27 Old Compton Street is a restaurant close to Shaftesbury Avenue. It sits among the busy streets of SOHO, it is hip, and it focusses on pasta.

I had the Pumpkin Ravioli, and my husband the Cacio e Pepe Bucatini. We thought the dishes to be lovely, but in our opinion the pasta was a little too al dente for us — another 30 seconds in the pan, and it would have been perfect.

We followed with a portion to share of their only dessert, a pistachio sweet gnocchi — these were little gnocchi sized doughnuts with a liquid pistachio filling with a scoop of ice-cream and some crushed and chopped pistachios (mind the inevitable squirt when you cut in).

Next time I'd have the courgette fries too which the table next to us had and looked great.

We were in and out in about 45 minutes.

Cacio e Pepe Bucatini

1 / 3

Pumpkin Ravioli

2 / 3

Pistachio Gnocchi

3 / 3

❮ ❯

In SOHO, in the hubbub of central London, Duck & Rice is a busy establishment with a lively atmosphere. There is a big tank of Pilsner Urquell tank beer downstairs when you get in.

We arrived a little before seven, and the place was nearly full, with hip people a fair bit younger than we are, as well as a some people about the same age or older. The menu is fairly extensive, but focuses on Cantonese food.

We started with some sesame prawn toast as starter. The two pieces of toast were cut length wise, resulting in four tasty morsels. They were moist, flavourful, and the right amount of crispy.

Our mains came shortly after the starters, way before we could finish the toast. I chose their signature dish, the "Duck & Rice" as my main dish. My wife had the king prawn Katsu curry rice, but I believe she was slightly wishing she'd had the Duck & Rice as well. That isn't to say that the prawns weren't well cooked, or the sauce wasn't perfectly nice, but sometimes you just have to have the signature dish; like the table of three next to us, but the missus was willing to "take one for the team" and ordered something else (thanks!)

The Duck & Rice consisted of a roasted duck, with a sweet and crispy skin, over a well cooked rice. I was initially concerned as the duck also came with a leg with bones. I'm not too keen if I have to effectively gnaw meat off bones (spare ribs excluded). However, it was only the one leg, and I was pleased the rest of the meat was off the bone, as well as being perfectly cooked, spiced, and paired perfectly with the rice. Because the skin was slightly sweet, so were the juices that seeped into the rice. The cucumber added a pleasant bite of freshness.

Instead of having wine, it made much more sense to us to have a beer, especially because they have some exclusive ones (we like beer). Which meant that with our dinner we enjoyed a Duck Pale Ale and an Orion Lager.

When we booked, the table was reserved for two hours. However as the service was quick, and we only really had two courses, and one drink each, we were in and out in a smidgen under an hour. The quick service, and the location of Duck and Rice, close to many theatres, might make this an ideal spot for a pre-theatre meal.

We might be back at some point, to try some other intriguing dishes.

Prawn Toast

1 / 3

King Prawn Katsu Curry

2 / 3

Duck and Rice

3 / 3

❮ ❯

The Oystermen is a restaurant not far from Covent Garden. We've been before, but many years ago, probably pre-pandemic. As the name suggests they specialise in oysters and henceforth we had plenty of them.

For our starter we picked a raw Jersey rock oyster each, which were fresh and delicious. However, this spot also does cooked oysters, which is more unusual, so we also enjoyed a couple of seaweed oysters which were served with a seaweed butter, and two tempura oysters.

As our arrival drink we fancied a cocktail, and we're quite keen on Martinis. We decided to have a Martini with an oyster in it, because, you know… when at an oyster restaurant! It worked even better after we added a drop of the leftover oyster juice to our cocktail. The Oyster garnish took the place of the more usual olive and added a similar salty, briny tang. Definitely one to try if you get the opportunity.

For our mains my wife ordered a mackerel, which came with a horseradish sauce. I ordered the Gurnard, curried, with a few chilli flakes. We also chose to have some fries on the side. These were crispy, with a lightly spiced coating which worked well with both main courses. We also ordered a glass of Chardonnay each.

We still fancied a digestif. My wife had a glass of the Sazerac Straight Rye, which in my opinion could have done with a bit of ice. I selected a Somerset cider brandy, which I had never had before.

We really enjoyed our time at the Oystermen. The food is excellent, the ambience is great, and on top of that they play recordings of the shipping forecast in the toilets, which are located downstairs. I think we'll be back at some point.

Jersey Rock Oysters

1 / 6

Seaweed and Tempura Cooked Oysters

2 / 6

Curried Gurnard

3 / 6

Mackerel with Horseradish Sauce

4 / 6

Oyster Martini

5 / 6

Spiced Fries

6 / 6

❮ ❯

Richoux is a French bistro restaurant that used to be situated on Piccadilly near the Ritz, but they've now moved to Regent Street, next to the BBC Broadcasting House.

We went when they still hadn't quite opened yet, their so-called "soft opening".

I choose, as one of my favourite starters, the Escargots de Bourgogne: snails in a pesto-like sauce. The sauce was fairly oily, and I sort of wished I'd had some bread with that. My wife had the Rillette de Saumon, a nice enough (but not overly exciting) salmon pate with some toasted bread.

As her main, my wife picked the Steak Frites with a Béarnaise sauce. She ordered it medium rare. It was well cooked and well seasoned, but not too well rested. I had a Filet de Saumon, which was also quite nice, but nothing particularly very special. With our main, we also had a bottle of wine. Wines start at around £40.

In the end, we thought the meal was a little disappointing and on the pricier side. One thing that was useful, is that because they were in their "soft opening" mode, all the food was half price.

I don't think we're going back to Richoux. But if you're in a mood for some French food, near Regent's Street, then they'll be able to provide you with a solid meal. To be honest, if you really want French food, you’d be better heading to Le Vieux Comptior, which isn't very far away in Marylebone, or Le Garrick in Covent Garden.

Snails in a Pesto Sauce

1 / 4

Salmon Rillette

2 / 4

Salmon Filet

3 / 4

Steak Frites

4 / 4

❮ ❯

On the phpc.chat Discord, a user of a website was complaining that a site required them to select their home time zone from the 500 item long list of IANA Time Zone Identifiers. You might have encountered these in the form of Europe/London, America/Los_Angeles, or Asia/Gaza.

But the fact is, these identifiers are not intended to be shown to users directly. They indicate the largest populated city in the are that the time zone covers, when the time zone identifier was established. It is therefore not even the 'capital' city, and henceforth we have Asia/Shanghai, and not Asia/Beijing.

This is a useful feature, because sometimes it is necessary to split a zone in two, and then there is no need to argue what the name of each of the two split zones should be.

Although these identifiers are stable, they shouldn't be used in front-ends to let users of websites choose what their zone is. And certainly not in a single big list.

Instead, the Time Zone Database carries extra information for zones to indicate to which country/countries they belong, their centroid coordinates, and often a comment. These comments are user-presentable and used to distinguish between the various options in a specific country.

PHP exposes this functionality too.

For example, you can list all the identifiers belonging to a country with the following code:

<?php
$tzids = DateTimeZone::listIdentifiers(DateTimeZone::PER_COUNTRY, 'PS');
var_dump($tzids);
?>

Which outputs:

array(2) {
  [0] => string(9) "Asia/Gaza"
  [1] => string(11) "Asia/Hebron"
}

So now we know that there are two time zones associated with Palestine.

Where there is more than one time zone per country, the TZDB also includes a comment with each time zone. You can query these with PHP as well:

<?php
$tz = new DateTimeZone('Asia/Hebron');
echo $tz->getLocation()['comments'], "\n";
?>

Which outputs:

West Bank

Each getLocation()'s return value also includes the country_code element:

<?php
$tz = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Kyiv');
echo $tz->getLocation()['country_code'], "\n";
?>

Which outputs: UA.

These features together make it possible to create a user-friendly time zone selector. You can either first ask for the country, and then present all time zones for this country, like I have shown above. For this you would use DateTimeZone::listIdentifiers(DateTimeZone::PER_COUNTRY, $country_code) and DateTimeZone->getLocation()['comments'], or you can build up an array of all zones organised by country code (and cache this information):

<?php
$tzs = [];

foreach (DateTimeZone::listIdentifiers() as $tzid) {
        $tz = new DateTimeZone($tzid);
        $location = $tz->getLocation();

        $tzs[$location['country_code']][$tzid] =
                $location['comments'] ?: 'Whole Region';
}

ksort($tzs);
var_export($tzs);
?>

This outputs a very big list, an extract looks like:

…
'GB' =>
array (
  'Europe/London' => 'Whole Region',
),
…
'PS' =>
array (
  'Asia/Gaza' => 'Gaza Strip',
  'Asia/Hebron' => 'West Bank',
),
…

Of course, you also shouldn't show country codes to users, and translate Whole Region into your user's preferred language.

The Unicode Consortium's Unicode Common Data Repository project can help you with expressing the country code as a name. I have used icanboogie/cldr for this before.

With:

composer require icanboogie/common:^6.0-dev icanboogie/accessor:^6.0-dev icanboogie/cldr:^6.0-dev``

The full example would look like:

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use ICanBoogie\CLDR\Repository;
use ICanBoogie\CLDR\Cache\CacheCollection;
use ICanBoogie\CLDR\Cache\RuntimeCache;
use ICanBoogie\CLDR\Provider\CachedProvider;
use ICanBoogie\CLDR\Provider\WebProvider;

$locale = 'en';

$provider = new CachedProvider(
        new WebProvider,
        new CacheCollection([
                new RunTimeCache,
        ])
);
$repository = new Repository($provider);

$tzs = [];

foreach (DateTimeZone::listIdentifiers() as $tzid) {
        $tz = new DateTimeZone($tzid);
        $location = $tz->getLocation();

        try {
                $territory = $repository->territory_for($location['country_code']);
                $countryName = $territory->name_as($locale);
        } catch (Exception $e) {
                $countryName = 'Unknown';
        }

        $tzs[$countryName][$tzid] =
                $location['comments'] ?: 'Whole Region';
}

ksort($tzs);
var_export($tzs);
?>

With as excerpted output (using the en locale):

…
'Palestinian Territories' => array (
   'Asia/Gaza' => 'Gaza Strip',
   'Asia/Hebron' => 'West Bank',
 ),
…
'United Kingdom' => array (
  'Europe/London' => 'Whole Region',
),
…

Or with the cy (Welsh) locale:

…
'Tiriogaethau Palesteinaidd' =>
array (
  'Asia/Gaza' => 'Gaza Strip',
  'Asia/Hebron' => 'West Bank',
),
…
'Y Deyrnas Unedig' =>
array (
  'Europe/London' => 'Whole Region',
),
…

Now you just need to find out how to translate Whole Region into each language. Pob Lwc!

We went to Locatelli's, a fairly new restaurant, situated in the redeveloped Sainsbury's wing of the National Gallery. This meant that we actually had to go into the gallery to go to the restaurant, including a security and bag check.

It was a nice warm and sunny evening and when we got there, we walked up to the first floor and were sat down in quite a nice area. During the evening, the lighting varied a bit as somebody was seemingly playing with the dimmer switch inside the restaurant. This was slightly irritating. We really wanted them to pick a light level, and then stick with it.

Because neither of us were massively hungry, we opted to have one of the snacks on the menu, rather than a full starter. My wife went for the Parma ham and Parmesan cheese starter, which came with delightful big chunks of cheese and a slightly salty ham. I had crackers with sesame seeds, and a full flavoured, and delicious whipped goat cream.

For our mains, I selected a Stone Bass fillet, which came with samphire, some mushrooms, and some salad. The fish skin was nicely grilled and crisp, with the fish flaky. My wife had a roast chicken, which came with polenta and some vegetables in a tomato sauce with some crisp sage leaves on top. To drink with our food, we shared a lovely and fresh bottle of wine made with Caterratto grapes.

We really enjoyed it, and the restaurant had a good atmosphere. The service was speedy and friendly from the moment we arrived to the point we left. We didn't stay for dessert though, as we weren’t very hungry, but the dessert options sounded lovely… one for another visit, perhaps.

Overall, dining in part of a gallery, located on the first floor adjacent to a gift shop is slightly strange. But the meal was tasty, the service and ambience lovely, and it was fairly good value for a central London location.

It would be a good place to go on a date, or if you just fancied a meal after some sightseeing, or gallery touring.

Sesame Crackers with Whipped Goat Cream

1 / 4

Parma Ham with Parmesan Cheese Cubes

2 / 4

Stone Bass Fillet

3 / 4

Roast Chicken

4 / 4

❮ ❯

This restaurant is situated in the new-ish development Sir Simon Milton Square, close to Victoria Station. We've visited this area previously when we dined at the Rail House Victoria, and at Camino Victoria, which are both close by however on a warm summer evening we decided to go for some Portuguese cuisine.

Casa del Frango, specialise in Portuguese grill dishes. We started with a pair of Salgadinhos, crispy filled empanada pastry with kale, mushroom, and caramelised onions. These were hot and fresh and vanished quite quickly.

For my main course, my husband chose the lamb chops, which were also nicely grilled and still moist. I picked the beef skewers, which were also well cooked. Neither of these dishes came with sides, so we ordered some house rice to go with our mains to make a full meal. Without the rice, we'd likely still have been hungry.

Even after that, we still liked some dessert, and had one each. I had a Bolo de Bolocha, a Portuguese biscuit cake with vanilla ice cream and salted caramel, which was possibly a bit too sweet and creamy overall. And my husband had a classic Pastel de Nata, a custard tart. This came served with cinnamon ice cream on the side.

Casa do Franco in Victoria is pretty good, but the service was slower than ideal, and in particular we had to wait a while to order. The food was nice, but the restaurant felt expensive and a little “big box”, lacking something in ambience. So although we like Portuguese food, I’m not sure if we’d return here. However, as there are many other restaurants in this development, we’ll no doubt be back in the area to try another soon.

Salgadinhos

1 / 6

Lamb Chops

2 / 6

House Rice

3 / 6

Beef Skewers

4 / 6

Pastel de Nata

5 / 6

Bolo do Bolocha

6 / 6

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 27 hours on Xdebug, with 29 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailing list, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

This restaurant is located in Eccleston Yards, a recently renovated pedestrian-only historic courtyard, not far from Victoria Station. The Jones Family Kitchen is, what might be described as a “steak focused restaurant” but they also have a few other options for those avoiding red meat. As well as a cosy dining area inside, there is a large outside terrace, where on this warm and sunny evening a lot of people were enjoying their meals and drinks.

To start, we enjoyed some cheese polenta balls, which were served with a spicy mayonnaise. These were soft and crispy in all the right ways, and the mayo serving was very generous… so generous that we were able to enjoy it with the chips we had with our main course.

For our mains, we both chose the same cut of meat, a 10 oz sirloin steak, medium rare. I opted for no condiments, but my wife added some béarnaise sauce. On the side, we shared a portion of triple cooked chips, and green beans. The steaks were perfectly cooked, well rested, and slightly charred on the outside, with the fat mostly rendered. The beans were nice and soft, and the chips crispy on the outside. Some of those chips got dipped in the spicy mayonnaise mentioned earlier. We also enjoyed a bottle of Rioja, which accompanied our steaks nicely.

Afterwards, we fancied a little dessert. I had a scoop of apple sorbet, and my wife picked a rhubarb ice cream that tasted remarkably like peach ice cream—still tasty though.

It's a bit on the pricier side if you go for steak, but the food was of excellent quality, and the service attentive. There are several other interesting looking restaurants around the same courtyard, so we might be back for those too.

Cheese Polenta Balls

1 / 4

Sirloin Steak

2 / 4

Beans and Chips

3 / 4

Sorbet and Ice Cream

4 / 4

❮ ❯

My wife and I run a blog where we review the restaurants we go to when we go out for dinner on Friday evenings.

And on this website you can look at all the reviews, but it is a bit difficult to see as to where the restaurants are.

So I decided that I wanted to add a map to our website.

We have already recorded the addresses for this, but not quite yet the coordinates.

So in order to show a map we needed to convert the addresses to coordinates, and there are several ways of doing so.

You can roll something yourself with a Nominatim, which is part of the OpenStreetMap project. But I decided to try a different service, called OpenCageData, which provides a geocoding service. I didn't want to maintain a geocoder myself.

After signing up and creating API keys, I used their PHP library (handily recommended during the on boarding process) to convert all my addresses to latitude/longitude pairs. This required a bit of fiddling, as it was fairly picky about what it would accept. Although we mostly go to places in London, it really didn't like geocoding places with "The Netherlands" as address, and instead insisted on my using "Netherlands". I updated the source material to cope with this.

With the finicky bits out of the way, I changed my blog's software to add a coordinate pair whenever it sees a new entry and address. But to start, I had to go through all of the reviews of restaurants that we already had, and pass their addresses through the geocoder:

<?php
$geocoder = new \OpenCage\Geocoder\Geocoder($OpenCageKey);

$location = "{$entry['title']}, {$entry['location']}";
$geocoded = $geocoder->geocode( $location );

if ( count( $geocoded['results'] ) > 1 )
{
  foreach ( $geocoded['results'] as $result )
  {
    if ( $result['components']['_category'] === 'commerce' )
    {
      $finalResult = $result;
    }
  }
}

Of course, for that to work, you need to have the $OpenCageKey set to your API key.

The geocoder then gives me a coordinate pair in latitude and longitude. Often there are multiple results. Although each result has a confidence level attached to it, the result for just the postcode is higher than the actual accurate point of interest for the restaurant, even though I also pass in its name as part of the $location.

Because of this, is have to loop over the results and pick the right one (with lower confidence level), if an actual commerce place, indicating a restaurant, was found.

I store these pairs in the database, and then I can use them for generating a map with all the restaurants that we have reviewed.

After I had created these coordinate pairs, upon a page load, my blog software creates a big GeoJSON file with all the features. I embed this into my rendered web page to prevent extra round-trips to the server. I wouldn't suggest to do this if the data updates frequently, or if you have a lot of locations to display.

An example of the generated code looks like, after formatting it for easy viewing:

var geojsonFeatures = [
  {
    "type":"Feature",
    "properties": {
      "name": "Spicy Grill",
      "rating": "4",
      "popupContent":
        "<h3><a href=\"\/spicy-grill-jkb\">Spicy Grill<\/a> <small style=\"font-weight: normal\">(Rating: 4)<\/small><\/h3>"
        "<p>122 Golders Green Road, London NW11 8HB<\/p>"
        "<small>Starters: \u00a33.00-\u00a37.50<br\/>Mains: \u00a39.50-\u00a313.50<\/small>"
    },
    "geometry": {
      "type": "Point",
      "coordinates": [-0.2007587,51.5739245]
    }
  },
  …
];

I then use a JavaScript library called Leaflet, a library that I've used many times for many of my other side projects to render these restaurants on the map. The code for this is fairly simple too.

The id="map" div is where Leaflet renders the map, which you create in JavaScript with:

<div id="map" style="height: 500px; align: center;"></div>

I then configure the OpenStreetMap map layer URL, attribution, and some configuration options for Leaflet:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var map = new L.Map('map', {zoomControl: false});

  var osmUrl = 'https://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
    osmAttribution = 'Map data &copy; 2025 <a href="https://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors',
    osm = new L.TileLayer(osmUrl, {maxZoom: 18, attribution: osmAttribution});

I also created a specific icon instead of relying on the standard marker for points:

var forks = L.icon({
  iconUrl: '/images/meal.svg',
  iconSize: [ 24, 24 ],
});

And include the GeoJson blog from earlier:

var geojsonFeatures = …

And bind the GeoJSON data layer to the map, with the data (geojsonFeatures), a conversion layer (pointToLayer) to add the markers, set the title with the feature's properties.name, add a pop-up for each feature (onEachFeature), and then add the layer to the map with addTo(map):

L.geoJSON(
  geojsonFeatures, {
  pointToLayer: function(feature, latlng) {
    return L.marker(latlng, {
      icon: forks,
      riseOnHover: true,
      title: feature.properties.name
    });
  },
  onEachFeature: function(feature, layer) {
    layer.bindPopup(feature.properties.popupContent)
  }
}).addTo(map);

I then center the map to a strategic location in London, and add the osm layer to the map with addLayer:

  map.setView(new L.LatLng(51.513, -0.177), 13).addLayer(osm);
</script>

Finally I add the map to the div element map by instantiating L.Map, and prevent zoom controls from showing:

var map = new L.Map('map', {zoomControl: false});

To see the full code, you can do "view source" on the page that shows our mapped restaurants.

