Speculaas Biscuits

• 2 Cups Bakels Gluten Free Flour
• 2 tsp Cinnamon
• 1 tsp Ground Ginger
• 1 tsp Nutmeg
• 1 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 125g Olivani 
• 5 tbsp Almond Milk
• 1 Egg
• 1/2 Cup Brown Sugar

Preheat oven to 180 Deg C

Add all ingredients into a bowl aside the Milk.

Add 1 tbsp of the Almond Milk and beat till well combined. The mixture will still be crumbly at this point.

Add the rest of the milk and beat till the mixture sticks to the beater.

Remove from bowl/beater onto a floured bench and hand knead / add flour till the mixture has just about lost its stickyness, take care not to add too much as it will quickly end up too dry to roll.

Add flour to bench / rolling pin and roll to desired thickness.

Cut shapes and add to oven tray, cook for 10 / 15 minutes until turning golden.

WCF Template auto-redirects

Just a post to consolidate the various information on the net regarding preventing WCF from redirecting upon a request passing or not passing a trailing slash when it differs from the UriTemplate declared on the service.

The bits needed....

First of a message inspector to check for the wcf redirect property and remove it from the Message.

Next you need to implement a custom contract behavior to make sure its applied high enough up the pipeline to prevent WCF doing its usual redirect.

Finally add it to your service host in the OnOpening override. And you should now find you no longer get redirected when passing an incorrect url to your WCF application.

Liquid Nerdz

Something the sproglets are bound to love and pretty good winter drink, called it liquid nerdz as they are as close to the taste as I could think of ;)

Throw the below into a mug add hot water and your good to go.

1 Twinings echinacea and raspberry teabag

1 decent tsp good quality honey

1 decent sized lemon

1 tsp raw sugar

Leave to brew after honey has dissolved .

Bit of a help to the immune system over winter and shouldn't have any trouble getting the kids to drink it :)

Citrus Cake GF/DF

Just to mix things up a bit I thought I'd share a recipe, as those who have Gluten intolerance will know getting nice home baking is a challenge and add dairy intolerance to the mix things get a lot harder, so here we go, the below should result in a nice moist citrus cake with a slightly toffee'ish crust.

INGREDIENTS:

175g Olivani Spread.
1 tsp Vanilla Essence.
1 3/4 cups raw sugar.
3 Eggs.
2 cups Bakels Gluten Free Flour.
2 tsp Gluten Free Baking Powder.
1 Cup Rice Milk.( or soy )
2 Lemons or small Oranges.

INTO IT!:

Heat oven to 180deg C.

Grease a 20cm cake tin or similar capacity ring tin.

Add Olivani, raw sugar, eggs and vanilla and beat well till mixture is even.

Finely grate the lemons into the mix, then add the juice beat well again.

Add the flour, baking powder and milk and beat mix well.

Once the mixture is even add to tin and bake for ~ 40 minutes or until top of cake is golden and springs back when touched.

Enjoy!.

WinRT

Today I was lucky enough to get along to the Microsoft WinRT Code Camp which was split into two parts , the morning session covered the stack and Metro UI guidelines and the afternoon hands on lab building an app, with the lab content allowing approaching such from the angle of a c#\XAML or HTML5 angle. The day went pretty well over all with the morning session filling in the gaps adequately with minimal issues from the gear given Windows 8 itself is still pre release. A couple of observations from the lab, I decided to run through the lab using the HTML5 based material given the heavy use of such within current projects at JADE and a personal interest in such ( and allergies to XAML... ) . Across the boards the WinRT Apis are consistent and appear vastly improved at a brief look, over the existing stack. While the JavaScript / HTML5 implementation at first made me wonder why one would bother going to the lengths of supporting the html5 spec just to provide a JavaScript API it became obvious in a short space of time , the implementation would be immediately familure to any web developer out there, deviations from the current w3 spec only to implement functionality not currently supported within such. ( with the intention to move to introduced specs going forward ) The only thing I found lacking in the space of the lab was a jQuery style selector , and a slightly odd way of defining the callback functions, I'd be interested in hearing from those who have experimented with common js patterns and generated Dom elements. On the c# side the new await keyword looks useful although I do wonder in some cases whether having the callback code defined in a seperate block is more readable than having the callback code inline but I guess that will become apparent going forward.

