, it probably is one of three things - damage caused when the spy submarines were tapping into the cable offshore, built in obsolescence (anyone seen an Alcatel salesman hanging around?) or maybe it's the reverse vampires. "We're through the looking-glass here, people".

More Here

I've been conversing, on and off, with an old friend of mine who hails from Melbourne and he just sent me his "remastered" website and blog - which all looks kind of fabulous - and clearly the considerable effort has had some great results.

If, like me, you're interested in food, well, Syrup And Tang is definitely worth a visit. Duncan - self confessed "Writer, Eater, Cakebatterbeater" - is somewhat less loquacious than me so you won't find any dull posts blathering about the dog. Take a look.

Been meaning for such a long time to work out how to remove this (uncharacteristically for Apple) naff picture from my login screen:

Needless to say, it's not really my cup-of-tea. I'm surprised Apple didn't use a photo of their Dear Leader - although the actual login window would probably have covered Steve's face.

I hope that Tinkertool add the ability to change this (plus perhaps a few more Dock configuration bits and pieces would go astray).

In the mean time, if you want to change the picture, you need to go under the bonnet and replace this file:

/System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

with the image file that you'd prefer.

There's a longer description on how to do it here.

I've just been playing around with DDNS on Fedora again. I do this every few months on a new box so this post is as much an aide mémoire for myself as much as anything, however, others might find it useful. The DHCP DNS interaction on linux seems to be quite poorly Howto'd despite best intentions.

I'm working with an FC8 box. Here's the highlights (I mean, the description is deliberately terse) of the configuration that you need to make Secure DDNS work:

Make An Update Key

Fedora comes with rndc.key supplied. I suggest not using a well known generic key. Generate your own like so:

  dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 512 -n HOST somehost.somedomain.com

The generation process may appear to hang due to a lack of entropy - so if this is the case, open a window and start typing the World's Greatest Novel in another window on the server.

The Key File Format

It should look something like this:

  key somehost.somedomain.com. {

    algorithm HMAC-MD5;

    secret "Nd2+awholelotofseeminglyrandomstuff /moreseeeminglyrandomstuff==";

  };

SELinux and Keyfiles

If you're using SELinux, the context of the key file should, for dhcpd, should be:

  [etc]# ls -Z update.key

  -rw-r-----  root named system_u:object_r:dnssec_t:s0 update.key

  ddns-domainname "somedomain.com" ;

  ddns-update-style interim ;

  ddns-ttl 86400;

  key somehost.somedomain.com. {

    algorithm HMAC-MD5 ;

    secret ##$$##$$##$$ put your public key data here ;

  }

  zone somedomain.com. {

    primary 127.0.0.1 ;

    key somehost.somedomain.com. ;

  }

  zone 1.168.192.in-addr.arpa. {

    primary 127.0.0.1 ;

    key somehost.somedomain.com. ;

  }

  subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0

  {

    ...

    ignore-client-updates ;

    ddns-updates on ;

    ...

  }

Now, the named.conf file:

In each zone that you want to allow updates:

  zone "somedomain.com" IN {

    ...

    allow-update {

      key somehost.somedomain.com. ;

    }

    ....

  };

  zone "somedomain.com" IN {

    ...

    update-policy

    {

      grant somehost.somedomain.com. subdomain somedomain.com. TXT ;

    }

    ...

  };

  include "/etc/update.key";

Config testing can be done with:

  named-checkconf
  service dhcpd configtest

I'm dubious about the results from configtest as you'll see later.

Test With nsupdate

Here's a completely uncommented example. Implies that the configs are fine and you've restarted at least named and checked /var/log/messages for anything additional:

  [etc]# nsupdate -k Ksomehost.somedomain.com.+157+08869.private 

  > server 127.0.0.1

  > zone somedomain.com.