When you click on an icon, you get a pop up with the title and a link to the review, with some useful information such as our rating, the address, and a cost indication:

This actually didn't take me a lot of time to do, but mostly because I'm always relatively familiar with Leaflet.

I enjoyed working on this project to add a map to the website.

And when I now look at it, I can see all the lovely places, and sometimes less lovely places where we had our Friday night dinners. If you zoom out far enough, you can also see the far away places we enjoyed our meals at. Let us know if you make it to one of them!

We don't usually venture out to this part of North London, but on this warm Friday evening we found ourselves at Spicy Grill, a Korean BBQ restaurant in Golders Green. There is a large Jewish presence in this area, which meant that about half the restaurants were closed, due to it being a Friday evening.

The restaurant itself is an open space with a scattering of smaller tables along the walls, and a larger table for groups in the middle. Each table has its own grill.

The menu is extensive, with salads, appetizers, tempura, different meats for barbecuing, and even seafood. You can grill it yourself, or the kitchen can do it for you.

We settled for some pumpkin croquettes and seaweed rolls to start. The croquettes had a crumbly coating, and were slightly spiced. The seaweed rolls were crunchy on the outside and filled with glass noodles. There were served with a sweet and sour dip, that worked well with it.

For our mains, we ordered Bulgogi marinated beef and pork belly. We opted to have the grill on, and cook these ourselves. The pieces of meat were sliced thinly which meant for a quick cooking time. With this, we had some steamed rice and a selection of sauces. We thought that this would not be enough for the two of us, so we also picked a fried tofu salad. This wasn't really needed though, but still enjoyable to have some freshness. The tofu was prepared to actually have some flavour. With our mains, we also enjoyed a bottle of Cass, a Korean lager.

It was a good spot, although a little far away. We were the only two non-Korean-looking people in the restaurant, which probably says something about its authenticity. If you're in the area, then Spicy Grill will provide a solid meal at a reasonable price. When walking to catch the bus home, we noticed another Korean barbecue restaurant, which may get a visit on another day.

Pumpkin Croquettes and Seaweed Rolls

1 / 4

Steamed Rice and Sauces

2 / 4

Tofo Salad

3 / 4

Pork Belly on the Grill

4 / 4

❮ ❯

It's summer, which means trying out some food from a tropical place makes perfect sense. Cottons is situated next to Vauxhall Bridge alongside the Thames. There is a big outdoor space, where in the sunshine, cocktails, and music would be a ball, but this is a British summer, so it was a bit nippy, and a risk of rain! Instead, we sat inside the spacious establishment. While looking over the menu, we figured out it was happy hour, which meant two-for-one cocktails. That meant two of the same for the price of one, not two different cocktails for the price of one. And that is how we ended up with two cocktails each: An Exotica Sour, and a Rum Punch. Both delicious, and vaguely deadly.

We started of with a starter each. My wife choose the salted cod fritters, and I had the jerk chicken spring rolls. The spring rolls were served with some salad and a sweet chilli sauce. They almost had an Asian flavour to it. The salted cod fritters were served with a spicy tomato sauce.

Mains wise, my wife picked the curried mutton, served with rice'n'peas. The flavour had a good depth to it, and although it was a little spicy, it wasn't overpowering. The meat was soft and tender. As my main, I selected the pork ribs and fried chicken combo. The ribs came in a fairly spicy sauce, which worked well. The red and green chillies that were sprinkled over them, did not add much heat. The fried jerk chicken was a little too salty to my liking, but the sauce that was coating the ribs fixed that soon. Some fried plantains and rice'n'peas completed the meal. The sweetness of the plantains helped with balancing the heat.

We were quite full after this, and decided against pudding while finishing the last of our (second) cocktail.

The restaurant has a good atmosphere, the service was speedy and attentive, and the food delicious and affordable. It's a great spot near the river, and if the sun comes out there will be a Caribbean atmosphere too.

Jerk Chicken Spring Rolls

1 / 5

Salted Cod Fritters

2 / 5

Pork Ribs and Fried Chicken

3 / 5

Curried Mutton

4 / 5

Rum Punch and Excotica Sour Cocktails

5 / 5

❮ ❯

We have been to this location before, which is just off the Kings’ Road in Chelsea, when it was still called the Butcher's Tap and Grill. But Tom Kerridge, the proprietor decided to go in a slightly different direction. He renamed the pub "The Chalk", with an updated concept. Where the original concept was mostly pub fare with (big) cuts of meat to grill, it is now a more traditional gastropub with more refined dishes, and less of a focus on steaks and similar cuts of meat. Overall, we thought it has shifted a little more upmarket (not surprising given the location), and that perhaps Tom is trying to emulate of the success of The Coach in Marlow, with its one Michelin star.

The restaurant wasn't quite full when we, arrived and were seated in a cosy booth in the downstairs area. We were fairly peckish, so opted for some starters to get going. My wife had the 'nduja and smoked mozzarella sausage roll, which had a good kick to it. I picked the cheese and onion scone, which came with a very generous serving of mustard and herb butter. With our starters we enjoyed a half of the Rebellion IPA — sadly they had run out of their other two cask beers, although that does offer an excuse to pop back another time.

As my main, I chose the rolled shoulder of lamb, with was served with charred onion wedges, ratatouille, and a crispy parcel. The flavours all worked well together. My wife enjoyed the butter roasted ray wing, which came with pickled cockles, diced cucumber, and an anchovy and garlic dressing. As the wines are fairly pricy, instead of a bottle to share, we just had a glass of wine each to match our dishes.

We could have left it there, but felt the need to have some pudding as well. For that, we shared a Chelsea bun sitting in a bath of spiced custard with dried raisins or currants in, in.

It's still a good spot, but we were not in total agreement whether it had improved since it was the Butcher's Tap and Grill. We might give it a go in another year or so.

Cheese and Onion Scone

1 / 5

'Nduja and Smoked Mozzarella Sausage Roll

2 / 5

Butter Roasted Ray Wing

3 / 5

Rolled Shoulder of Lamb

4 / 5

Chelsea Bun

5 / 5

❮ ❯

Market Halls is situated not far from Oxford Circus, on the former location of BHS. It occupies the first floor of the building, and boasts a selection of small, street food pop-up type kitchens, although some of them look fairly permanent. They operate a few sites around London, but the one on Oxford Street is the only one that takes bookings for two (or more) people.

The idea is that you pick a table, and then figure out what you want to eat from all the available vendors. You can order drinks at the bar, or through a QR code at the table. The beer choices were lacking, but there was a reasonable selection of wine and cocktails.

After sitting down, we had a look at the menus, and made a plan, which we then didn't quite follow once we started ordering. As it's not really a restaurant, that also was not important.

We started with a set of MOMO dumplings, from "Himalayan dumplings". They were juicy and filled with chicken. A slightly spicy dressing completed the dish. This pop-up also had a special on, which formed our second starter: crunchy pieces of puffed rice filled with potato, and served with tomatoes, cucumbers, and raw onion. The cucumber and tomato provided a cooling counterpoint to the spice in the rest of the dish.

As my main I enjoyed the Chilli Jam Pork Belly from Krapow!, which was served on rice. The pork was a little crunchy, well seasoned with birdseye chilli, and sprinkled with some salad leaves. My wife ordered the lamb from Salt Shed, another temporary addition to their menu. The slices of perfectly cooked lamb had some sea salt sprinkled over them, and were served with very spicy chillis, pickled radishes, and a slightly garlicky dip.

There are plenty of more pop-up restaurants to try out including a dessert place. If you feel like a good and low-key meal after a hard afternoon (or day!) of shopping, the options at Market Halls will easily satisfy your appetite.

MOMO Himalayan Dumplings

1 / 4

Crunchy Snack

2 / 4

Chilli Jam Pork Belly

3 / 4

Lamb Steak Slices

4 / 4

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 14 hours on Xdebug, with 23 hours funded. I went on a holiday!

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailing list, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

De Ruif (The Hay Rack) is situated at the edge of one of the Netherlands' national parks, de Veluwezoom. It's popular with walkers, but in the evening it is more of a traditional restaurant. They serve mostly French cuisine, but also some local classics.

We visited not with just the two of us, but also with my parents to celebrate a birthday. We selected our dishes from the three course set-menu.

My wife chose a seventies classic, the shrimp cocktail. In this case, it came with brown shrimps instead of the more usual prawns. It was well-dressed with Marie Rose sauce, and came with some lettuce and a lemon to squeeze. For my starter, I picked the "watermelon" carpaccio, although it came with three types of melon (watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew). The chunks were served on top of long strands of flavourful and thinly sliced parma ham.

After our main, we both opted to go with the swordfish. This was served with a red risotto, a dressing, grilled baby tomatoes, and some vegetables. The portion sizes were on the larger side for both starter and main, but we still found some space for pudding.

I selected the Aperol Spritz Sorbet, which turned out to be massive. But it was all the right kinds of sweet and bitter and juicy. My wife chose the Limoncello Tiramisu, served with a strawberry on top. This dessert was creamy, light, and refreshing.

After all these courses, we were properly satisfied. We will likely be back, as there are not too many options in the area for dining out. But perhaps we won't have three courses again.

Shrimp Cocktail

1 / 5

Watermelon Carpaccio

2 / 5

Swordfish

3 / 5

Aperol Spritz Sorbet

4 / 5

Limoncello Tiramisu

5 / 5

❮ ❯

OPSO styles themselves as a modern Greek restaurant. They're based just off Marylebone High Street. We first ate here when they opened, just over a decade ago, and recalled that experience positively, and as it was a lovely warm summer evening, perfect for some Greek food we thought we'd return.

It seems however, that in the last decade, the prices had gone up significantly. Wine starting at £58 is a bit of a joke really… but it's Marylebone, so perhaps the locals don't notice or care? Instead we settled on some beers from Greek breweries that we hadn't tried yet.

We were not overly hungry, and as a result decided on a slightly lighter meal. We started with a duo of souvlaki kebabs, which were served on top of a slightly charred pitta bread. They were dressed with a dollop of yoghurt and red onions. With the kebabs, we also had some tzatziki and slightly spicy flatbreads. The tzatziki was fresh and the flatbreads crispy.

For our mains, we shared the slightly seared tuba, which was dressed with sugar snap peas, tomato, mint, and capers. This combination really worked well, and the tuna was spot on. I always think that tuna is better mostly raw, but seared on the outside To accompany the tuna, we also shared a spanakorizo — spinach, rice, and goat's curd, baked in the oven.

The food was delicious, and the atmosphere lively, but we did think that perhaps some value has been lost along the way.

Souvlaki Kebabs

1 / 5

Tzatziki

2 / 5

Seared Tuna

3 / 5

Spanakorizo

4 / 5

Slightly Spicy Flatbreads

5 / 5

❮ ❯

San Sebastián, a city in the basqueland region of Northern Spain, is known as a culinary hot spot. It is therefore not short of plenty of pinxtos restaurants, fine dining, and a galaxy of Michelin stars.

Artean is a small restaurant in the Gross area, not far from the beach. It has twelve seats, at the bar only. The bar chairs are comfy, and sitting at the bar creates an intimate atmosphere. The chefs are from Peru, and have worked in Michelin starred places, but the person serving was Danish. Artean does not have a start (yet?).

We were the first customers that evening and got to choose our seats, which we did, near the kitchen towards the end of the bar counter.

They offer a seven-course tasting menu (at €90), but also have an à la carte menu. We picked our meal from the latter. As our starters, we picked a selection of tapas. While waiting for them to be served, a lovely bread and a shot glass of a fresh and flavoursome gazpacho got us in the mood. A lovely crisp white Leirana wine made it to our table too.

Our selection started with dressed oysters, and topped with salmon roe, served in a boat shaped bowl. They were slightly acidic, but the dressing toned it nicely down. Fat and juicy anchovies on toast, with a nice layer of butter in between then followed. And finally a duo of scallop gildas. Each consistent of two scallop halves slightly seared, on a bed of creamed parmigiana reggiano, roasted tomato, and topped with an olive, some anchovies and pine nuts. It was plated up right in front of us.

After the starters we each chose a different main. My wife selected the catch of the day, a moist piece of hake on a pea oil, served with a couple grilled shrimps with a piece of samphire on top, which was delicious. I decided on the grilled octopus with green beans and pine nuts. It was a little sticky from a dressing, and cooked perfectly with a little bounce.

After we finished our meal, we moved to a separate set of stools in front of their window for our dessert. That was all our doing as we had probably been a little slow with dinner. Here we enjoyed a dessert wine each, and a sheep's milk curd, topped with blue cheese, cider ice cream. Yum!

Artean was a perfect meal, incorporating local flavours and ingredients with hints of Peru. And all at a very reasonable price. We would certainly return if we're in town again.

Dressed Oysters

1 / 6

Anchovies on Toast

2 / 6

Scallop Gildas

3 / 6

Hake, the Catch of the Day

4 / 6

Grilled Octopus

5 / 6

Sheep Milk's Curd with Cider Ice Cream and Blue Cheese

6 / 6

❮ ❯

We have been to Le Garrick several times over the last decade. Once for my birthday, where I learned that Cassoulet is based on beans, not my favourite category of food. Although it is not a fine-dining restaurant, the meals we had there, have always been solid, albeit a little rustic.

They also do a pre- and post-theatre menu, which is what brought us here this time. With a play in the early evening, a post-theatre menu is often good value, and usually speedily served.

We both opted for a main and dessert. My wife chose the Onglet steak with a Béarnaise sauce, and I had the Moules Frites. While waiting for our meals to arrive, we enjoyed a lovely glass of Cremant — we had something to celebrate.

The steak was juicy and served with a good amount of fries. My Moules were well-prepared in a rich and flavourful broth. The accompanying fries were excellent for dipping into this bowl of flavour.

We picked the same dessert, the Tarte au Citron (lemon tart). This came served with lovely dollop of cream.

Le Garrick was reliable as always, and after our meal we walked to our theatre. If you're in the neighbourhood for a similar reason, Le Garrick is a safe choice, with good food.

Moules Frites

1 / 3

Onglet Steak

2 / 3

Tarte au Citron

3 / 3

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 22 hours on Xdebug, with 21 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailing list, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

After a trip, we wanted something more relaxed and non-fussy. Sicily, close to Victoria Station, seemed to fit the bill on a warm summer evening. My wife commented that the restaurant had been here for many years—and like Chakra a few weeks ago—she’d walked past many times without ever visiting. Something we were rectifying.

We were seated upstairs, and when we arrived, it wasn't very busy with only two other parties seated in the upstairs area. However, within half an hour, the place was full, with nearly every table occupied. Despite the influx of diners, the service was attentive and speedy.

For her dinner, my wife chose the Fiorentina pizza, with tomato, fior di latte mozzarella, spinach, oregano, free range egg, and flaked parmigiano reggiano. The crust was crispy, the spinach wasn't overly wilted and dry, the cheese flakes across the top were generous, and the pizza wasn't too humungous overall. I picked the Rustichelle Salsiccia pasta—twisted pasta with pork and fennel sausage, with mushrooms, saffron, and cream. The sausage is what gave it the flavour, and the pasta and mushrooms the texture.

We both had a glass of their Sicily Pilsner on draught to enjoy with our meals, which paired well with both our dishes. We decided against dessert.

The price for the meal was very reasonable, the ambiance great, and the food well worth going back for again.

Rustichelle Salsiccia Pasta

1 / 3

Fiorentina Pizza

2 / 3

Sicily Pilsner

3 / 3

❮ ❯

Through the media, we discovered that London’s oldest Indian restaurant, Veeraswamy, might have to close due to a building redevelopment that will remove their entrance. The restaurant has been operating in its current location for 99 years, but unless they manage to change the building owner’s mind they will have to move out. With that in mind, my wife had booked dinner for us on a sunny Friday evening.

After going up by lift, we were shown to our table overlooking Swallow Street. The atmosphere was full of light. We had booked a fairly early table, at 18:15, which meant we could still order from the pre-theatre menu.

I probably would have ordered these dishes anyway, as I fancied the Anglo-Indian Muligatawny Soup as a starter from this menu. It was just the right thickness, with good levels of spice. My wife ignored the pre-theatre menu for her starter, and instead ordered the Calcutta Beetroot Croquettes. These were crunchy, served with Stilton cheese and the sweet beetroots inside—it sounds like an odd combination, but worked surprisingly well.

Before and with our starters, we enjoyed some signature cocktails. I had the Citrus Burst spring special, and my wife had a new Old Fashioned.

As my main, I chose the Grilled Fish Exotica. Which was both spicy and sweet, with the sweetness coming from small tomatoes. The fish's skin was crisp, and a serving of plain rice and the crispy naan bread were great for lapping up the juices from the plate. As her main, she picked the Chicken Dilkush, a chicken supreme served with a sauce of almond extract, which was also on the pre-theatre menu.

With our pre-theatre menus we were also given a choice of dessert. I selected the dark chocolate and raspberry sorbets, and she enjoyed the pistachio and salted caramel gelato. A great way to finish our meal.

With the rumours of Veeraswamy having to close, we might not have the opportunity to go back, but if they stay open, we would very much recommend a trip.

Muligatawny Soup

1 / 6

Calcutta Beetroot Croquettes

2 / 6

Grilled Fish Exotica

3 / 6

Chicken Dilkush

4 / 6

Dark Chocolate and Raspberry Sorbets

5 / 6

Pistachio and Salted Caramel Gelato

6 / 6

❮ ❯

Thursday, June 12th 2025, 16:15 BST

London, UK

Before MySpace (2003), Orkut (2004-2014), Facebook (2004), Instagram (2010), and Twitter (2006), the only way to have an online community presence was to host it yourself, or use Geocities (1994-2009).

For messaging there was AOL Instant messenger (1997-2017), ICQ (1996-2010), and MSN messenger (1999-2012), which got later get gobbled up by Skype (2003-2025).

I am sure many of you have set up a PHP BB bulletin board, or one of the many various alternative online forum software packages.

For showing your photos you would use something like a PHP Gallery and host it yourself. These things became a little easier to self host when WordPress got released in 2003.

These tools required hosting your own content, on your own server. That also meant that you had full control over your own content. You could, within the law, publish anything that you wanted, and decide which comments you would allow to be posted under with content.

This content became discoverable through search engines: Yahoo!, Altavista, and later Google. They would only rank the search results through an algorithm that focussed on popularity and content only, using fancy maths.

Alternative content discovery came through Webrings, Blogrolls, and when podcasts became a thing: RSS. RSS wasn't only for podcasts though, and many web sites and services would publish new articles and product updates through this protocol. Many, including the BBC, and this site, still do.

Over the years, people shifted away from hosting their own content to the big American tech firms. Facebook for keeping up with your family and friends, "news", and discussion boards for your local cycling group. Twitter for short message communication, and Instagram of sharing your perfect life with the wider world.

As you don't pay for these products, they monetise you, and the interactions you have on these platforms. They are built to create dopamine hits so that you stay longer on these sites, and see more advertising. Instead of seeing the content you choose to follow, they feed you with information that they think that you will be engaging with. In fact, the content that you would be engaging with, is often created to induce anger.

Some platforms that used to be great at what they did in the past, now have been enshittified to be able to save your more ads, and now also AI slop. You can't honestly say that Google is a great search engine any more for example.

In the open source ecosystem, the proliferation of using "big tech" is also proliferating, with many communities adopting Slack or Discourse as their project's discussions groups.

Using Slack moves content away from the public into a proprietary environment. For example, if you don't pay, you only have access to a certain amount of history. And contributors and users need to have a login to participate, turning them into walled gardens.

And let's not forget about GitHub. A proprietary platform, now owned by Microsoft, is almost universally used by Open Source and closed source projects to host Git repositories. Git ironically being a version control system specifically designed to be decentralised.