JOOB Mobile 2.5

After a rather pressed end to 2011 the new year has started well, we just dropped version 2.5 of JOOB Mobile.

Just a quick overview of the top 12 enhancements contained within the release:

Multiple Application Support

This adds the ability to manage multiple JOOB Mobile applications from one instance of the control panel, this is the initial step to a full multi-tenanted environment going forward.

Searching

In this release we add the capability to do searching in a RESTful manner in a simple, scalable and standardized way. Tyler has written an introduction to the new classes and functionality on the JOOB Mobile site here: RESTful searching with JOOB Mobile

Support for iOS5.1/Android 4/WP7 Mango

JOOB Mobile has been tested against iOS 5.1 betas, Android 4 ( Ice Cream Sandwich ) and Windows Phone 7 'Mango' , Server side has been tested against 64bit Windows releases from Vista through to Windows 8 Developer preview so you can be sure your applications will work with current devices going forward. 

Roles

This release contains finer grained Roles by default to allow better control of access out of the box without resorting to implementing your own access control plugin.

Test Client Framework

We have now shipped a test client framework within the product to make it easier to implement integration tests within JOOB Mobile applications. 

Priority Queues on Clients including TTL

Calls within the framework now allow the ability to pass in a Time To Live and priority, this was after feedback from developers wanting a way to immediately fail and return in certain cases, you can now for example allow a GET to jump the queue and only attempt the request once for time critical requests. 

New callback mechanism iOS

The iOS client library now allows the developer to pass in a target object and selector to be invoked on success and failure to allow better flow and easier development within your iOS applications. 

Control Panel redesign

The control panel has had a make over to freshen up the UI and improve the user experience.

In-memory requests on clients

You can now define whether you wish requests through our API to be persistent or not, previously ALL requests where persisted regardless to provide reliable delivery, you can now request operations to be non persistent where for example you may be dealing with sensitive data you do not wish to be stored on the device. 

Javascript support for multiple apps on same domain

The Javascript client now handles multiple JOOB Mobile applications being deployed within the same domain. 

Server Module in control Panel (log monitoring, heartbeat etc...)

We now have a server module to provide statistics and monitoring capabilities of the JOOB Mobile instance host.

Appcelerator Module 

This JOOB Mobile version contains the first release of an Appcelerator module ( currently only supporting iOS ) with the code base being opensourced and hosted on GitHub

As usual any issues can be logged on our issue tracking system or you can email us directly , feel free also to drop past our IRC channel on freenode #joobmobile or DM me on twitter @swishyTM.

ok maybe Im wrong,

After originally rambling to colleagues and the like about the iPad not going to do well due to a number of technical limitations around both the hardware and software I have decided that ok maybe it will take off.
It has happened prior, Dulux is a point in case while not the best paint on the market it managed to keep up with the competition as a product of good advertising, after talking to a few not technically orientated the iPad is already a hit despite the name.
Steve has managed once again to create a sense of wonder around apples new device, "Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price." while I doubt your going to see any unicorns rocking up around the iPad (and imho "unnbelievable price" is correct for a whole different reason ) the sense of awe appears to have transcended to the general public.
The iPad while technically not up to scratch when compared to a number of other vendors in this arena ( and to be honest even some of the ebook readers are more compelling ) it appears it will do well once again due to the fact its an apple...
As I mentioned on Johns comment regarding this yesterday my only concern is around h.264 being pushed as the default codec in what is supposed to be an open standard (html5), with google pushing it in the youtube beta and apple already supporting it, if this is the way of the internet browsing future things are not looking to hot for mozilla.