  > update add newhost.somedomain.com. 86400 IN A 192.168.1.1

  > show

  Outgoing update query:

  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: UPDATE, status: NOERROR, id:      0

  ;; flags: ; ZONE: 0, PREREQ: 0, UPDATE: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

  ;; ZONE SECTION:

  ;somedomain.com.		IN	SOA

  ;; UPDATE SECTION:

  newhost.somedomain.com. 86400 IN A	192.168.1.1

  > send

  > quit

  [etc]# ping newhost

  PING newhost.somedomain.com (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

  64 bytes from somehost (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.053 ms

  64 bytes from somehost (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.029 ms

  --- newhost.somedomain.com ping statistics ---

  2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 999ms

  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.029/0.041/0.053/0.012 ms

Key File Strangeness / Incompatibility

Unless I'm mistaken, it seems that named and dhcpd prefer the update.key file to be in slightly different format. named needs quotation marks surrounding the key or else it gives this error:

  [etc]# named-checkconf

  /etc/update.key:3: missing ';' before '/'

  /etc/update.key:3: '}' expected near '/'

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: /etc/update.key line 3: invalid base64 character 32.

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: #011secret "xxyyxxxyxyxyxyxyx /xixixkxxjxjx

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd:            ^

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: /etc/update.key line 4: expecting a parameter or declaration

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: };

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: ^

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: /etc/dhcpd.conf line 24: /etc/update.key: bad parse.

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: include "/etc/update.key"

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd:         ^

  Feb 7 somehost dhcpd: Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting

I believe that dhcpd is at fault here - the config file should allow the quotation marks.

Versions

I'm using FC8 with Bind 9.5.0-23 and dhcp 3.0.6-12.

Some References

This article is great - very complete - even though it is now quite old:
my newbie DDNS-HOWTO http://www.lugs.org.sg/pipermail/slugnet/2003-January/002848.html

The following articles are great, but they don't have the dhcp config:
nsupdate: Painless Dynamic DNS http://linux.yyz.us/nsupdate/
Painless DDNS part 2: the server http://linux.yyz.us/dns/ddns-server.html

With the tubes running at less than dialup speeds lately, here in Qatar, I decided to do some purely academic bittorrent download benchmarking. Here are torrents for three CD size images:

Yes - it does read "20 days", "90 days" and "95 days" - slight down on the maximum of 145 days earlier today.

This is due to some fairly impressive failures of submarine cables in the last week. It would be fair to ask why I am clogging up the pipes trying to download torrents when things as basic as porn web sites are downloading very slowly (I'm told). Something to do with net neutrality I guess...

This is naught, nonetheless, when compared with the catastrophe of me running out of Vegemite today, and, the yeast-extract equivalent of the Nectar-Of-The-Gods not being available anywhere - I repeat - anywhere in Qatar.

The last bottle I purchased here, several months ago, was actually the last bottle that I have seen on the shelves here in Qatar. It cost me QAR 30 (US $ 8.25) for 175 grams. If we presume the net weight of Vegemite is 150 grams, the that works out at about 5.5 cents per gram - but every glorious gram worth it.

Like some junkie facing imminent withdrawal, I have been cotton-shooting every last scraping of Vegemite, eking it out of the jar for my morning toast; I have hunted all known supermarkets for the goods; pleaded with friends to have some of their stuff; and tried to be satisfied with the methodone of condiments, Marmite, but there is no substitute.

This is a disaster.

<sniff>

Found this while randomly surfing, It's cute:

I'm always amused when I visit Costa Coffee here - right in the middle of Arabia - to be served "traditional coffee". Partly because Costa started in the London, not Italy; a little because coffee in Arabia preceded coffee in Italy by around 600 years and preceded Costa Coffee by about 1000 years; and slightly because there's not an Italian (or Arab for that matter) anywhere in sight preparing my coffee. Just goes to show that globalisation and marketing without adapting the local franchises to the local market is just plain brain dead. Of course, if your local market, on the whole, are not very discerning and fairly subservient to imperialist consumerism and not so then it probably doesn't matter anyway.

Wall Street Journey (from The Sun) writes here that Bill Gates has had to stop using Facebook:

“But he signed off after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and spotted weird fan sites about him,”

Apparently, 8000 friend requests is a problem (I wouldn't know). That explains why he hasn't accepted my friend request. I wonder how many pokes he gets a day?

Seems like it shouldn't be a problem if Bill was to use, say, Firefox, and then run a Greasemonkey script to politely decline all those friend requests automatically.

Or maybe he's actually just bored with his $240 Million facebook toy like the rest of us...