GitHub was first for just the code, but now many Open Source projects and companies have given up control over their other project related content as well.

It's not uncommon to see GitHub used as an issue tracker and security report tracker, for project planning, and to test and deploy libraries, tools, and applications through GitHub Actions.

Because this auxiliary content is no longer owned by you or your project, platforms hosting this content can decide to ban or limit your account. This is not just theory, as it happened to OrganicMaps. Although you can easily relocate the code repository, you can not do that for this adjacent content.

PHP is also at risk here, as it uses many of these proprietary GitHub features, and the PHP Foundation uses Slack for its internal communications.

There are also more extreme tales, where Microsoft withdrew access to Office365 for some users. For example, they decided to ban the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which ended up impacting several prosecutions due to sanctions imposed by the Trump government.

A few people are still holding out using their own self-hosted forums and issue trackers. This is made harder for them due to regulations, like the onerous Online Safety Act in the UK. This act will likely push more operators to use the big tech variants in the future, as has already happened.

Some countries are luckily starting to realise that depending on US owned big tech is a bad idea.

Luckily, there are still some decentralised communication systems alive and well.

Perhaps the most well known one is e-mail, through the open SMTP protocol. Open protocols are protocols that can be understood and implemented by anyone.

Another example is Internal Relay Chat (IRC), which is perhaps not so flashy as Slack, but still alive — having been build on an open protocol introduced in 1988.

The curious thing about email is, is that it is a decentralised protocol, where everybody can technically set up an SMTP server on their own hardware with their own domain name. But fewer people or companies now do so. Instead, they use big centralised providers, such as Gmail and Outlook. These platforms often require extra requirements for accepting email, on top of what the SMTP protocol stipulates.

As an example, when we moved the php.net e-mail infrastructure to a new server it took Gmail weeks to trust our new IP enough to accept most of our email again on the first delivery attempt.

And can you or your company handle Google cancelling your Gmail account? Not only would you lose access to your email, you will also likely lose access to your Google Drive documents, calender, and potentially logins to many websites as you have used Gmail as login provider.

At this current time, most content is now hosted by third parties at their behest: Journalists and blogs on Medium, Blogger, or other third party platforms; newsletters on Substack; code, issue tracking, security reports, and CI pipelines on GitHub; email on Gmail or Outlook; open source project discussions on Slack; pictures on Instagram; community forums on Facebook; videos on YouTube, and short messages on X/Twitter.

The companies hosting these services can go out of business, decide to not like you any more, or decide to steal your content to train their AI models—and then sell you back the content that you and others created.

Or worse, they can decide to remove or block your accounts, so that you lose your readers, content, project's issues, e-mail, community, images, followers and interactions, and messaging.

The authors, including you, have no control over any of this.

But there is an alternative to many of these services.

There is a way to take back control.

Lets focus on the ActivityPub protocol. This open protocol, introduced in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can be used as that basis for publishing content, interacting with this content, and integrating this with existing publishing services.

https://axbom.com/fediverse/ — CC-BY-SA 3.0

It is the basis of the Fediverse, a network of ActivityPub servers that can communicate with each other, even though there are many different implementations, serving different types of content.

Some implementations focus on short messages, such as Mastodon or Misskey, but others focus on forum-type exchanges (Lemmy, mbin), image sharing (Pixelfed), video sharing (Peertube, Loops), and many many others.

These software packages are written in different languages, and can often be self-hosted. Most of them are open source. And because the protocol is open, you can also create your own implementation, or integrate with already existing software.

Each server that contains content is called an instance. Instances implementing the same service can easily interact, but crucially instances of different services can also do this.

Instances are hosted by individuals, specific-interest groups, language communities, or be "generic" instances. The instances are decentralized, and users can pick the instance of the service they want to use, while still being able to interact with other instances and services.

Users can therefore pick the instance that aligns with their interests, or one where they agree with the community guidelines of that instance. And if they can't find a matching instance and don't want any moderation of what they create, users can set up and self-host their own single-user instance as well.

For example, I am a user of the Mastodon service and use the phpc.social instance. But I also have an account on the Pixelfed service instance pixelfed.social. I can interact with posts on my @derickr@pixelfed.social Pixelfed account with my @derickr@phpc.social Mastodon account. I can reply, like, and forward posts between accounts.

This is very much like e-mail, where users can chose their e-mail provider, and still e-mail users on other servers, although ActivityPub extends this by also being to interact with other services.

The protocol is extensive, and I don't have time to go into every detail, but I am hoping to provide a reasonable overview here.

ActivityPub operates with three main data types: Actors, which represent content owners; Objects, which describe data; and Activities, which represent operations. ActivityPub itself is based on top of ActivityStreams, which defines many different object types, activity types, and standard properties.

An Actor can send data to other Actors by creating an Activity (such as Create) that wraps a data Object, and place it in their Outbox.

The ActivityPub server then takes this Activity and posts it (with HTTP POST) to the Inboxes listed in the Activity's to/bto/cc/bcc fields.

A receiving server then takes the Activity from the Inbox and acts upon this, according to what the Activity represents. The receiving server then sends an Accept (or Reject) Activity to the originating server.

The same would apply to a Follow Activity, where a receiving server (with, or without user interaction) might Accept or Reject the follow request.

Let's have a look at an example.

To create a short message and deliver it to followers, an Actor first creates an Object. Objects have types. For example a Note Object represents a short text, and an Article a multi-paragraph written work of some sort. There are many more types.

Different services will understand different types of objects, although Note Objects are fairly commonly understood.

The data format used with ActivityPub is JSON-LD. An object representing a blog post looks something like:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    {
      "Hashtag": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Hashtag"
    }
  ],
  "id": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/posts/dakota-jgf.json",
  "type": "Note",
  "published": "2025-05-23T18:30:00+01:00",
  "attributedTo": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners",
  "content": "<b><a href='https://dakotahotels.co.uk/leeds/grill/'>Dakota</a></b><br/><p>…</p>",
  "to": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
  ],
  "location": {
    "name": "Dakota, 8 Russell Street, LS1 5RN, Leeds",
    "type": "Place"
  },
  "tag": [
    {
      "type": "Hashtag",
      "name": "#FridayNightDinners"
    }
  ],
  "attachment": [
    {
      "type": "Image",
      "mediaType": "image/jpeg",
      "url": "https://s3.drck.me/derickrethans-images.s3.uk.io.cloud.ovh.net/friday-night-dinners/dakota-1.jpg",
      "name": "Bread with Cheesy Tomato Sauce"
    }
  ]
}

The context describes the namespaces for elements. The default one is listed first (https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams) and other namespaces are created in an associative array. The "Hashtag": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Hashtag" line defines the Hashtag namespace, which is later used to add the #FridayNightDinners tag to the post.

The id contains the unique identifier for this object. The id can be references in later activities, such as Like, Delete, Announce (re-post), Flag (report), etc.

The type defines the object's data type, in this case, Note: a short text.

Actually, in this implementation I slightly misuse the Note type, as I also use it for full articles, which ostensibly should rather be an Article or Page. The reason for this is, is that Mastodon does not support Article or Page objects.

The published property describes the date and time at which the object was published — not necessarily when an Activity is created for it.

The content property contains the Object's content — by default this is HTML encoded as JSON. It is also possible to use other MIME media types through the mediaType property. You can see this used in the sub-object in the attachment.

The to and cc properties are used to instruct a receiving server where to direct the activity to. In this example, it is just sending it to the Public realm, but it is more common to use to it to the followers of this Actor, and cc to the Public realm:

"to" : [
  "https://fosstodon.org/users/php/followers"
],
"cc" : [
  "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
]

location indicates a physical or logical location that is associated with this object. This property is not always understood by every ActivityPub implementation, for example, Mastodon does not support it.

And then lastly, we have the tag and attachment properties that associate other information with this Object. Tags are prominently used for hashtags, and attachments for linking in additional objects that need special handling, such as this Image object.

In order to deliver this Note to an Actor's followers, the implementation needs to wrap this in an Activity:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  ],
  "id": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/posts/a7c1b1fd04884a2e4c7f2c86743f5df9#Create",
  "type": "Create",
  "actor": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners",
  "to" : [
    "https://fosstodon.org/users/php/followers"
  ],
  "cc" : [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
  ]
  "object": …
}

The contents of the object property in the case of the Create Activity would be the Object from above, with the to and cc fields copied from that Object. The id is also often similar to the embedded Object's id — in this implementation #Create is added to the end of it.

When a server receives this Create activity in its inbox, it first needs to make sure that the activity is in fact sent by the Actor mentioned in the Activity — you wouldn't want impersonations.

The server can do that, because with the POST request, the sending server also includes cryptographic hashes in its HTTP headers.

For each message that it sends, it:

• Creates a sha256 digest of the text representing the JSON payload.

• Formats a signing key: (request-target): post {$path}\nhost: {$targetHost}\ndate: {$date}\ndigest: SHA-256={$digest} which includes the URL of the inbox it POSTs to ($path), the host, the current date in the format D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T, as well as the $digest it has just created.

• Retrieves the private key from the Actor.

• Uses this private key to sign the signature.

• Encodes this signature in base 64 and formats it again with a different format: 'keyId="' . $keyId . '",algorithm="rsa-sha256",headers="(request-target) host date digest",signature="' . $signature . '"'.

• And then includes the host, date, payload digest, and this newly formatted signature in the HTTP headers.

This signing algorithm was probably the hardest part of my implementation.

Retrieving the private key from the Actor is achieved by requesting the Actor's JSON object from the actor property (https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners), which looks like this:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "https://w3id.org/security/v1"
  ],
  "id": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners",
  "type": "Person",
  "following": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/following",
  "followers": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/followers",
  "inbox": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/inbox",
  "outbox": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/outbox",
  "preferredUsername": "fridaynightdinners",
  "name": "Friday Night Dinners",
  "summary": "Hi! We are …",
  "url": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners",
  "manuallyApprovesFollowers": false,
  "discoverable": true,
  "indexable": true,
  "published": "2024-02-05T18:59:09Z",
  "icon": {
    "type": "Image",
    "mediaType": "image/jpeg",
    "url": "https://media.phpc.social/cache/accounts/avatars/111/851/729/954/932/528/original/196af8039f5c41bb.jpg"
  },
  "image": {
    "type": "Image",
    "mediaType": "image/jpeg",
    "url": "https://media.phpc.social/cache/accounts/headers/111/851/729/954/932/528/original/a85d3e0b1408f0c9.jpg"
  },
  "publicKey": {
    "id": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners#main-key",
    "owner": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners",
    "publicKeyPem": "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\nMIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w…JOc\nHwIDAQAB\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\n"
  },
  "endpoints": {
    "sharedInbox": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners/inbox"
  }
}

The relevant property to look at for signing is the publicKey property. It includes the key-id (https://social.derickrethans.nl/@fridaynightdinners#main-key), the owner (this Actor), and the public key to use by the receiving server to check the signature that the sending server has created with the secret part of this key.

The public and private key pair are created when an Actor is created.

The Person object also includes the Inbox and Outbox URLs, and URLs for retrieving the followers and which Actors this Actor is following.

The user name (preferredUsername, textual user name (name), description (summary), and some images (icon and image), are also present.

A service can find this Actor JSON document by using Webfinger, a protocol specified by the IETF to allow for the discovery of information about people defined by a URI.

Services that implement Webfinger would request the following URL on the accompanying domain. To find the actor for my blog's ActivityPub presence, a service would GET the following URL:

https://social.derickrethans.nl/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:blog@social.derickrethans.nl

This returns the following JSON document:

{
  "subject": "acct:blog@social.derickrethans.nl",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://social.derickrethans.nl/@blog"
    }
  ]
}

The service then uses the href property from this document (https://social.derickrethans.nl/@blog) to retrieve the Actor description.

These four parts is what makes the Fediverse tick.

This is just a quick overview of what goes on technically, but it is perhaps more interesting to see what you can do with it.

I was originally interested in sharing the restaurant reviews that my wife and I write for our Friday Night Dinners website with my Mastodon followers.

For that to work, I had to do a few things.

First I had to create a website (https://social.derickrethans.nl) with routes that would accept Follow Activities to add Actors to send reviews to. Secondly, I had to create a script to send each review (as Note) to these followers.

After a few initial hacks, I settled on implementing library that implements an API that would act on Activities posted to the inbox that an Actor description provided.

Since then, it also accepts GET requests for the Actor, the following and followers collections, the outbox containing all posted Notes, and a route to return the data of each Note itself.

For the inbox, I first implemented the Follow and Undo/Follow Activities to manage followers. I then followed that up with the Like and Undo/Like Activities to store and collect which users had liked each post.

This information is shared with my blogging system, which shows these likes under each article.

The last handler for the inbox that I added is for the Create Activity, so that I can also capture Fediverse replies to each post. This is still fairly primitive as it can't handle replies to replies just yet. But it does allow me to integrate first-level replies to ActivityPub posts with my blogging software through a callback.

The implementation of this is available at https://github.com/derickr/activitypub

After integrating sharing posts through ActivityPub for Friday Night Dinners, I also added an integration with my actual blog, https://derickrethans.nl.

The article on Unicode Collation Sorting can be found as ActivityPub document at https://social.derickrethans.nl/@blog/posts/7ec0d8e4fb538b5b4534bad5e4e13ad6

As there were likes and replies, they now appear under the article as well: https://derickrethans.nl/unicode-collation-sorting.html#likes

My website is not the only ActivityPub integration.

Terrence Eden has created an ActivityPub Server in a single page — he insists that this is not for production use.

WordPress has a plugin to make all articles available to the Fediverse. 404media also makes their articles available through their Flipboard user https://flipboard.com/@404media.

And if you don't want to create an integration but use already existing software, it is also possible to self-host a Mastodon instance, or use an existing "shared hosting" provider where it costs around £10/month.

Or you can join an instance for your community, such as phpc.social. The benefits from using a larger instance is that you get a moderation team for free. They will action on user reports and apply their own moderation rules. In some cases, they will need to block users, mostly from other instances, or block full instances in case these are violating the community's rules. Blocking other instances is called "de-federation", and this is a decision that instance owners can independently make.

Some instances for example have de-federated with Threads, Meta's short message social media website that is Fediverse enabled. Others have decided not to do so, or not so yet.

Whichever option you pick, you will have full control over your output, but also on what you see. The Fediverse has a strong mantra to also not use algorithms to decide what you can see, or what you see first; nor is it particularly keen on any sort of tracking or non-organic advertising. Unlike big-tech apps <https://www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-tracking-explained-it-could>_, the apps for the Fediverse have the fewest amount of permissions they can get away with. And even if one of them would request more, you can always select another one.

There is also the opportunity of instances or services to require payments for access to the content. You would only be able to "follow" users when you have an ongoing subscription. Of course, that does rely on instances not sharing these private Notes or Articles with the wider world.

If in the future, a service, or instance, starts injecting ads into the stream of content that you see, you can move your user account to another instance.

As an example, if Meta's Threads service starts publishing ads to random followers, it will certainly get de-federated.

The power of the Fediverse is to give you control over your content. You can publish it through many different channels, and they can all interact.

As JA Westenberg said:

RSS never tracked you.

Email never throttled you.

Blogs never begged for dopamine.

The old web wasn't perfect.

But it was yours.

Just like the web used to be before the algorithms, the advertising, the tracking, and corporations selling your data to shady data-brokers.

Instead of being the product, with ActivityPub and the Fediverse, you're back in control.

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 20 hours on Xdebug, with 22 hours funded.

My apologies for missing several monthly reports.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailing list, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

We have walked past Chakra many times, as it's almost next door to bottle shop and beer bar, Real Drinks that we frequent. Although we have often eaten at The Red Pepper, an Italian restaurant on the same street (which we also recommend), we've never ventured into Chakra, an Indian restaurant. Chakra also have other restaurants in Kensington and Kingston upon Thames.

Although we had booked, there were very few customers inside, although this was probably because it was still fairly early. The menu at Chakra has plenty of options, but isn't overwhelming and includes all the Indian dishes you'd expect. Classics like a chicken tikka masala, plus biryanis, and tandoor dishes.

My wife went for one of the tandoor dishes, the Chatpata Chicken Tikka — which was without sauce, as our waiter explained. It was however not just a dry piece of chicken, and still coated in something, giving a good level of spice and flavour and the chicken was still nicely moist. I picked the Kashimiri Lamb Rogan Josh as I was hoping for something a little spicier, which this dish delivered.

With our dishes, we also had a plain naan and some steamed rice. To help us deal with all the spice, we had the customary Cobra to go with our meal.

Chakra is a good neighbourhood Indian restaurant, and I'm sure we'll be back some time.

Lamb Rogan Josh

1 / 2

Chatpata Chicken Tikka

2 / 2

❮ ❯

On a warm Friday night in May, whilst visiting Leeds we ate at Dakota. Not knowing Leeds, we booked this place on the strength of lots of positive online reviews.

The restaurant is located in the basement of a hotel, and is gloomily dark. I'm not a fan of massive strip lighting in restaurants, but I do think the lights could have been turned up a bit. We note that online photos do show the restaurant more lit up.

The service was efficient. However, the waitress we had serving us, should work on making guests feel less "patronised" when engaging in small talk, for example when commenting on a customer's wine choice, or when discussing the purpose of their visit to Leeds.

We started with what was a “complimentary bread with a tomato, goats cheese and mozzarella dipping sauce" — apparently this was the favourite dish of the waitress. It was tasty enough, but perhaps a little heavy on the over-reduced tomato purée flavour.

The food was fine, the cod with prawns on a finely chopped red pepper base was fine, and my companions lamb was well cooked. A single side of soy glazed tenderstem broccoli (rather than the "recommended" 2 or 3 sides) was more than sufficient for us.

Overall I wouldn't recommend Dakota or revisit if I was in Leeds again. There are plenty of other options, which, in hindsight would have been better.

Bread with Cheesy Tomato Sauce

1 / 4

Lamb Rump with Pave Potatoes

2 / 4

Cod with Prawn

3 / 4

Soy Sauce Glazed Tenderstem Broccoli

4 / 4

❮ ❯

Camino Victoria is a fairly newly opened tapas place in one of the various new developments on, or near, Victoria Street. It was a nice warm evening, and lots of people were outside enjoying some food and drinks. If you're not near Victoria, they also have four other branches in London.

We sat inside in the comfortable seating room, and started ordering our dishes.

We went for the traditional tapas: Padron Peppers, some were hot and spicy, and some were sweet and mellow; Tortilla de Patatas, which had a lovely gooey centre; Patatas Bravas, with a pleasant spicy ketchup sauce; Croquetas, with its cheesy centre; Arroz Negro, a cuttlefish black rice, with squid ink; and Talos De Chorizo, soft mini tortillas, with minced chorizo, butternut squash, and some yoghurt.

There were three talos in the serving, but you can upgrade to have a fourth one — excellent when you're sharing with two, and frankly something that should be available for every sharing dish, when the number provided do not divide between the size of the party.

With our dinner, we also enjoyed a bottle of a really lovely cava, because we felt like it and it was Friday.

We were in the mood for some dessert, and shared a couple of chocolate truffles to finish our meal.

All the tapas were tasty and well presented, but not absolutely outstanding. For that, you'll probably have to head to Spain, and visit a really good tapas place — we've had bad tapas in Spain too! But if you'd like a taste of Spain in London, then Camino Victoria will do just fine.

Padron Peppers

1 / 7

Talos te Chorizo

2 / 7

Tortilla de Patatas

3 / 7

Croquetas

4 / 7

Arroz Negro

5 / 7

Patatas Bravas

6 / 7

Chocolate Truffles

7 / 7

❮ ❯

I felt the need to write my MP Georgia Gould again.

Subject: Labour's Stance on Immigration: I am neither a stranger, nor the subject of an experiment

Dear Georgia Gould MP,

What does the Labour Party stand for? Progressive policies to make this country better for its people? Or pandering to far-right Reform-like policies that blame all of this country's problems on immigrants, like myself?

Yesterday, Kier Starmer proclaimed that people like me, who moved to the UK from abroad, did "incalculable damage" to this country.

I had hoped that with Labour coming in after the last election, this sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric would be gone. I expected this from the Tories, and to a greater extend from Reform, but never from your party.

But I am no longer surprised by it.

I was willing to give Labour the benefit of the doubt, but after nearly a year in "power", I haven't seen any positive things that the government has done with its large majority.

Your large majority could easily be used to improve our (economic and cooperative) relations with the EU, fix the wealth and income imbalances by a better (and simpler) tax system with fewer loopholes, or improve the rights of minorities, including LGBTQIA+ rights.

Instead, you seem to prefer a miniscule (and pointless) trade deal with the US, taking benefits away from disabled people, and shitting on the LGBTQIA+ community with this ridiculous stance on who can use which toilet.

And now you've come to blame immigrants.

Like myself, and more than half of the population in Brent 1, were born outside of this country. Are we really the people that do "incalculable damage", or rather, was the "incalculable damage" caused by 14 years of Tory mismanagement, which your government promised to fix?

Are these quotes not really quite the same as Theresa May's nasty party's "citizens of nowhere"?

Is this really what the Labour party stands for?

I also don't understand what you are trying to achieve with pandering to the far-right. You won't win the Reform voters, and you'll end up losing support to actual progressive parties like the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. Morgan McSweeney's approach is not going to do you any favours. If Reform ends up winning the next election, that is going to be on you.

It also isn't going to help growing the country. You will know that immigration is what makes the care system at least sort of work; you will know that the building industry can't hire enough labourers to build enough houses to meet your housing targets, and you will know that economic growth will happen by a comprehensive reset of economic relations with the European Union.

As a Dutch-born naturalised citizen of the UK, I will vote against any party in Westminster that engages in anti-immigrant or anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric on principle, before even considering other policy pledges. And campaign against ones who do.

I bet am not alone in this.

Yours sincerely,

Derick Rethans

Please write to your own MP if you share similar concerns, and feel free to copy parts of this letter and adapt them to your own examples. You can find out how to contact your elected officials on WriteToThem.

If you are in search of a bierkeller (German for beer cellar), with a band, and where you can dance on the tables (but not the benches), then Albert's Schloss is the place to be.

Luckily for us, there is also upstairs Schenke (think: German bakery café), and in the cellar there are many tables for less entertaining dining far away from the band. Here it is quiet enough to have a conversation over burgers, bratwursts, schnitzels, and other alpine fare. And the accompanying beer.

And this is where we found ourselves on this Friday evening.

Hiding away in the back, next to a ski gondola converted into a dining place, we started with a half pint of a traditional German beer. My wife chose the Currywurst as her main, two thick sausages with a spicy sauce and fries. I selected the Cordon Bleu schnitzel, a flattened chicken breast stuffed with Gruyère and ham, served with a mushroom sauce and served with Parmesan fries. The schnitzel wasn't of Austrian proportions — it did actually fit on the plate — but was well cooked, and certainly enough.

We washed our mains down with another half pint, and as we were quite full, we decided to have a digestive. You can get schnapps by the dozen, in all kinds of fruity flavours, but we went for something more classic. My wife had a Genepi, a slightly fruity grape schnapps, and I enjoyed a Mentzendorff Kümmel, which had a slight caraway and aniseed flavour to it.

We enjoyed Albert's Schloss, and it was great value. But it's not the place for a romantic or date-night dinner. Great for a group or a party with friends though.

Cordon Bleu Schnitzel

1 / 2

Currywurst Platter

2 / 2

❮ ❯

Mowgli is situated on Charlotte Street, not far from Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. A section of this street is dedicated to restaurants. You can find anything there. Mowgli is a new addition, replacing Côte, which has gone from this location and many others.

Mowgli is part of a chain, that specialises in Indian Street Food. When we arrived, was a good buzz in the restaurant, with half of the tables full. Unlike last week, we were not the youngest.

We didn't fancy wine, and instead enjoyed a cocktail. My wife had a delicious Smoked Cardamom Old Fashioned, and I chose the Masala Espresso Martini.

Their menu is extensive, but almost overwhelmed with choice. As this was our first visit, we took the lazy option and went for the Street Food Sharer, in the “meat” variety (vegan and vegetarian options are also available). Our starters included a trio of dishes: an Indian take on Patatas Bravas, fried cubes of potato in a sticky turmeric masala, with some raw onion and chilli sprinkled over it; gunpowder chicken, lightly battered and fried; and the most delightful yoghurt chat bombs that were crisp and filled with chickpeas, a yoghurt, and spices. The latter was the star of the show, and as they were liquid inside, not possible to share. Which was a problem, as we were given five for the two of us.

The main consisted of three curries (chosen by the chef), rice, and Roti breads. All three curries (Butter Chicken, Temple Dahl, and Agra Ginger Chicken) were excellent, although I still find my own butter chicken much better than anything you find in a restaurant.

The desert was a scoop of ice cream. My wife enjoyed a scoop of mango sorbet, and I had a scoop of salted caramel to finish our meal.

It was a great and tasty meal out, in a modern, but not loud setting. It's an excellent place to come for a meal after a busy day of shopping (or not), and we expect to return to try more of that menu (and especially the yoghurt bombs).

Patatas Bravas, Yoghurt Chat Bombs, and Gunpowder Chicken

1 / 3

Rice; Butter Chicken, Temple Dahl, and Agra Ginger Chicken); and Roti

2 / 3

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

3 / 3

❮ ❯

We booked Soutine a little later than normal, but there was no problem for us to get a table on a warm and sunny Friday evening in St John’s Wood. When we arrived and were shown to our table, I immediately thought that it had a resemblance of Brasserie Zedel, near Piccadilly Circus. Which ended up making sense as it has the same owner.

The interior consists of mostly wooden panelling, and loads of mirrors, giving the inside an airy, but cosy atmosphere.

We started with the smoked salmon crumpet for me, and a single oyster for my husband. We ordered a carafe of Chardonnay to share. For the main I had the rather calorific souffle suisse, which was delicious, but perhaps not something to have too often! As a consolation, it did come with a salad.My husband had the roast lamb, which was very tender, and was served with a mushroom flower and some rocket. With that, he had a separate class of Côte du Rhone.

We were originally expecting to be able to order off the set menu which according to the website should have been available, but alas was not offered.

The food and ambience was nice, but we couldn't quite shake off that we were by far the youngest in the restaurant!

Oyster with Trimmings

1 / 4

Smoked Salmon Crumpet

2 / 4

Roast Lamb

3 / 4

Souffle Suisse

4 / 4

❮ ❯

Lonsdale Road has many restaurants. They come and go, and we've been to plenty of them in the last few years. But Don't Tell Dad is pretty new.

During the day it's a bakery, but during the evening it turns into a restaurant. It's hip, so booking is a must.

The interior is modern, and full of wood. It wasn't noisy, and it was easy to chat. As our starter, we shared a couple of truffle and cheddar beignets — cheesy balls with shavings of more cheese — and a couple of oxtail crumpets. These were well braised pieces of meat in gravy, upon soft crumpets with some fried crumbs for texture.

We did not fancy ordering a bottle of wine, but instead chose to have a cider with our starter, and a glass of wine each with our main. Unfortunately, the cider only showed up after we finished our starters.

My wife picked monkfish as her main. This was served on the bone with artichoke and a dill béarnaise. I selected the roast lamb, which was served with courgette, chickpeas, and a salsa verde. Both dishes were delicious. However, to be critical whilst the food and wines were lovely, they didn't turn up at the same time. Our wine turned up so far in advance of our main, that we’d nearly finished the glasses of wine when it arrived

Still feeling a little peckish, we also had dessert. Madeleines for my wife, and an olive oil and chocolate mousse for me. Both desserts could easily have been shared between the two of us, and we probably should have. We opted to go for the matching dessert wines, and again there was a significant delay in between the wine and the desserts appearing.

Once they finally arrived, the madeleines were soft, but not so crunchy on the outside. The chocolate mousse was covered in nicely bitter chocolate flakes, and juicy blood orange.

The food at Don't Tell Dad was very nice, as was the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the service was very slow with long waits between the courses. In addition to that, the drinks were served at odd times, and not with the food which they were ordered to go with.

Truffle and Cheddar Beignets

1 / 6

Oxtail Crumpets

2 / 6

Roast Lamb

3 / 6

Monkfish

4 / 6

Madeleines

5 / 6

Chocolate Mousse

6 / 6

❮ ❯

This was our second trip to Ida. We first visited in summer 2023, and although we wrote a review, we never posted it. Ida has achieved something of a reputation in the last couple of years, but remains at its heart a local neighbourhood restaurant.

When you walk past Ida during the day, you wouldn't pay it any notice. It sits on a busy road at the edge of a residential neighbourhood, with a convenience store across the road. It's an unlikely spot for a restaurant, situated pretty close to both Salusbury Road in Queens Park, and the restaurants on Chamberlayne Road close to Kensal Rise. In the daytime it looks slightly unwelcoming, which is probably why it took us so long to visit the first time.

In the evening however, the place livens up. We arrived at Ida at a quarter past six, and we were nearly the first ones in. By the time we were ready to order fifteen minutes later it was full. When we were here last time, on a lovely warm summer evening, there were also a few tables outside. With one set of doors open, even our inside table felt part of the streetscape.

To start, we ordered a crostone to share. The sourdough toast was covered in flavourful (and aromatic) melted taleggio cheese, with grapes and a little syrupy honey.

As his main meal, Derick ordered the wild funghi papperdelle, and as hers, Morag ordered the little ears — orecchiette — which was served with a creamy velouté of cauliflower, and more of the tasty taleggio cheese.

The home-made pasta was nicely al dente, and the sauces thick, slightly sticky, and delicious. We only got (and needed) a fork as utensils, which made the meal more authentic.

With our meal, we also enjoyed their house white wine, which was, fresh with a good flavour that worked well with all our dishes.

After our pasta we were still a bit peckish, and fancied a tiramisu to finish our evening. This was light and fluffy, and we debated whether this was as good as the tiramisu offered by another local restaurant. We think the jury is out on that one though.

Crostone

1 / 4

Funghi Papperdelle

2 / 4

Orecchiette

3 / 4

Tiramisu

4 / 4

❮ ❯

When fetching all the likes, my internal API returns the following structure — just like how PDOStatement::fetchAll() returns them:

array(7) {
  [0]=>
  array(8) {
    ["name"]=>
    string(14) "Marcus Bointon"
    ["linked_account"]=>
    string(33) "https://phpc.social/users/Synchro"
  }
  [1]=>
  array(8) {
    ["name"]=>
    string(14) "Derick Rethans"
    ["linked_account"]=>
    string(33) "https://phpc.social/users/derickr"
  }
  [2]=>
  array(8) {
    ["name"]=>
    string(26) "🇵🇸 Álvaro González"
    ["linked_account"]=>
    string(37) "https://mastodon.social/users/kAlvaro"
  }
}

I wanted to sort the likes by name, which turned out harder to be than I had hoped. Mostly because people do odd things with their names sometimes, such as not using an upper-case letter, or by prefixing their names with emojis as you can see in the example above.

If each entry in my array was only a string with a name, and no emoji is prefixed, you can use natcasesort(), but I have both complex objects and an emoji. This means PHP's built-in functions don't cut it.

However, PHP also has the Intl extension, which has a Collator class with a sort method.

To create such a collator in code, use:

$collator = new Collator('root');

The Root Collation is ICU's Default Collation, but as the ICU documentation says:

Not all languages have sorting sequences that correspond with the root collation order because no single sort order can simultaneously encompass the specifics of all the languages. In particular, languages that share a script may sort the same letters differently.

This is good enough for my use case there, where I only want to sort names in a reasonable fashion.

One thing that it does do is to sort lower-case letters before upper-case letters, but this behaviour can be changed by setting CASE_FIRST attribute on the collator to UPPER_FIRST:

$collator->setAttribute(Collator::CASE_FIRST, Collator::UPPER_FIRST);

Letters in non-Latin script will sort after the Latin letters.

However, the Collator->sort() method can only handle arrays of strings, and not complex objects.

To get around this limitation we instead use PHP's built-in usort() function with our own callback. In our callback we can use the Collator::getSortKey() method on each sort element's name array key to create the key that Collator::sort() would have used internally.

For good measure, we also use trim to remove preceding and trailing whitespace. The code to sort the elements now looks like:

$col = new Collator('root');
$col->setAttribute(Collator::CASE_FIRST, Collator::UPPER_FIRST);

usort(
    $allLikes,
    function($a, $b) use ($col) {
        $aName = trim($a['name']);
        $bName = trim($b['name']);
        $aKey = $col->getSortKey($aName);
        $bKey = $col->getSortKey($bName);

        return $aKey <=> $bKey;
    }
);

Now the only problem is that emojis sort before actual letters, so we need to scrub them. Each letter defined in the Unicode standard has properties associated with it. One of those properties is the General Category. If you examine the chart you will fined that for 0061;LATIN SMALL LETTER A the GC is Ll (Letter, Lower-case). The flag emoji from my example is composed of two characters: 1F1F5;REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER P and 1F1F8;REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S. Both of these have as category So (Symbol, Other).

The PCRE library that PHP uses for regular expressions is aware of these categories, and you can select for for them with the \p{…} specifier. The documentation has a page on it.

In our case we want to remove all Symbols (with category S). Changing our trim lines to strip this character class accomplishes this.

When we now combine all of this, we get:

<?php
$allLikes = [
    [ 'name' => 'Marcus Bointon', 'linked_account' => 'https://phpc.social/users/Synchro' ],
    [ 'name' => 'Derick Rethans', 'linked_account' => 'https://phpc.social/users/derickr' ],
    [ 'name' => '🇵🇸 Álvaro González', 'linked_account' => 'https://mastodon.social/users/kAlvaro' ],
];

$col = new Collator('root');
$col->setAttribute(Collator::CASE_FIRST, Collator::UPPER_FIRST);

usort(
    $allLikes,
    function($a, $b) use ($col) {
        $aName = trim(preg_replace('/\p{S}+/u', '', $a['name']));
        $bName = trim(preg_replace('/\p{S}+/u', '', $b['name']));
        $aKey = $col->getSortKey($aName);
        $bKey = $col->getSortKey($bName);

        return $aKey <=> $bKey;
    }
);

var_dump($allLikes);
?>

When we now run the example with the $allLikes array from previously, our result is:

array(3) {
  [0] =>
  array(2) {
    'name' =>
    string(26) "🇵🇸 Álvaro González"
    'linked_account' =>
    string(37) "https://mastodon.social/users/kAlvaro"
  }
  [1] =>
  array(2) {
    'name' =>
    string(14) "Derick Rethans"
    'linked_account' =>
    string(33) "https://phpc.social/users/derickr"
  }
  [2] =>
  array(2) {
    'name' =>
    string(14) "Marcus Bointon"
    'linked_account' =>
    string(33) "https://phpc.social/users/Synchro"
  }
}

And from that, I can then generate the HTML code to render who liked my article, which you can hopefully see below.

When we arrived, there was a long queue outside waiting to get in. Luckily, my wife had booked, so we got to skip the queue. Inside, we were seated in a backroom, with space for about a dozen people.

The menu isn't extensive, which makes sense, as it's a chippy. We both therefore had Fish and Chips, but not quite the same ones. My wife had the cod, while I had the haddock. There wasn't really much between them though. Both of them came in beautifully light batter. For those who don’t like fish, or who are vegetarian, they also offer a battered rare breed sausage, or a battered halloumi as alternatives.

A reasonable amount of reasonable chips were served with the fish. They were the classic style of chips you get with a fish and chip supper, a little chewy, and quite far away from the triple cooked Belgian fries that are so very good (but not traditional for fish and chips). There were also three accompaniments: tartare sauce, with crunchy gherkins, mushy peas to cover the vegetable section, and a nice and spicy curry sauce. My wife being a traditionalist also went in for the malt vinegar and salt.

With our meal, we shared a bottle of a white Vinho Verde, from Portugal. It's not something you often find in a chippy, but it was date night after all.

We didn't have any dessert, as the Fish and Chips were quite filling. It's a good chippy, but I believe it was quite pricey for what it was. You don't typically pay £25 per person for food at a chippy. Maybe we should try out our local chippy…

We did come home with a paper party bag of fruit salad sweets and black jacks though!

Haddock and Chips

1 / 1

❮ ❯

In tandem with the PECL website, which hosts around 400 packages, PHP developers have been able to install third party extensions for several decades now with the PECL installer.

PECL, which stands for the PHP Extension Community Library was a sister project to PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository. This repository has largely been replaced by Packagist, which hosts PHP user land code to be installed through Composer. Unlike PEAR, Packagist allows anybody to register a library of PHP code, which can then be composed through a file (composer.json) and made available to people's application code.

For extensions written in C, PECL was the only option. The PECL website has not been properly maintained for a long while now. And there are issues where the package description and release information XML files can not even contain higher-byte characters due to a very old misconfiguration of MySQL—back when it did not support Unicode and UTF-8 properly.

Updating the website, for example for adding new releases releases, is also not the easiest thing to do. Unlike adding a Git tag as you can do with Composer packages, it requires modifying an unwieldy XML file, and uploading the packages manually through a web form.

With this in mind, about a year and a half ago, I started drafting the requirements for "New PECL". The initial goals I came up with were:

• A new simplified installer, that does not rely on PEAR

• Ways to configure which (already installed) PHP version should get which extension version(s)

• Cryptographic verification of released extension tags

• Removing the reliance on a PECL website

• No longer relying on package.xml

The PHP Foundation bid for funding by the Sovereign Tech Agency — an agency of the German government — to develop this new tool.

From my initial requirements, James Titcumb and others worked on a more detailed design as part of their work for the PHP Foundation. James then set to work on the installer resulting in the first pre-release last November.

Since then, the tool has matured with more features, and better integration with Packagist, which now also features PHP extensions besides public PHP packages. Many extensions, including Xdebug, can now be installed with PIE.

Documentation for PIE is available on GitHub.

Binary builds for Windows are also supported, and we have developed a GitHub action to help extension authors to do this in the right way for PIE.

PIE's feature set is fairly compatible with PECL, and now is the time to start using it in your projects. There are sometimes still a few kinks, such as a recent issue with the MongoDB extension's use of Git submodules. This is already fixed in the 0.7.0 of PIE, but more issues are likely to be encountered.

At some point in the future, the PECL website will be discontinued leaving PIE installing PHP extensions from Packagist as the only available option.

If you are an extension author, then now is the time to add support for PIE in your extension.

In most cases, this requires creating a composer.json file in the root of your GIT repository, such I have done for Xdebug, and others have done for the APCu, CSV, Imagick, and many other extensions.

If you are a user of extensions, that you currently install through PECL, then now would be a great time to start using PIE in your development environments. Only through superior testing will the new PIE installer reach maturity, and become ready to have a 1.0 release.

And then we can celebrate with an actual pie. 🥧

We walked to the Grove Tavern, situated on the corner of a street with a few other shops, cafés, and another restaurant. When we arrived there were a few people having a pint, and a few other people eating. We were shown to our seats in a near-empty part of the dining room.

It being a pub, it does pub food. And it does it rather well.

While waiting for our mains, we first enjoyed some crispy halloumi, dressed in honey and chilli. They were a little crunchy and sweet. My wife had the Onglet steak, which she said was better than the steak at Rail House Victoria. It came with some good chips, a mushroom, and a peppercorn sauce. I enjoyed the Fish & Chips. It was a good portion with a light, but not whimsical, batter. Besides it were the usual accompaniments: tartare sauce, chunky chips, and some mushy peas. The latter I thought were a little too watery.

With our meal, we also shared a bottle of a Paraíso Sur viognier from Chile.

We didn't fancy any of the desserts, and instead we ended up for some dessert wine at The Brackenbury Wine Rooms at the other side of the terrace. Their menu looked good too, so that might become a further review.

The Grove was cosy and welcoming, and it fits in well as a neighbourhood pub with decent food.

Crispy Halloumi

1 / 3

Fish & Chips

2 / 3

Onglet Steak

3 / 3

❮ ❯

I release a new version of Xdebug on Sunday, which fixes a few bugs. One of them is titled emoji character become diamond question marks. This bug turned out to be the same as var_dump does not output some Cyrillic characters, which was originally reported a few days earlier but hadn't come with a decent enough reproducible case.

At first I dismissed this, as it's not unlikely that people get their character sets wrong, or mixed up.

But when I tested it, the following script really did not show the right result:

<?php
$str = 'hello 👍';
var_dump($str);
?>

Instead of the expected:

<pre class='xdebug-var-dump' dir='ltr'>
<small>Standard input code:3:</small><small>string</small>
<font color='#cc0000'>'hello 👍'</font> <i>(length=10)</i>
</pre>

It showed:

<pre class='xdebug-var-dump' dir='ltr'>
<small>Standard input code:3:</small><small>string</small>
<font color='#cc0000'>'hello ���'</font> <i>(length=10)</i>
</pre>

The four bytes that should have made up the 👍 had turned into three.

Xdebug uses a function, xdebug_xmlize, to escape XML and XHTML-special characters such as ", &, and < when it outputs strings of data.

Its algorithm first calculates how much memory the resulting string would use by looping over the source characters, and adding the lengths of the escaped characters together. It uses a 256-entry table for this.

The first row shows that byte 0's escaped length will be 4 (for �) and the LF character's escaped length will be 5 (for 
).

The replacement strings are recorded in the table that follows. It only has place for 64 elements, as none of the bytes above byte-64 need to be escaped. You can see that because the xml_encode_count table only has entries containing 1 after the fourth 16-element row.

Then in a second iteration it loops over all the source characters again to construct the resulting output.

In this iteration, it checks if the destination length is 1, in which case it just copies the character over. If the destination length is not 1, then it adds the number of characters that correspond to the destination character's length.

The bug here was that the table for xml_encode_count, although it was defined as having 256 entries, only had 240 entries. I had missed to add the 16th line, so instead there were only 15 lines of 16 elements.

And in C, that means that these missing elements were all set to 0. This meant that if there was a character in the source string where the byte value was larger or equal to hexadecimal 0xF0 (decimal: 240), the algorithm thought the replacement length of these characters would be 0. This then resulted in these characters to just be ignored, and not copied over into the destination string.

For the 👍 character (hex: 0xF0 0x9F 0x91 0x8D) that meant that its first byte (0xF0) was not copied into the destination string. And that meant a broken UTF-8 character. Oops! 💩

In Xdebug 3.4.2 this is now fixed, as I have added the 16th line to the table, with 16 more elements containing 1.

What I did find curious that it took nearly five years for something to report this issue, and with that, two in the same week!

We went to the Rail House Victoria on a rainy Friday evening. We were seated right next to a big group with children generally acting up, on a table which if I’m honest was a little undersized.

We started our meal with five aged Gouda croquettes. We've seen portions of two, three, and four before, but five is slightly bizarre. I don't get it when restaurants serve sharing items in prime number portions. It makes it harder to divide properly to share. They were however, quite tasty.

As her main, my wife selected the minute sirloin stack, which was served with a fried egg with a running yolk, and a caper salsa. It was well cooked. I chose the roast lamb, which was served with a fried rice with peppers and onions. The lamb was spot on as well, and lovely pink in the middle. It however did come in a very hot pan which I subsequently burned my hand on. With the meal, we shared a bottle of a Cantina di Gambellare merlot.

The dishes were fine, but the setting was more like an industrial gastropub, than a date-night establishment.

We were finished pretty quickly,, but didn't fancy any of their puddings. Instead, we popped over the road to Stoke House to enjoy a lovely cocktail.

Aged Gouda Croquette Balls

1 / 3

Roast Lamb with Fried Rice

2 / 3

Minute Sirlock Steak with Fried Egg

3 / 3

❮ ❯

We were determined not to do a "Valentine's Meal", you know, the ones that are cringe, start with a welcome glass of cheap fizz, have a special overpriced set menu, and are just a bit cheesy all round. Instead of that, my wife had booked a table at The Surprise, a gastropub in Chelsea that decidedly did not have a Valentine's Day Menu.

We were set in a small back room, and getting there meant wrestling through a throng of people hanging out at the busy bar.

As our starter, we shared chicken and blue cheese croquets, which came with a delicious thyme mayonnaise. We ordered a bottle of Riesling, partly because my wife didn't want to pronounce Gruner Veltliner to the waiter. It was nice and crisp, and we enjoyed it while waiting for our mains to arrive.

I chose the pan-fried cod. Unfortunately they no longer had that, but after going back-and-forth with the kitchen, it turned out they could do the same dish with monk fish, which I indeed had. It came served with mussels and prawns, some smoked tomatoes and risotto. The ingredients worked well together.

My wife picked the butternut squash gnocchi, which was a little crunchy on the outside offering a nice texture, and was served with kale and pine nuts. It also was a dish that was well put together.

We were still a little peckish, and henceforth decided we wanted some pudding. Our wine had run out though, so with our desserts — the affogato for her, an orange cake with chocolate sorbet for me — we also enjoyed a glass of dessert wine: A sauternes to go with the affogato, and for me a tokaji to go with the cake and sorbet.

The food was excellent, although the service was a little slow. The staff did apologise for this, while commenting that this was due to it being Valentine's Day. It's a great vibrant place for a meal, so we'd go again.

Chicken Croquets

1 / 5

Monk Fish, with Prawns and Mussels

2 / 5

Butternut Squash Gnocchi

3 / 5

Orange & Almond Cake, with Chocolate Sorbet

4 / 5

Affogato

5 / 5

❮ ❯

I have been speaking at the 2025 edition of ConFoo in Montreal, the city with three seasons in as many days.

I have given two talks.

• In What's New in PHP 8.4? I explain the major new features of PHP's most recent release, 8.4.

• And in Better Debugging with Xdebug I explained some of Xdebug's new features, and also showed how to use some of these features to use the debugging in complicated situation. I also mentioned the Native Path Mappings feature that I am working on, as well as the initial ideas and plans for time travelling.

Let me know if you have questions or comments.

On a cold and rainy evening, we met at the Blue Stoops, a pub owned by Midlands brewery Allsopp's, near Notting Hill Gate station, on the way to Kensington High Street. We arrived a little early, so started off with a half. I tried a Double Diamond, a beer that has recently come back after having been gone for 30 years.

While we were enjoying our cheeky half, our table became ready, and we sat down to investigate the menu. With our food we ordered a large glass of wine, but they only did small measures. So instead of a single large glass each, we ended up with four small ones! We combined the glasses to end up with two large glasses. A little curious, and to be fair, I would have been happy with just a small glass instead.

Back to the meal — To start, we had an oyster each. They were nice and plump, and were served with the usual accompaniments: a slice of lemon and an onion vinaigrette. We also choose the same main course, and onglet steak served with chunky chips, and a fried egg. The chips were crispy and fluffy, the steak well cooked, and the egg added some moisture. We saw other plates coming out of the kitchen, and I think we missed our mark here by not picking two different dishes.

The dining room had a typical gastropub feeling to it, and the bar was quite busy. It's a good spot, and I'm glad to see it has opened. Maybe next time we need a better look at their menu.

Oysters

1 / 2

Onglet Steak, with Chips and an Egg

2 / 2

❮ ❯

Having dinner at the Escoffier Room in the Vincent Rooms is one of our pre-Christmas traditions. This year that did not work out though, and instead we went in January. The Escoffier is the smaller, slightly fancier dining room which offers tables for up to four people, there is also the larger Brasserie, which is also well worth going to, which will do tables for larger groups.

The Vincent Rooms is a restaurant of the Capital City College — where they train chefs. The meals and service are all done by the students (with suitable supervision). This has little effect on the dishes, but it does sometimes make for a more haphazard service. That is okay though, as we are now used to this, and students learn by doing these things.

The set menu comes in a normal and a meat-free version. Our menu was "A Taste of Italy". Neither of us chose the matching wine menu, it was a school night after all, and my companion was doing “dry January”. I did enjoy a glass with my starter and mains, whilst she opted for some sparkling water.

Our dinner started with beetroot gnocchi — which were nicely fried, slightly red, and had a hint of beetroot flavour. Then followed a minestrone, which was served with Parmesan cheese crumbs. This was my least favourite dish. I thought it was a little too sour, and the Parmesan did not add much, if at all.

After the starters, a piece of moist, but firm, roast Monkfish followed. This was served on a bed of creamed porcini mushrooms. I thought it worked well together, but my wife was less keen as she thought the mushrooms were overpowering. This was followed by the main course, a porchetta served with artichoke purée, crispy crackling, and some kale. I think this also fit well together, and I thought this was my favourite course of the meal.

For pudding, a Sicilian Cassata was served with biscotti, and some poached pears. The cassata was a bit odd, as we hadn't expected a savoury flavour as filling in-between the two sponge layers. A selection of six petit fours finished our dinner, which we enjoyed with a coffee for my wife, and a glass of port for myself.

Although we normally enjoy our meals in the Escoffier, this one was a little underwhelming, but it doesn’t put us off returning.

Beetroot Gnocchi

1 / 6

Minestrone

2 / 6

Roast Monkfish

3 / 6

Porchetta, with Truffled Jerusalem Artichoke Purée

4 / 6

Sicilian Cassata

5 / 6

Petit Fours

6 / 6

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 18 hours on Xdebug, with 25 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

This is our second visit to Lore of the Land, but that was before Friday Night Dinners. On that occasion we went because they make their own beers (Gritchie Brewing Company). This time, we went because of a specific event: a Burns Supper.

Burns Night, January 25th, is when the Scot celebrate the life and poetry of the poet Robert (Robbie) Burns. It is traditional to serve haggis, neeps (swede), and tatties (potatoes); and of course a wee dram to toast with.

But this is a blog about dinner.

Our dinner started with some bannock bread and a Whisky Mac upon arrival. Soon we were tucking in into our starters, some whisky cured salmon tartlets, followed by hand dived scallops with cauliflower purée. The latter was also served with slices of picked cauliflower.

In between the starters and mains we had a whisky tasting of Crabbie and Bonnington malts. To be honest, the whiskies (and especially the 30-year-old one) were disappointing. They were mostly young and had very little flavour. But the experience of a guided whisky tasting was lovely, and other people around our shared table were very much more liking it. I think we are spoiled.

Before we started with our main, the Haggis was "piped in", and announced through Robbie's poem "Address to a Haggis". The haggis was well spiced, the mash was smooth, and the neeps just slightly mushy. Some fried onions were sprinkled on top, and a whisky cream sauce poured over.

After our meal, and during pudding (shortbread with Caledonian Cream and Marmalade) there were toasts to the lassies, and replies to the laddies — a humorous and mostly clean episode.

We enjoyed our dinner, and it was nicer than at Brown's last year. Although the whiskies weren't too much to our liking, we still had an enjoyable evening. I think we'll try to find a different venue for a burns night dinner next year though.

Bannock Bread

1 / 5

Whisky Cured Salmon Tartlets

2 / 5

Scallops with Cauliflower Purée

3 / 5

Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties

4 / 5

Shortbread with Caledonian Cream

5 / 5

❮ ❯

A few years ago I wrote a letter to my then MP Tulip Siddiq, with regard to the Online Safety bill.

This bill has now become the Online Safety Act and the regulator, Ofcom is preparing the rules and regulations around this.

What I then was worrying about, now all seems to come through. So I wrote the following letter to my new MP Georgia Gould.

Dear Georgia Gould MP,

I wanted to write to you as my MP regarding the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA), which was passed under the previous government with wide support from Labour.

Although it was always touted as promoting online safety, targeting the large social media companies, it is currently already having serious unintended consequences.

Because it is not just the larger social media companies that are in scope, but it also affects community forums, discussion groups about issues in Open Source software, and small independent sites. In most cases, these are not commercial entities making money from stirring up controversies, which is what in my opinion the OSA should have focussed on.

Each platform that has some relation with user-to-user to content is in scope, and the operators needs to a complicated risk assessment. Although Ofcon is now coming out with some help 1, and they talk about "proportionality", I would argue that many of these requirements are not proportional at all.

Personally, I would, need to do a risk assessment for several "services" (that I have identified so far), none of which are commercial—there are not even ads, algorithms, or tracking:

• The comments for my low-traffic blog (https://derickrethans.nl), as users can reply to comments by other users, and potentially add links to photos, even though all comments are pre-moderated.

• The issue tracker for one of my Open Source projects (https://bugs.xdebug.org). I self-host this, but users can submit bug reports, with screenshots showing where something went wrong.

• The web-based interfaces to the discussion groups of a large Open Source language project (PHP) (https://news-web.php.net/). This is a language used by upwards of 50% of the web. The groups are for discussing technical details of the language, but as it is user-to-user and not just e-mail, it is in scope.

• I help run a Mastodon server for the community of users for this language (https://phpc.social) as well, which is also clearly in scope.

• A small website that I, and a few other users, use for storing and sharing notes on whiskies we have tried (https://dram.io).

If I do any of these assessments wrong, or neglect to do, I would be liable, perhaps with severe penalties. Some of those deal with images, others with alcohol (so 18 and up). But none of them are probably high risk. But I still have to this. And these 5 are just examples that affect me. And nothing would stop malicious entities from making spurious complaints or uploads to get me in trouble.

But it goes further, resources and communities grown over decades will be gone because the consequences of enforcement under the OSA are so draconian that anyone rightly concerned about their users and the law isn't going to take the risk of that liability 2.

Ironically those who don't care about their users or UK law will just ignore it and likely be beyond prosecution/enforcement anyway, while those who do genuinely care about the actual safety would find it really hard and costly.

The worst about this is this will do is the opposite of the intentions of the OSA, and consolidate power in the large companies, as small independent operators shut their services down.

This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what we need right now.

We need diversity of online communities and opportunities for people to create safe online spaces that are not subject to the whims of someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

As a matter of fact, there is already a list being compiled of services that have decided to shut down, or block access to users from UK locations: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/ — I expect that list to grow drastically over the next few months.

I hope you can urge the UK government to amend things and clarify the position for small operators (some of which that have been part of the internet since the earliest days), so the UK doesn't lose all the small, independent, curated online communities, nor small independent non-UK companies blocking access for UK users.

With kind regards, Derick Rethans

Please write to your own MP if you share similar concerns, and feel free to copy parts of this letter and adapt them to your own examples. You can find out how to contact your elected officals on WriteToThem.

Not to be confused with "The Devonshire", an extremely popular pub, near Piccadilly Circus, which we also have reviewed.

The Devonshire Arms is a cosy pub situated in Kensington, between Earls Court and High Street Kensington tube stations. The pub itself has the feel of a local, but upmarket boozer—it is Kensington—where everyone (not just the locals) are welcome.

We had a cheeky half when waiting for our table to be ready. My wife had an alcohol-free Lucky Saint as she's doing Dry January. It's good to see that there were several alcohol-free options on their menu.

After a little wait (we were early) we were seated at a cosy table in the dining room to have a look at the menu.

As starters, we had some Padron peppers, and Wild Boar, pork and ale sausages, served with an English mustard. That sharp mustard, gave you a good slap in the sinuses, as all good mustards should.

From their specials menu, my wife chose the fish pie as her main, which was served with green beans. To accompany it, she had an alcohol-free Amalfi Spritz cocktail made with Lyres Italian Spirit. It looked like an Aperol Spritz, but it did not taste like it.

I selected the trout dish, which was served with salsify, roasted potatoes, and prawns. I also ordered a glass of wine that was recommended on their menu for my dish. To my surprise, a glass of red wine showed up, and not the customary white wine for fish. However, to my surprise and delight the flavours combined well.

After this, we were full enough and had no place for dessert. Our bill came in at £63 as we had a half-price main course voucher, a special for early January, without it would have come in at just under £90. The food was tasty, the service good, and the ambience lovely. A good night out all round.

Wild Boar Sausages, with English Mustard

1 / 4

Padron Peppers

2 / 4

Trout with Prawns

3 / 4

Fish Pie with Green Beans

4 / 4

❮ ❯

Tuesday, January 14th 2025, 17:40 GMT

London, UK

For a while I have been aware of some odd behaviour when you use branch coverage with PHP's foreach language construct. Usually with PHPUnit.

Take for example this bit of code:

<?php
function showLanguages(array $languages): void
{
    foreach ($languages as $language) {
        echo $language, "\n";
    }
}

It seems that in order to cover all paths by test cases to pass in an array without any elements, and one with at least one element.

But no, when you run the analysis, you will see that there only two out of the three paths are covered:

Let's first actually analyse which opcodes, PHP's internal execution units, are generated by the engine:

line      #* E I O op          return  operands
------------------------------------------------
    2     0  E >   RECV        !0
    4     1        EXT_STMT
          2      > FE_RESET_R  $2      !0, ->9
          3    > > FE_FETCH_R          $2, !1, ->9
    5     4    >   EXT_STMT
          5        ECHO                !1
          6        EXT_STMT
          7        ECHO                '%0A'
    4     8      > JMP                 ->3
          9    >   FE_FREE             $2
    7    10        EXT_STMT
         11      > RETURN              null

This output from VLD shows on line 4, two relevant opcodes: FE_RESET_R and FE_FETCH_R. Both of them can either followed by the next opcode on the list, or they can jump (->9) to opcode 9, which marks the end of the loop.

However from the diagram above, we don't see that path (the green one) being taken. Only the two paths that both continue with the next opcode (the red and blue lines). It seems that the emptiness of a normal array is checked by the FE_FETCH_R opcode.

Now the question is how to trigger the other path, so that 100% path (and branch) coverage can be reached.

This turns out harder than it is. I originally thought that this would be possible by trying to create a broken iterator — for example one where you inherit from an internal class with a custom one, and not call the original constructor. But this creates an exception which pre-empts the engine from even running the rest of the function.

The only situation where I managed to do this was by creating an iterator that after a correct initialisation, had no items to return. An example of such as case is a DatePeriod iterator where the start date of the iterator is behind the end date:

$i1 = new DatePeriod(
    new DateTimeImmutable("2025-01-14"),
    DateInterval::createFromDateString("+1 day"),
    new DateTimeImmutable("2025-01-01")
);

I had to change the definition of showLanguages too so that it accepts DatePeriod besides just array. But with that done, this specific iterator now lights up the green path:

There is currently an open bug in Xdebug's issue tracker to merge the branch analysis information for the two subsequent opcodes (FE_RESET_R and FE_FETCH_R).

I think I will now rather hide the jump away from the FE_RESET_R (and FE_RESET_RW) opcode.

But at last I now have an explanation as to where this phantom path came from.

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

In the last month, I spend around 8 hours on Xdebug, with 22 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

Situated at the end of a side-street of Marylebone High Street, Le Vieux Comptoir has been serving as a wine shop and restaurant for more than a decade. We first went many years ago, and have returned several times, with friends and family, as well as just having dinner a deux. However, we've not been recently, and so hadn't written a review. We also fancied seeing if it was still as good as we remembered. .

In the run-up to Christmas, we decided to do a re-visit to Le Vieux Comptoir. Upstairs is the wine shop, where you can get a bottle to take down into the restaurant if you wish. But you can also select your wine for dinner downstairs in the cosy restaurant. I felt like a little celebration was in order, so we started with a lovely glass of Cremant, served with some bread and homemade butter, while waiting for our starters.

For the starters, my wife went with the cheeseboard; two slices of four different cheeses, served at the perfect temperature, allowing the flavour of the cheese to come through. I selected the snails in parsley and garlic butter. I have always found snails interesting enough, but would only ever have it at a French place.

For our mains I ordered the confit duck. Sometimes that is exactly was looking forwards to, and in this case the whole week leading up to our visit. I remembered it being excellent on previous visits, and this time was no exception. It was served with roast potatoes, and cabbage leaves with a dressing. The same side dishes accompanied my wife's onglet steak. This was served medium rare, and was splendid. With our mains, we also enjoyed a glass each of a full-bodied red wine.

We still had some space for pudding, and we enjoyed a sharing platter of enormous profiteroles while sipping on a Sauternes dessert wine. It was a great meal, and quite indulgent. Something to do once in a while!

Snails

1 / 5

Cheese Board

2 / 5

Confit de Canard with Sides

3 / 5

Onglet Steak

4 / 5

Mountain of Profiterols

5 / 5

❮ ❯

A restaurant that focuses on one specific thing, Spanish tortillas. They come in different flavours. From classic (egg and triple cooked potatoes), to courgette flavoured ones, and Jamon Iberico. That, and a few starters and drinks makes for a unique and rustic place, especially when it is cold and windy outside.

We visited Broken Eggs on such a stormy and slightly damp Friday evening, just before a storm would arrive. The restaurant is cosy with a homely atmosphere, with friendly and welcoming staff. Spanish classics on the radio.

We had some Padron peppers and cheese croquettes to start. As is common, the croquettes came as three pieces. Which I always find odd, because many bookings are likely to be couples, and dividing three portions among two can be tricky. However, they kindly offered to produce four. This was good news, because they were excellent, and my wife said she wouldn't have wanted the third one to share.

We however, did share the tortillas. Instead of picking a big one to share, we chose two different flavours to split between us. One with courgettes, and the second one with Jamon Iberico. They were both flavourful, and slightly gooey in the middle. Perfect for scraping up with some bread at the end.

With our starters and tortillas, we also had a bottle of their house red. It wasn't anything special, but on a cold, rainy, and windy evening that it was, it was the perfect accompaniment to our meal.

It was a relaxed evening out, with good rustic food, for a reasonable price.

Padron Peppers

1 / 4

Cheese Croquettes

2 / 4

Courgette Tortilla

3 / 4

Jamon Iberico Tortilla

4 / 4

❮ ❯

Styling themselves as a New York neighbourhood Italian restaurant, Demartino is situated on Great Portland Street. When we visited it was busy, with elderly couples, a bunch of friends, and a birthday party. Very much a low-key neighbourhood restaurant. Unfortunately, that meant we had a small table right in the middle of the restaurant, which meant we were on something of a busy thoroughfare with serving staff and fellow diners moving around close to us.

For our starters we picked courgette fries and arancini, or rather, one big arancino. The courgette fries were nicely seasoned, and were served in a cone — just like Belgian fries. The big arancino was served in a spicy sauce, that had a very nice strong tomato flavour.

As her main, my wife selected a ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach, served in a lovely butter and sage sauce. I had the wild mushroom risotto, with the rice just a little al dente. A decent sprinkling of Parmesan added the right level of cheesiness.

We had a lovely bottle of red wine to go with our excellent meal. The service at Demartino was good, and the atmosphere lively.

The only downside to our visit was the position of the table we were seated at, so if we returned we'd try to be seated elsewhere (almost anywhere else).

Courgette Fries

1 / 4

Arancino

2 / 4

Wild Mushroom Risotto

3 / 4

Spinach and Ricotta Ravioli

4 / 4

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 43% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 10 hours on Xdebug, with 22 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

Het Schilderij (The Painting) is a gastropub in the small village of Dieren, where I grew up. The pub has been around for as long as I can remember, and I've had many a merry evening there in my youth. But it has evolved, and now has the feel of an English Gastropub, with a decent (although hardly changing) menu, with seasonal additions. They also have a great selection of interesting beers. It is a spot we frequently eat in as well, when we visit my parents.

In that context, we found ourselves here on a cold and rainy autumn evening. As a starter we shared an "Oerbrood", a rustic loaf, with butter, (very garlicky) butter, and some tapenade which worked well with a glass of Hertog Jan's Grand Prestige beer.

In autumn, it is quite common to see game on restaurant menus, and Het Schilderij is no exception. My wife and I both selected the venison steak, served with a thick wine jus. The venison was still moist and a little pink in the middle, with a nice grill-seared outside — adding a bit of colour and flavour. My parents both had wild boar loin which looked similarly delicious.

Accompaniments are shared with the table, and the chips, pan fried potatoes, and brussels sprouts with lardons (a seasonal addition) worked very well with our choices. Although the sprouts aren't everyone's favourite, I thought they were cooked just right.

We had a lovely evening, with enjoyable food and drink in a good atmosphere. We'll certainly be back.

Oerbrood with Butters and Tapenade

1 / 3

Venison Steak

2 / 3

Accompaniments

3 / 3

❮ ❯

For our tenth anniversary we made a trip to Marlow, a small town on the banks of the river Thames. The town features a suite of gastronomic pleasures. The two Michelin starred restaurant and Michelin starred pubs are both owned and operated by chef Tom Kerridge, which made for an amazing gastronomic weekend getaway. The getaway package also included a voucher for his Butcher's Tap and Grill, which is both a butcher and… a grill. We got a nice haul of barbecue meat from there!

Now, a few months later, we had something else to celebrate, and in that time, a new Butcher's Tap and Grill has opened in Chelsea, in London.

Although they do plenty of simpler (and cheaper dishes), we selected the Beef Wellington for two. We were informed in advance that it would take some time for it to be prepared. This gave us an excellent opportunity to enjoy a cocktail. I had an Aged Beef Fat Old Fashioned, and my wife a Butcher's Bloody Mary. Both excellently made.

The Beef Wellington was served a while later, and was served with green beans and some mashed potato. The latter could have been a bit more generous. There was also a charred onion, and fried onions on a crispy salad leaf. The Wellington itself was splendid. Nicely pink in the middle, surrounded by a moist mushroom duxelles, and covered with a perfectly crisp pastry — no soggy bottom! The dish was finished with a red wine sauce.

With dinner, we enjoyed a bottle of Bedoba, a Georgian red wine. We later found out it's the same wine we had at the Hand and Flowers in Marlow!

We were still a bit peckish and finished our meal with a pudding. My wife had a sticky toffee pudding, and I enjoyed an apple crumble.

The Butcher's Tap and Grill is a lovely pub, with great food, although it is the usual pub fare (the Sunday roast looked great). They also serve great burgers and speciality cuts. A lot of choice. It isn't a cheap place, but we thought quite worth the price, and are already thinking of a reason to return!

An Old Fashioned and a Bloody Mary

1 / 4

Beef Wellington, with trimmings

2 / 4

Sticky Toffee Pudding

3 / 4

Apple Crumble

4 / 4

❮ ❯

We went to St. JOHN on a chilly evening. We were sat upstairs directly in front of the door, and with the aircon also turned on it was verging on cold. I arrived a bit early and noticed people dining, whilst wearing their outdoor coats.

St. John, like most restaurants in London these days, operates on a “sharing concept” which is fine, but doesn't work for all foods, like soup for example.

We shared the venison rissole, which came with an extremely punchy aioli — a bit heavy on the raw garlic to be honest — which was nice. I then had a delicious artichoke soup and my husband enjoyed the smoked mackerel, with its bones in place, as starters. The smoked mackerel was served with some lemon herbed potatoes, which complemented the flavour of the fish well.

My main, the middle white pork, was underwhelming, with something of the school dinner about it. The pork was very dry and served on a cold plate with carrots that were well on the overcooked side. For some reason the entire dish was also drowned in what appeared to be gravy and oil, which didn't improve or moisten the dry pork, it just made it tepid and greasy. My husband's hake dish was better, served with leeks of just the right firmness, and a not-so-garlicky mayonnaise.

We had a bottle of the house white wine which worked well with all the dishes.

The mains took forever to turn up. The serving staff apologised for this, and offered us a bag of their madeleines as recompense, which we took away. Those fresh warm madeleines were absolutely delicious, and by far the best thing served. We'd go back for those, and the soup… But not for the mains.

Venison Rissole with Aioli

1 / 5

Smoked Mackerel

2 / 5

Artichoke Soup

3 / 5

Middle White Pork

4 / 5

Hake with Leeks

5 / 5

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 31% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug. This is again less than last month.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 10 hours on Xdebug, with 19 hours funded. I also spent 16 hours on the Native Path Mapping project.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

We were supposed to visit Café Deco together last November, but then I ended up in A&E for the evening, with my wife going on her own. She liked it well enough then to make a repeat visit for the two of us.

I arrived a little before her, and I was sat in a cosy and small room in the back, with room for barely 6 patrons. Café Deco does modern British cuisine, with some forays into French and Indian styles.

For her starter, my wife chose the charcuterie (from the snack section), and I picked the Mulligatawny (from the starter section). They slightly forgot that they were supposed to come together, but that was sorted out soon enough. The soup was thick with lentils and spices, and had a good kick to it. The charcuterie was flavourful too.

For her main, my wife picked a cicoria, carrot, and cannellini bean stew. The flavours were deep, the carrots a little crunchy, and the beans nice and buttery. I selected the pork chop as my main. I don't really often eat pork, but on this chilly autumn evening it felt the right choice for the moment. It was served with a pumpkin and radicchio gratin. The chop was nicely seasoned, and the gratin of roasted vegetables were a nice and slightly sweet accompaniment.

With our meal we also enjoyed a lovely bottle of a Spanish Granache, and created little sparkles on the tongue.

And then it was dessert time, for which we both had a scoop of the mint choc chip ice cream, and a dessert wine to round out the evening.

Café Deco is on the up market side, and not particularly cheap. But it was a very nice meal indeed.

Charcuterie

1 / 5

Mullagatawny

2 / 5

Cannelli Bean Stew

3 / 5

Pork Chop with Roasted Veg

4 / 5

Choc Mint Icecream

5 / 5

❮ ❯

Spagnoletti is an Italian style restaurant operating with a sharing dishes concept. We visited this in the middle of October, when it was reasonably busy.

Just like other sharing dishes places, they recommend a certain number of plates per person. In Spagnoletti's case, three to four. As part of this concept, most of the dishes also come at random moments.

We weren't especially hungry, and the waiter was surprised that we did not order the recommended amount of plates. However, for our starters we ordered the wild mushrooms and truffle arancini, with a whipped goat's cheese, and the suckling pig and black pudding croquettes. The arancini stood out. They had a perfectly crisp and seasoned coating and a smooth mushroom filling, and the whipped goats cheese was both delicious alone and as an accompaniment to the arancini. The croquettes sadly were a little underwhelming, both in terms of flavour and the amount of filling.

For her main course, my wife picked the burrata, which was served with butternut squash and chicory leaves. I chose the risotto with a pulled shin of beef and bone marrow. The burrata showed up first, and we soon realised that the warm risotto wasn't coming until the cold burrata had been eaten. The burrata with butternut squash, with a few bits of mandarin was a good combination, with the slightly bitter chicory rounding it off. The risotto, once it arrived half an hour later, was quite wet, with the rice on top of the pulled beef and bone marrow, and had an odd “gravy” sitting with the meat. It had depth, but it was a little strange to eat… and overall far too wet

Because the burrata came before the risotto, we didn't really get to eat at the same time, even though we had mentioned that these would be our main dishes. Awkward. Luckily, they did have a couple of interesting beers from the Portobello microbrewery that we enjoyed during the waiting time.

Sometimes, a place that does "sharing dishes" works fine, but in this case, it fell a little flat on its face.

Wild Mushrooms Arancini

1 / 4

Suckling Pig Croquettes

2 / 4

Burrata with Butternut Squash

3 / 4

Risotto with Beef Shin

4 / 4

❮ ❯

We visited Bubala, a vegetarian and vegan restaurant, on a warm-ish Friday night in October.

Bubala is located very centrally, just a few minutes walk from Oxford Street, Regent Street, and just around the corner from Carnaby Street.

The restaurant felt cosy inside, although the lighting was a bit on the dim side. It was fairly busy when we arrived. We were seated quickly, and shortly afterwards the server arrived with menus and complimentary still or sparkling water.

Bubala is a sharing plates type restaurant, serving a Mediterranean inspired cuisine. They had vegetarian or vegan set menus available for £45/person, but we opted to pick from the à la carte menu. We ordered flatbreads, hummus with chilli oil, baba ganoush, sweetcorn, halloumi with a fennel honey crust, and (surprisingly spicy) spanked cucumbers. To drink we enjoyed a bottle of white wine.

The food was delivered fairly quickly, but this led to an issue as the table wasn't really big enough for more than a couple of the sharing dishes, which were all quite large and flat. I ended up having to put my cutlery on the bench seat beside me, in order to have enough space for the water and wine glasses. My husband juggled cutlery.

Overall the food was tasty, and service good, and we'd return with veggie friends. If we returned we would consider ordering only a couple of dishes, and then ordering more when those were eaten, due to the table size. We ordered an extra flatbread and this arrived hot from the grill within a couple of minutes.

Flatbread

1 / 4

Hummus

2 / 4

Sweetcorn

3 / 4

Smacked Cucumbers

4 / 4

❮ ❯

From the archive: We visited Myrtle in December 2022

We had a wonderful tasting menu with accompanying wine pairing to celebrate my birthday (21 again). Myrtle specialises in using Irish ingredients, and overall the presentation was excellent, without being pretentious, the ingredients and the food in general was definitely the star.

I don’t think they have a Michelin star yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they’d get one soon. The location was a bit odd, as it was very far away from any sort of public transport or major town centre. It doesn't matter much for us, as we’re not the type of people that like our valet parking.

The food itself, again, was superb. I particularly liked their additional black pudding starter, made with beef black pudding, instead of the traditional pork version. All the other dishes were great too. My favourite was possibly the sea bass with potato scales, and tasty sauce.

As with a tasting menu, we also went with the wine pairing, putting us back £167/person—excluding service charge (12.5%).

Of course, the reason we ended up here was due to Anna's (the head/executive chef) appearance as a judge on Master Chef.

We were in Paris for the Paralympics, and on our first night we had time for a real meal. My wife suggested this restaurant as she had been here many times when visiting Paris for work. I had heard a lot about Chez Tony already.

When we arrived, we found the place empty inside. Tony came over from the terrace across the street nearly immediately and recommended that we sat outside, as the weather was great, and it was going to be stuffy inside. He was totally right after we (briefly) tried sitting inside first.

The menu is a blackboard that gets put on a seat close to you. They don't really do starters, and henceforth their menu is dinner. From snails and foie gras, via a beef tartare and cheese burger, the menu eventually leads to pieces of beef: filet mignon de porc (pork tenderloin), and escalope de veau. There is even fish and chips. My wife usually enjoys the cheese burger on her work trips.

The "piece de boucher" (butchers piece of beef) seemed the most appealing to us, and we ordered one each served medium rare. While dinner was being prepared our chosen carafe of a nice Côte du Rhône. I can't remember which one, but it was delicious, went well with our steaks, and it was empty by the time we finished our mains.

The steak was cooked perfectly medium rare, and the fries were nice and crispy. The peppercorn sauce had just the right amount of pepper to it.

We did find a little space for dessert, and shared a crème brûlée. Tony suggested, after tapping it with a fork, to wait a for minutes before enjoying it, so that the crème had some time to set. By this time, the restaurant had also filled up, and it was full when we left. Mostly locals too!

This is not a fancy restaurant, but one that does what it does well. No fuss, no snobby waiters, but good French cooking; and with a good ambiance.

The Restaurant

1 / 3

Piece de Boucher

2 / 3

Crême Brûlée

3 / 3

❮ ❯

We had visited Cafe Pacifico a few times in the past already, but we hadn't been back for a while, nor written up a review.

As it was a warm day, having Mexican food seemed like a good idea, and starting with a large margarita an even better one.

Cafe Pacifico has fairly standard items on their menu, not nearly as adventurous as Polanco where we dined a few weeks ago. We started our meal to share a couple of Empanadas, with a flavourful filling and a subtle chipotle salsa on the side.

By now our margarita was empty, and we ordered another one while waiting for our main, for which my wife picked the Chicken Chimichanga with black beans. A lovely dollop of guacamole and cream was perched on top. I chose the Sea Bass and King Prawn Tacos. These came in "tempura style" (i.e.: battered and fried), and were served with grilled pineapple, some red onions, and a slightly spicy mayonnaise.

After our mains, we were eventually given the dessert menu. We were quite eying up the churros, but it took so long for staff to return that by that time we had changed our mind and decided not to have any.

In my opinion, there could have been a little more spice and flavour in most of the dishes, and service wasn't the speediest. But it's still a reasonable option for a meal after a hard day of shopping in Covent Garden. We would also have benefitted from ordering a bottle of margaritas, instead of 4 individual large glasses.

Classic Margaritas

1 / 4

Crispy Empenadas

2 / 4

Chicken Chimichanga with Black Beans

3 / 4

Sea Bass and King Prawn Tacos

4 / 4

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 32% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug. This is again less than last month.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 8 hours on Xdebug, with 20 hours funded. I also spent 8.5 hours on the Native Path Mapping project.

remote_prefix: /usr/local/www
local_prefix: /home/derick/project
/projects/example.php:5-17 = /example.php:8
/example.php:5-17 = /example.php:8-20
/example.php:17 = /example.php:20
/projects/php-web/ = /php-web/

AFL_SKIP_CPUFREQ=1 afl-fuzz -b 7 -i fuzz-seeds -o fuzz-output -- ./afl-test @@

remote_prefix: /usr/local/www
local_prefix: /home/derick/project
=/example.php:42-5 = /example.php

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

Brother Marcus has a few different locations. The one we visited is right beside South Kensington station. It's a light filled comfy restaurant, specialising in middle eastern style sharing platters.

We like eating on the earlier side, which meant that we could benefit from the "pre-show set menu". This consists of a "rip and dip platter", consisting of three dips, olives, and fluffy pittas; and then a veggie and meat mezze per person.

The dips platter arrived swiftly, with our choice of roasted beetroot hummus, baba ghanoush and taramasalata. All the dips were delicious, and the pittas were indeed fluffy. A bottle of Kokotos wine showed up soon after, although I probably should put bottle in double quotes, as it was filled from a tap. That didn't do anything against its tastiness though.

As is usual in restaurants like this, everything comes when it's ready, so our table was soon overflowing with dishes. The pan-fried halloumi was sweet and sticky with a watermelon jam. The crispy aubergine skewer, crispy, but not dry and served with a creamy labneh sprinkled with grape molasses. The calamari had a well-seasoned coating, and was served with a green aioli. A little sprinkling of chilli added a little kick. And finally, the moist and well-spiced lamb koftas came on a smooth bed of aubergine begendi (béchamel sauce).

Close to many of London's top museums, the pre-show menu was excellent value at £25 per person. We can recommend this modern place, which after a day out shuffling around old museum pieces will certainly fill your belly.

Rip and Dips Platter

1 / 5

Pan-fried Halloumi

2 / 5

Crispy Aubergine

3 / 5

Crispy Calamari

4 / 5

Lamb Koftas

5 / 5

❮ ❯

Another hip restaurant, one, that recently had acquired a Michelin star, although they don't seem to mention that on their website. There was however a difference in prices between booking and eating.

When we arrived, we were explained that the menu consists of three sections: a selection of starters, a selection of smaller plates, and mains. They recommended getting a starter and small place each, and a main to share. We have heard this spiel before, and knew it was going to be too much (quantity of food and cost).

We did our own thing, and had a starter and small plate each instead.

For our starters, my wife chose the cured dairy beef, lovely thinly sliced meat with some almond shavings. It was perfectly moist with an earthy flavour. I picked the anchovies and cheese, which were served on sourdough bread. The cheese was whipped, with some oil sprinkled over it. As you expect from anchovies, they were salty, which the whipped cheese was a perfect accompaniment for.

As my main course I selected a mackerel with grilled peas. The mackerel came wholly grilled on a bed of caramelised chopped onions, and the aforementioned grilled peas. There was a sprinkling of herbs on top as well, to make the plate less beige. The combination of the meaty fish and caramelised onions worked great. My wife opted for an omelette, stuffed with girolle mushrooms. The omelette was fluffy, wonderfully moist, and filling!

With our meal, we also enjoyed a lovely bottle of Psarades, a Cretian white wine.

The food at Mountain was great, and the atmosphere inviting with a large open kitchen. Do make sure to request a table on the ground floor though. It is a bit on the pricier side, especially if you also share (or not) a main as well.

Cured Dairy Beef

1 / 4

Anchovies and Cheese

2 / 4

Girolle Ommelette

3 / 4

Mackerel

4 / 4

❮ ❯

We have been to this location before, back when it was called Morso, which has now moved to St. John's Wood. There are a few other restaurants next door, which we might also try at some point.

It was a very warm evening, and my wife had arrived much earlier than our table was booked for. She'd ordered a margarita to spend the time, and "convinced" me to get one too. One showed up right when I entered the cosy restaurant. We were on the earlier side and it was mostly empty.

Polanco serves contemporary Mexican food, and their menu consists of tacos and small plates to share. We ordered baja fish tacos, a quesadilla rustica, green chicken enchiladas, and tortilla chips with guacamole to enjoy while we were waiting.

With our food, we also got a bottle of white wine. Usually we would probably have had beer, but their beer selection was really only the boring macro lagers.

The guacamole was well-made, and a little spicy. Smooth, but still with some crunchy bits. The green chicken enchiladas were doused in a slightly spicy green sauce. A dollop of cream on top smoothed things out. My favourite were the fish tacos — crispy fried fish, served with chipotle mayonnaise and habanero sauce, and topped with pickled cabbage. The rustic part of the quesadilla consisted of molten cheese, shopped cherry tomatoes, a habanero sauce, and some cream.

All the dishes were a little spicy, but not so much that it overpowered. By the time we were done with our meal, the restaurant was buzzing with nearly every table occupied.

Tortilla Chips with Guacamole

1 / 4

Green Chicken Enchiladas

2 / 4

Fish Tacos with Pickled Cabbage

3 / 4

Quesadilla Rustica

4 / 4

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 42% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug. This is less than last month.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 15 hours on Xdebug, with 21 hours funded. I also spent 6 hours on the Native Path Mapping project.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

On the hottest Friday of the year (so far) we found ourselves at Turmeric Kitchen. Situated inside The Chilworth Hotel, a stone throw away from Paddington station.

It was quite dark inside, with little natural light, and wood panelled walls. The decor is more fitting for a winter's meal than a bright summer's day.

The menu is fairly varied, with some traditional dishes such as Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken) and Biryanis, but there are also some more interesting dishes — and an "around the world" section including burgers, fish and chips, and steak.

As a starter, we shared the Avocado Bombs, spicy smashed avocado with mustard seats and deep-fried, like bitterballen. They were served with a beetroot chutney and a pomegranate seed. A tasty appetiser.

As my main meal, my wife ordered the aforementioned Murgh Makhani, with some plain naans on the side. The curry was a little spicy, which I hadn't expected for a butter chicken. But it wasn't overpowering and left a nice warmth in the mouth. I opted for the Laal Maas, a slow cooked spicy lamb curry. I paired that with a pilau rice. The curry was tender and had just the right amount of heat.

Normally we would have had a beer with curry, but the selection was poor. There were only small bottles of macro brewery beers with ridiculous prices. We had a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc instead. A bit odd, but it worked fairly well.

To conclude our meal, we finished with a sorbet — my wife had the raspberry, and I had the mango. The serving (one scoop) was disappointingly small for the price.

After having refreshed, we went back outside into the heat for some exiting beers at "The Bear", a nearby pub.

Avocado Bombs

1 / 4

Murgh Makhani

2 / 4

Laal Maas

3 / 4

Icecreams

4 / 4

❮ ❯

After one of our entertainments, a tour and tasting of Graham's port wines, we had booked a table at Vinum. Situated at Graham's Port Lodge with magnificent views over Porto, the Douro river, and Vila Nova de Gaia. It had come recommended by a colleague.

First we were briefly seated outside for a drink with a great view, which was unexpected (and a little chilly). After this confusion was resolved, we were seated at a large table, in an airy and bright room, and the great view—they don't guarantee you get that though. It was also fairly quiet when we got there, at 18:30.

The restaurant also does a tasting menu (with wine pairing, if you desire), but we went à la carte again. We forwent our starter, and instead had four very plumb oysters.

As main course I selected the grilled tuna, which was wrapped in chard and slightly seared — which is how it is supposed to be. It came with a charred pepper and garlic mash. My wife picked the "Vace Velha" tataki, which was served with a roast potato and caramelised onions. The port lodge's owners also produce Duoro wines, so to go with our meal we selected a bottle of Altano Reserva 2021, a rich and complex white wine.

We still had some space for desserts, and my wife choose a baked peach with vanilla ice cream, and I had a pineapple dish. As we were in a port lodge, we paired this with a Graham's 20 years old Tawny, which was served in a gigantic 4.5l bottle. The tray that came on, also contained a port from 1882, but at €900 a glass, a little over budget.

The food was good, and the service excellent. The view magnificent, and the atmosphere relaxing. It was a "bit" of a hike up the hill, but certainly worth visiting — especially after also having done a tour of their warehouses.

Fat Oysters

1 / 6

Seared Tuna Wrapped in Chard

2 / 6

Vace Velha Tataki

3 / 6

Big Bottle of Graham's 20

4 / 6

Baked Peach with Vanilla Ice Cream

5 / 6

Pineapple Many Ways

6 / 6

❮ ❯

We recently visited Porto in Northern Portugal, where we were also in need of dinner. A while away from the busy hubbub of the riverside and the touristic areas of the city, we found ourselves on an unremarkable street in front of Apego.

We were welcomed in, and seated on a nice table near the kitchen in the calm and rustic restaurant. You can either choose a tasting menu of 5 courses, or eat à la carte. Five courses seemed a bit much, and we wanted to select our own courses, so we picked the latter option.

The menu is not very extensive, but each course did come with wine recommendations. As a started, I picked the Atlantic bonito crudo on a bed of beetroot and crème fraîche with a seeded cracker. My wife decided on the corn empanada with mushrooms, cucumber, and lime. Usually I have a red wine, and my wife a white, but in this case the recommended wines were of the opposite colour. The red to go with my wife's empanada wasn't totally fitting, and she liked my white more.

This meant that for our main courses she disregarded the recommendation and instead had the wine I had with my starter. As main course, she selected the artichoke with egg, pesto and Parmesan, whereas I opted for the pork shank, which was served with a crispy potato dish. Just like the starters, the mains were well cooked, with balanced flavours, with a delightful presentation.

The deserts looked great too, and to finish our meal, I picked the coffee tarte, while my wife choose the "Chou", served with strawberries and basil. We paired that with a Madeira, and, as we were in Porto, a glass of port.

Apego was a really nice experience, with great food and atmosphere. It's a little out of the way, but well worth visiting.

Atlantic Bonito Crudo

1 / 7

Corn Empanada with Mushrooms

2 / 7

Pork Shank

3 / 7

Crispy Potato Dish

4 / 7

Artichoke with Egg, Pesto and Parmesan

5 / 7

Chou

6 / 7

Coffee Tarte

7 / 7

❮ ❯

Back when I just moved to London, now nearly 15 years ago, I would frequent the Chamberlayne a lot. It was the closest pub with a good food selection, and the best chips in town.

It has changed hands, and name, a few times in the intervening time, but it's now back as the Chamberlayne, and we decided to try them out again.

We started with a happy hour, but then of Oysters and not drinks. The selection included Jersey and Carlingford oysters, as well as the river oysters Louet Feisser. Oysters have started to grown on me. I wouldn't touch them a decade ago, but would now happily shuck them myself.

After our starters, I opted for a Grilled Cornish gurnard, a lovely chewy fish served on a bed of haricot beans with bagna cauda, a garlic and anchovies purée, and some herbs. I am not usually a fan of beans, but these were nice and soft and buttery and worked well with the fish and purée.

My wife went for a more traditional choice: a beef burger served with chips. The burger was well seasoned and moist, with some enjoyable pickles. The chips were good too, but were not living up to the standard that I remembered from all these years ago.

They had several ice creams and sorbets for dessert. We were already reasonably happy, and had a single scoop each. I had a raspberry swirl, and my wife a salted caramel. Both excellent to finish our meal.

The Chamberlayne had a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere, with good food at reasonable prices. An excellent local option.

Selection of Oysters

1 / 5

Gurnard on Haricot Beans

2 / 5

Beef Burger with Chips and Pickles

3 / 5

Raspberry Swirl Ice Cream

4 / 5

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

5 / 5

❮ ❯

After trying to get a table for a long while, we finally managed to snag one. We have been to this location before (when it was a Jamie's Italian), and it's situated right next to Piccadilly Circus. The downstairs is a pub, and upstairs there are a dozen of tables and a large roaring grill.

The menu is handwritten, and has sections on starters, grilled items, mains, sauces, and sides. While we were looking at it, some bread and butter appeared. And a few minutes later our wine. After our waiter poured a glass, she took it away to keep it cool in a fridge. Both of us are not keen on this practise — we'd really rather see our wine so that we can pour our own, at our time of choosing.

From the starters section, I selected a white crab salad, which came with slices of crisp apple, and crunchy chicory leaves. The crab meat was nicely seasoned and slightly sweet. My wife had three juicy scallops with a crispy topping, served with malt vinegar and some lardons. The scallops were cooked just right.

At this point it was time to top up our glasses, and we convinced our new waiter to leave the bottle on our table, even though that meant it wasn't cooled.

For her main, my wife had the fillet of halibut, while I opted for the lamb cutlets. The mains don't come with anything, so we also had duck fat crisps, and a pea, onion, and bacon dish to go with our meal. That did mean we had to assemble our plates ourselves, as they all came separately. My lamb cutlets were great. Perfectly cooked, and still moist. My wife's halibut was well seasoned and also splendid.

It was still early, and sometimes it just feels right for pudding. After some discussion we decided to share the sticky toffee pudding, with a side of some dessert wine. I am usually not too keen on sticky toffee pudding, but I was really getting my fork into this one. I secretly wished we hadn't shared it!

It was a great meal out, and I now understand why it is so hard to get a table, especially earlier in the evening.

White Crab Salad with Apple and Chicory

1 / 5

Scallops with Crispy Topping

2 / 5

Halibut Fillet, with Duck Fat Crisps and Bacon Peas

3 / 5

Lamb Cutlets, with Duck Fat Crisps and Bacon Peas

4 / 5

Sticky Toffee Pudding

5 / 5

❮ ❯

GitHub and Pro/Business supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 44% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 23 hours on Xdebug, with 22 hours funded.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.

Following the lead of a better-known, piano-playing food critic, we visited Lita, a new restaurant in Marylebone, on a nice spring evening. We didn't want to sit outside with the smokers, so we chose to sit inside. What we hadn't expected was to be sat right in a corner in the back—the darkest (and most humid) spot in the restaurant.

With the menu came a spiel of: "We recommend a starter each, and then two or three of the small plates, and then one or two from the big plates. The small plates are just little bites." — I am paraphrasing here, but you get the gist. Without looking at the menu, we already thought that, taking the advice would mean we would end up with way too much food — we've been in similar situations before. Seeing the price of each of these "small" and "big" dishes were, also put us right off. Ultimately, we can always order another dish.

Instead, we opted for a more reasonable selection, at least in our opinion. We started with wild-farmed sourdough, with cultured butter, and smoked Basque sardines with a cherry sauce. I have no idea what wild-farmed sourdough is, nor cultured butter; but it was nice bread with some good butter. The sardines were nicely cured, and the cherries added an enjoyable sweet tang. It wasn't a lot of chow though.

As our intermezzo dish we chose their salad of Provencal asparagus, peas, and broad beans, served with a poached Braddock Whites duck egg. A light and refreshing dish, with the white and green asparagus having just the right amount of crunch.

And finally, as our main we picked the poussin, which was served with an apricot jus. On the side we had a basic green leaf salad. The poussin was perfectly cooked, and easily came off the bone. I've never had chicken and apricot, but thought the combination worked really well. The salad was, well, salad. Flopped out of the bag and dressed with a fairly basic oil and vinegar dressing. Being critical the leaves were too large to eat in a mouthful, so a bit of light chopping by a chef would have improved it; alas.

With our meal, we shared a carafe of Chardonnay, which was perfectly nice. In most circumstances, we would have had a bottle. But they start at £54 here, which is a little over the top.

The food that we had, was delicious. But we really ought to have had a look at the price ranges in the original review, or on the menu before we booked. We didn't think the value-for-money ratio worked out here. I don't think we will be back here, also because it felt a little pretentious. Marylebone has both better and more affordable places to dine in.

Soughdough with Cultured Butter

1 / 5

Cured Sardines with Cherries

2 / 5

Asparagus Salad

3 / 5

Poussin with Apricots

4 / 5

A Bunch of Salad Leaves

5 / 5

❮ ❯

We walked the last mile to the restaurant on a lovely, warm spring evening. It is situated on the east side of Hampstead Heath, not far from Highgate Cemetery. Nearby are several independent shops.

As the evening was warm and sunny, many people sat outside, but we sat inside, on one side of the little restaurant. On the other side, there was a fish counter with fresh-looking fish and seafood. The back wall had a rack full of bottles of wine to have in or take out. A fridge next to it was for the white and sparkling wines to have in. The atmosphere was very relaxed.

The menu was a blackboard, with numerous tasty-sounding dishes in three different sections: cold plates, hot plates, and sides/desserts. Although nearly all the dishes sounded delicious, we each chose a dressed and undressed oyster to start our meal. But not after we had perused the wines on offer—we selected a Greek Savatiano.

The dressed oyster had a slightly spicy sauce with a nice burn that did not overpower the oyster's flavour. The undressed oyster was fresh and enhanced with a few drops of lemon juice.

After our starters, our mains arrived. My wife had picked a ray wing dressed with salty caper butter, and I had selected the whole plaice with lobster sauce. The lobster sauce alone was to die for—lovely, sweet chunks of lobster meat with a powerful tomato undertone. It went very well with my perfectly cooked fish. The other dishes coming from the kitchen also looked enticing. On the side, we shared some new potatoes.

We don't usually have three courses — two is plenty — but it was a lovely spring evening, and a dessert seemed appropriate. My wife had a slice of a traditional British custard tart topped with a little nutmeg, whereas I had opted for the fresh strawberries served with white chocolate cream. Although white chocolate can be cloying sweet, this wasn't, and therefore a delicious final to our meal whilst sipping an accompanying dessert wine: A nice relaxed meal with fabulous fishy food.

Four oysters on a place with ice, with a slice of lemon.

1 / 6

A whole plaice with lobster sauce.

2 / 6

New potatoes in butter.

3 / 6

A ray wing covered in butters with capers in it.

4 / 6

Classic custard tart slice.

5 / 6

Strawberries in white chocolate creak, with crunchy bits.

6 / 6

❮ ❯

We visited The Cow on a warm spring evening and went through a packed bar downstairs to the much quieter upstairs restaurant. This place had been recommended to us, so we were keen to pop along and try it out.

We were welcomed with some lovely bread and butter and had some mackerel pate to share to start with. The pate was nicely flavoured but could have done with being served with more bread, as there was too much pate, for the amount of bread, even if we loaded it on.

I chose the Monkfish, which was well seasoned and had its defining chewy bite. The vegetables that came with it added flavour, as did the tomato. What let the dish down was the watery sauce underneath it.

My wife selected the cuttlefish with peas. The cuttlefish with the peas and sauce was pleasant. The slice of sourdough helped up mopping the flavourful sauce as well, although it did make the dish a little soggy.

When we left, the downstairs area was even busier, with no place to even stand. Overall, whilst it is clearly a local favourite, we found it a bit overhyped, and we will probably not go back.

Smoked Mackerel Paté with Sourdough and Butter

1 / 3

Monkfish on a Bed of Courgette and Tomatoes

2 / 3

Cuttlefish with Peas and Toasted Bread

3 / 3

❮ ❯

For most of the videos that I make, I also like to have subtitles, because sometimes it's easier to just read along.

I used to make these subtitles with an online service called Otter.io, but they stopped allowing uploading of video files.

And then I found Whisper, which allows me to upload audio files to create subtitles. Whisper is an API from OpenAI, mainly known for ChatGPT.

I didn't like having to upload everything to them either, as that means that they could train their model with my original video audio.

Whisper never really worked that well, because it broke up the sentences in weird places, and I had to make lots of edits. It look a long time to make subtitles.

I recently found out that it's actually possible to run Whisper locally, with an open source project on GitHub. I started looking into this to see whether I could use this to create subtitles instead.

The first thing that their documentation tells you to do is to run: pip install openai-whisper.

But I am on a Debian machine, and here Python is installed through distribution packages, and I don't really want to mess that up. apt-get actually suggests to create a virtual environment for Python.

In a virtual environment, you can install packages without affecting your system setup. Once you've made this virtual environment, there's actually Python binaries symlinked in there, that you can then use for installing things.

You create the virtual environment with:

python3 -m venv `pwd`/whisper-local
cd whisper-local

In the bin directory you then have python and pip. That's the one you then use for installing packages.

Now let me run pip again, with the same options as before to install Whisper:

bin/pip install -U openai-whisper

It takes quite some time to download. Once it is done, there is a new whisper binary in our bin directory.

You also need to install fmpeg:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Now we can run Whisper on a video I had made earlier:

./bin/whisper ~/media/movie/xdebug33-from-exception.webm

The first time I ran this, I had some errors.

My video card does not have enough memory (2GB only). I don't actually have a very good video card at all, and was better off disabling it, by instructing "Torch" that I do not have one:

export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=""

And then run Whisper again:

./bin/whisper ~/media/movie/xdebug33-from-exception.webm

It first detects the language, which you can pre-empt by using --language English.

While it runs, it starts showing information in the console. I quickly noticed it was misspelling lots of things, such as my name Derick as Derek, and Xdebug as XDbook.

I also noticed that it starts breaking up sentences in a odd way after a while. Just like what the online version was doing.

I did not get a good result this first time.

It did create a JSON file, xdebug33-from-exception.json, but it is all in one line.

I reformatted it by installing the yajl-tools package with apt-get, and flowing the data through json_reformat:

sudo apt-get install yajl-tools
cat xdebug33-from-exception.json | json_reformat >xdebug33-from-exception_reformat.json

The reformatted file still has our full text in a line, but then a segments section follows, which looks like:

"segments": [
    {
        "id": 0,
        "seek": 0,
        "start": 3.6400000000000006,
        "end": 11.8,
        "text": " Hi, I'm Derick. For most of the videos that I make, I also like to have subtitles, because",
        "tokens": [
                            50363, 15902, 11, 314, 1101, 9626, 624, 13, 1114, 749, 286,
                            262, 5861, 326, 314, 787, 11, 314, 635, 588, 284, 423, 44344,
                            11, 780, 50960
        ],
        "temperature": 0.0,
        "avg_logprob": -0.20771383965152435,
        "compression_ratio": 1.5128205128205128,
        "no_speech_prob": 0.31353551149368286,
            },

Each segment has an id, a start and end time (in seconds), the text for that segment, and a bunch of auxiliary information.

But it is still sort of a sentence at a time, which isn't really what we want. Additionally, I really don't want it to say XDbook and misspell my name.

For both of those there are actually options that we can use.

To make things easier for us later, we're turning on word timestamps. That allows us to by word see where the time index actually was. You do that with the --word_timestamps True option.

To provide a hint on what the video is about, and to get better words, we can use the initial prompt. The option that I used for this video was: --initial_prompt="This video by Derick introduces a new Xdebug feature, regarding exceptions".

To make things more accurate or less accurate, there's also an option that you can specify which is which model to use. Normally the standard one medium is fine, but in order to speed up generation, you can use --model tiny. This will give less accurate results.

If the model has not been downloaded the before, Whisper will automatically do this.

It is also possible to specify the language, which makes things go faster if it's English only as well: --language English. It supports a bunch of languages.

The full command that I used is:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="" \
        ./bin/whisper ~/media/movie/xdebug33-from-exception.webm \
        --word_timestamps True \
        --initial_prompt="This video by Derick introduces a new Xdebug feature, regarding exceptions" \
        --language English

In the output file, we now see another elements in each sentence section:

"words": [
    {
        "word": " Hi,",
        "start": 3.6400000000000006,
        "end": 4.16,
        "probability": 0.6476245522499084
    },
    {
        "word": " I'm",
        "start": 4.28,
        "end": 4.44,
        "probability": 0.9475358724594116
    },
    {
        "word": " Derick.",
        "start": 4.44,
        "end": 4.8,
        "probability": 0.12672505341470242

For each word, it has the start and end, as well as the probability of it being correct. You see that for Derick it was only 13% certain.

With this information you can do some analysis to create an actual subtitle script out of this. For that I have written a PHP script.

It loops over all the segments, and for each of the segments over all the words. If the difference in time between the end of a word and the start of a new word is more than a quarter of a second, it emits a new section of subtitles.

Similarly if a sentence is longer than 60 characters it also breaks it up into an extra line. This keeps all the subtitles reasonably well sorted.

The emit function formats it like how the SRT files are supposed to be.

With this script, I now create a new SRT file, overwriting the one that Whisper had created:

php whisper-to-srt.php xdebug33-from-exception.json > xdebug33-from-exception.rst

The output looks like:

0
00:00:03,640 --> 00:00:04,799
Hi, I'm Derick.

1
00:00:05,919 --> 00:00:10,980
For most of the videos that I make, I also like to have subtitles,

2
00:00:11,640 --> 00:00:15,779
because sometimes it's easier to just read along for various
different reasons.

These subtitles I can now add when uploading a video to YouTube. I might also create a similar script to generate output that can be used as the base for an textual article. Not everybody likes learning from watching videos.

I would also prefer not to use a model that has been trained with questionable sources. I will be investigating if I can use Mozilla's Common Voice project's data instead.

We went on a rainy Saturday evening. Sudu is pretty close to where we live, but this was our first time.

The exterior is painted a dark grey and is a little unprepossessing, however once inside, we were in for a treat.

We were quickly seated in a busy restaurant and saw many delicious-sounding things on the menu. My husband chose the beef rendang, which he had served with plain basmati rice. I picked the chicken satay served with coconut rice and a plain roti. This was washed down with a couple of tiger beers. The service in Sudu was quick and attentive but not intrusive.

The food arrived fairly quickly. My husband's beef rendang was nice and spicy, as it should be, with nice tender chunks of beef that worked well with the rice. My chicken satay came as chicken pieces on skewers with a bowl of a spicy, peanutty satay sauce into which the chicken could be dipped. The coconut rice was subtly flavoured with coconut. Once the chicken skewers were finished, I poured the remaining satay onto my rice. The roti was delicious, slightly crispy on the outside but soft and a little fluffy on the inside and not overly greasy.

The food coming out to neighbouring tables also looked great, so it is likely we’ll be going back to try something else from the menu.

Chicken Satay

1 / 3

Roti

2 / 3

Beef Rendang

3 / 3

❮ ❯

We went to the branch on Marylebone High Street, in a building previously occupied by Patisserie Valerie. The front of Granger and Co. is pretty unassuming, however once inside it really opens up. The rear dining room is a large modern airy dining space around two floors high, with comfortable seating and art on the walls. It has a slightly mid-century modern vibe. Despite the size and height of the room, the acoustics was great, and we could hear our conversation perfectly.

I arrived a little early and was seated in a corner seat. From there, I could admire the room while perusing the menu. Once my wife arrived, we quickly settled on our food choices.

We started with courgette chips with an aioli. The chips (slices of courgette) had a lovely crisp batter, with juicy courgette inside and arrived sprinkled with black sesame seeds. We squeezed a few drops of lemon juice over them, which really brought them to life, especially when dipped in the delicious aioli.

For the main course, we both selected an onglet steak—medium rare. It was well-cooked, flavourful, and moist. It was served with some greens, baby lettuce, and onion rings. We enjoyed a bottle of Tule Rosso wine, which worked well with the food.

After our main course, we both fancied a little dessert. Not too much, as we were mostly full of delicious steak. We settled on a tiramisu, which had good, slightly boozy coffee flavour and was nice and creamy, and formed a delicious end to our meal at this Australian restaurant.

Courgette Chips

1 / 3

Onglet with Vegetables

2 / 3

Tiramisu

3 / 3

❮ ❯

Over the last few weeks I have been publishing a series of videos on writing PHP extensions.

I record these videos through OBS, and then slice and dice them with Kdenlive. This editing is necessary to make up for my mistakes, shorten the time we wait for things to compile, and to remove the noise of me hammering away on my keyboard.

Editing takes a lot of time, and I still wasn't always pleased with the result as there was still a fair amount of noise while I am talking.

For the PHP Internals News podcast, I used a set of noise cancellation filters, which worked wonders. But it turns out that Kdenlive does not come with one built in.

I had a look around on the Internet, and learned that there is a LADSPA Noise Suppressor for Voice plugin. LADSPA is an open API for audio filters and audio signal processing effects. LADSPA plugins can be used with Kdenlive.

Some Linux distributions have a package for this LADSPA Noise Suppressor for Voice, but my Debian distribution bookworm does not.

I found instructions that explain how to build the plugin from source. These instructions worked after some tweaks. I ended up creating the following script:

#!/bin/bash

sudo apt install cmake ninja-build pkg-config libfreetype-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev
git clone https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice /tmp/noise
cd /tmp/noise
cmake -Bbuild-x64 -H. -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
sudo ninja -C build-x64 install

After running this script, and restarting Kdenlive, I found the installed plugin when I searched for it.

With the plugin loaded, I now have much clearer sound, and I also don't have to edit the sections where I am typing, as the plugin automatically handles this.

I will still have to edit out my mistakes.

I then also had a look at how it worked. It turns out that this plugin uses neural networks to cancel the noise.

In the background, it uses the RNNoise library which implements an algorithm by Jean-Marc Valin, as outlined in this paper. There is an easier to read version of how the algorithm works on his website.

The data to train the model is also freely available, and uses resources from the OpenSLR project. Noise data is also available there. From what I can tell, all this data was contributed under reasonable conditions, and not scraped from the internet without consent. That is important to me.

Hopefully, from the third video in the series, you will find the sound quality much better.

From the archive: We visited Pascor in January 2023

Right on Kensington High Street, near the Design Museum is Pascor. A Levantine “Fire” restaurant, which we picked as our first place to go to in the new year.

The restaurant is over two levels, with the lower part smaller, and close to a chilly door. Luckily we were sat in the roomier first floor, with cosy decorations. The restaurant is a tapas-y affair, and we shared the Challah Bread, the Reverse Tabbouleh Salad, a whole roasted aubergine, and the evening’s special: fish cakes, which were really fish cake croquettes. The dishes all came with sauces. Although they were fairly simple, they all packed a great flavour. The dishes came out as they were ready, and they all went great with the Lebanese red wine that we picked (a Château Ksara Le Prieuré Rouge 2018).

We also did indulge in desserts. My wife picked a Coconut “Beirut Meets Bangkok” Malabi, which was lovely sweet and moist with strong hints of pineapple. I choose the Chocolate Crémeux which was rich and indulgent with a flavourful blueberry sauce.

My only regret is not picking one (or two!) more dishes to share! Which is all the more reason to return, and sample some other delicious things that we saw coming out of the kitchen — perhaps when the weather is a little better.

For tonight's meal, we walked to 50 Kalò, a busy restaurant just off Trafalgar Square, and situated in The Grand Hotel. Although you don't notice that it’s a restaurant attached to a hotel.

50 Kalò is a pizza restaurant and an off-shoot of their original Naples-based restaurant. It came with great reviews, so we punted on it. When we got there, we were quickly seated at a small table, with my chair nearly touching a chair on the table behind me. I am not keen on being boxed in like this, and despite the small gap, the staff still pushed through the gap between me and the diner behind, which was quite irritating. Fortunately, my wife spotted another free table without this constraint, and we moved.

The menu is full of Neapolitan pizza—in fact, that's what this restaurant specialises in. I selected a Prosciutto Cotto—roasted ham on a white base, with shavings of aged Parmesan. My wife chose the Del Monaco, which had a traditional tomato base, and came topped with salami. The pizzas were big and freshly cooked, arriving quickly. The pizza crust was slightly toasted and lovely and chewy, but in my opinion, the base could have been a little crispier. The shavings of fresh parmesan also added something extra to the overall flavour.

The restaurant also has its "own" beer, (three varieties) brewed in collaboration with Birra Amarcord, from Rimini in Italy. We both started with a "Forte," and during our meal, we enjoyed the other two, (a blonde and a red) as well. The beers were nice and complemented the pizza, but whilst tasty, they weren’t the most exciting beers.

Although we thought we were full from our large pizza, our waitress convinced us to have a special Easter-related dessert. The almond and orange cake was delicious, nice and fluffy, with a lovely freshness from the orange. It was a fitting end to the meal.

All in all, it was a reasonable meal out. The pizzas were nice, the service was quick, and the interior was lovely. This would be a good place to eat after a day of tourist-ing, and avoiding the nearby chain restaurants.

Prosciutto Cotto

1 / 3

Del Monaco

2 / 3

Almond and Orange tarte

3 / 3

❮ ❯

We were not planning to go here, but due to unforeseen circumstances with our planned dinner venue, we had to change plans at the last moment, and this pub was close by.

It's a fairly typical Young's pub, with their standard taps, including a Real Ale — the Young's Original. I ordered fish and chips, sorry, the "Ale Battered Haddock". My partner ordered the bavette steak. The fish had a nice crispy coating, and as a first for me, came with curry sauce as well as tartare sauce. It worked better than I expected. The chips were a bit on the chewy side, but then again, I like mine mega crunchy on the outside, and fluffy on the inside — like good fries should be!

The portions were large, and we were properly full by the end. I have to admit I was struggling a little.

It got busy soon after we finished our meal and was a little too loud and shouty for my liking. Therefore, we made a swift exit and headed home.

Ale Battered Haddock

1 / 2

Bavette Steak

2 / 2

❮ ❯

Once in a while, you want to try something different. So we found ourselves on a cold and rainy Friday evening at Nazuki Garden. I had just come back from a work trip to Berlin, and was in need of a good meal.

My partner had booked Nazuki Garden several weeks earlier, at a time which would make it easy enough for me to make it on time to. With London City's efficiency, I was way too early and ended up walking for half an hour first so that I didn't have to sit in the restaurant by myself for an hour.

We were sat at the back of the room, far away from the door, but that unfortunately didn't stop the draft when somebody opened that door.

Their menu is extensive, with lots of tempura, sushi, sashimi, temaki, nigiri, and rolls. However, it was a cold evening, and we preferred something warm.

Luckily, their menu also has a large selection of cooked dinner. Soups and donburis.

We began our meal with a starter of vegetable gyozas and Japanese fried chicken. The gyozas were nice and crisped up, with a slightly bubbly texture. The Japanse Fried Chicken also crisp, spicy, and served with a lovely flavoured mayonnaise.

While we were enjoying our starters and Merlot (we got a bottle, it was Friday, bite us), a fair amount of other punters came to the restaurant. I was happy to see a large Japanese contingent as well. It's often a good sign that restaurants with a specific country's cuisine are frequented by people from that specific country. It adds a flair of authenticity.

After our main, we both had the Teriyaki BBQ Roasted Pork Donburi — slices of well seasoned moist roasted pork in a delicious sauce. It was perhaps not the most adventurous dish on their menu, but sometimes you just want to get fed well. And we were.

After dinner, we were still a little peckish, and shared a chocolate ganache mochi ice cream. A little rice cake richly filled with chocolate ganache icecream. A perfect way to end our meal.

At some point, in summer, we probably should return and try our the sushi (and friends) side of the menu as well.

Vegetable Gyoza

1 / 4

Japanese Fried Chicken

2 / 4

Teriyaki BBW Roasted Pork Donburi

3 / 4

Chocolate Ganache Mochi Ice Cream

4 / 4

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From the archive: We visited Akub in January 2023

Just off the main road near Notting Hill Gate station is this cosy multi-floor restaurant serving Palestinian food. Opened last year, and the menu contains mostly sharing dishes.

We started off our drinks with two Palestinian beers, a White, and an IPA, which fitted very well with our selection of mezzes/starters/whatever you want to call it. Before the starters showed up, we ordered a bowl of salted lupin beans, called Turmous, which were very tasty. Similar to a mix of almonds and perhaps Edamame? At least, the way you eat them was like the Japanese bean snack, as it involved removing the skin in your mouth — if you were so inclined. I was; my partner wasn't.

The starters that we ordered included three balls of a goats cheese (Labaneh) covered in three different kinds of spices. Sumak, and two others that I can’t remember right now. Besides that, we got a grilled Nabulsi cheese, which was covered in some oil and seeds, and was slightly squishy like fried halloumi can be, a little salty like feta, but overall a better texture than I think that over-fried halloumi could be. Our third starter were spiced squash dumplings, Shish Barak with Beetroot, which was also delicious.

Our "main" to share was the short rib Fatteh, which was slow cooked beef with spices, with garlic yoghurt, crispy (like really crispy) onions, with some fried focaccia squares to add some more texture.

Even after that, we were still not 100% satisfied, and had a rich chocolate cremeux and pistachio ice cream to finish. It was all so tasty that we forgot to take any photos!

The service was attentive, and our waitress explained approximately how many things we should order from the menu, and she was spot on.

We had been to Volta do Mar before, before they moved from their old location in Covent Garden, to their new location in Chelsea.

The restaurant specialises in Portuguese food, including cuisines from countries along Portuguese trade routes.

While we were reading the menus to select our dishes, we enjoyed a cheeky cocktail. I had a take on a Caipirinha, spruced up with blueberries. And my partner had a Martini with added spiced pear.

After making our choices, we found out that beyond the dishes on the menu, they also have a short set of specials. This also meant that their Iberico Pork Bafassa was replaced with an Iberico Pork burger, with added foie gras. As we don't really want to eat that, it meant that my partner had to change to a different main.

In the end, we choose to share a Sardine Pâte and Sourdough snack, and Ham Hock and Chorizo Croquettes. The pâte was smooth and flavourful, and spread excellently on the sourdough. The croquettes full of porky goodness. The other starters on the menu also sounded appetizing.

For our main, we picked their Piri Piri Chicken, served with chips. The chicken was delicious, moist and well spiced and the pot of sauce that came with it was ideal to dip the chicken and chips into.

We had a glass each of their house wine with our main, I had red, but my partner had the white, both wines were lovely and worked nicely with the food.

We enjoyed our meal at Volta do Mar. The food was great and the atmosphere relaxing, and the staff attentive. It certainly was no Nando's!

Blueberry Caipirinha

1 / 4

Sardine Pâte with Sourdough

2 / 4

Ham Hock and Chorizo Croquettes

3 / 4

Piri Piri Chicken

4 / 4

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At the end of January, more shops start stocking haggis again. Haggis is a traditional food of Scotland and the main event of a Burns supper, where the life of the poet Robert Burns is celebrated. It is often paired with neeps and tatties (mashed swede and potatoes).

With my partner having Scottish ancestry, we usually prepared our own. In the earlier years with friends and family, in the form of "drink some of Derick's whisky". In later years just for the two of us. This year, we chose to not prepare our own, and instead enjoy somebody else cooking it for us.

We have been to Browns in Covent Garden a few times before — we even had our engagement party there. We know it as a reliable place with good food, and tasty cocktails. For Burns Night they were offering a short set menu, with a whisky pairing that sounded to our liking.

As a starter we both had the seared scallops. They were sweet and bouncy, and just cooked right. There were herbs sprinkled over them, and they were served with Parmesan crisps and a creamy sauce. It was paired with a 12-year-old Glenfiddich, which paired perfectly.

After waiting for a while — too long really — the main event showed up. Three thick slices of haggis, slightly crisped up on the outside, and served on a bed of the aforementioned neeps and tatties. Served with a sweetened gravy, of which more could have been served. I thought that the crisped up edges added a little extra texture to the otherwise well spiced and prepared haggis. This was paired with a 15-year-old Glenfiddich, which is a little spicier itself.

For our desert, the two of us picked something different. My partner had the traditional Scottish Cranachan, where I chose the crumble. I can't resist a good crumble, and this one was certainly one.

In the end, I thought it was a good meal, and certainly filling. The service was a little slow, and some confusion did ensue while we were waiting for our whisky to be paired with the haggis main course. I also thought it was a little on the pricier side of what it is.

I think next year we'll cook our own again, even though means we'll have to do the dishes too!

Scallops

1 / 2

Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties

2 / 2

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The idea behind going for a different restaurant every Friday is to try out a wide variety of places, but also of cuisines. We are lucky that in London, we have access to pretty much any sort of dishes we fancy.

Sometimes, you can even find a wide variety of different culture's food in one place, and East Street is such an establishment. It is situated just North of Oxford Street, close to Tottenham Court Road station. It specialised in what can only be described as pan-Asian.

Their menu is extensive, from Szechuan dishes via Japan and Korea to Indonesian and Malay. We started with two of their small plates, the Malaysian Satay Chicken and Korean Popcorn Chicken. They were both delicious, very flavourful and moorish. Good Satay Chicken I remember from my parent's Indonesian friends, and this was just like it. With our starters, we enjoyed a lovely Hokkaido Negroni as we didn't think a bottle of wine would fit with this menu.

Choosing the small plates was hard, as there are so many nice sounding ones. Instead of ordering them all, we also picked a large plate each. I ordered a Rendang Beef Curry, again, with memories of the Indonesian Restaurants you find in the Netherlands. It was accompanied by rice, peanuts, boiled eggs, and some pickled cucumber. My companion ordered a Tamarind Chicken, slices of well cooked moist chicken in a delicious sticky tamarind sauce. It came served with rice, broccoli and crispy onions, this was one of the non-spicy options on the menu, but despite the lack of chillies still had a bit of a kick. Again, not wanting wine, we picked a bog-standard Tiger beer to wash all the delicious flavours down, which paired pretty well.

Although we were pretty full, we could not quite resist the churros, and shared three with a tasty caramel sauce. I don't quite understand how they fit in an Asian kitchen, but they were delightful regardless.

If we were to return, which seems likely, we would probably have a meal made up of more of the smaller dishes (all of which sounded delicious) instead of going for the traditional starter plus main course approach.

The place was pretty full, and when we left I remarked that we were probably amongst the oldest of the clientele, but we didn't feel out of place. Which I think is a good sign.

Interior

1 / 5

Chicken Satay

2 / 5

Popcorn Chicken

3 / 5

Tamarind Chicken

4 / 5

Rendang

5 / 5

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We visited Empire Empire on a chilly January evening. The restaurant was fairly quiet but even at 18.30 there were some tables seated and enjoying their food.

The restaurant features an old fashioned jukebox type vinyl record player close to the entrance and has a photobooth for some fun snaps should you be so inclined.

We had a beer each from 40ft Brewery in Hackney, which was lovely. It's great to see an Indian restaurant branching out from the usual cobra and kingfisher options. We started with poppadoms and dips, and then I had a well spiced biryani with incredibly tender lamb falling off the shank and a pastry lid. My companion really enjoyed her Empire Butter Chicken and a naan bread. This was not as rich as some butter chicken curries, but was incredibly flavourful with a nice level of spicing and kick. Unfortunately we were both too full to move onto try what sounded like tasty desserts from the menu.

Service at Empire Empire was very welcoming and attentive (and quick, but not rushed) we were out and heading home on the bus about an hour after sitting down.

Butter Chicken

1 / 2

Lamb Biryani

2 / 2

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As first restaurant of the year, we wanted something low-key. Not far from Paddington station, on Westbourne Grove, there is a whole row of such places. We settled on Lokkanta, a place that specialises in Turkish food.

We started off with Turkish sausage slices with halloumi, while we were waiting for our main course. At the same time, we started enjoying our delicious red wine from Turkey.

The front section of the restaurant features a well ventilated charcoal grill upon which most of the meats were roasted. In my case, a well cooked and flavoured lamb shish. My partner picked a Yogurtly Adana, minced grilled lamb with bread and basted in a tomato sauce and yoghurt.

The service was speedy, and we did not have to wait long. Perhaps that was mostly because when we arrived at 18:30, there was only other table enjoying dinner, so we were almost the only customers. When we left, there were a few more people enjoying their dinner. However, with the restaurant being quite empty, it perhaps lacked a bit of ambience and the tiled interior made it feel a little clinical, I think it would be quite different if it was busy with plenty of hustle and bustle.

In short, the food and wine was good, but the atmosphere was unfortunately missing.