July, 2024 - Craft Cook Code

Mum’s famous (and not so secret) bread rolls

Throughout my childhood; Mum made her own bread rolls.

To us; they were just everyday, even mundane bread rolls. They fed the family of five when money was tight.

To us they were nothing special; but to my surprise everyone outside of our family absolutely loved them. My cousins could destroy a batch of bread rolls while they were still cooling on the rack before anyone else had a chance. Still to this day it is a core memory for my cousin – Aunty Kerrie’s bread rolls.

I didn’t appreciate them until I was older and started cooking them myself. Bread rolls are my party trick when having guests around for dinner and the guests are more than happy taking the remaining rolls home; if there are any.

But I am here to dismiss the mysticism of “Mum’s bread rolls”. They are great; but there is no unobtainable magic in them, no exotic ingredients that need to be sourced from far away lands and no secret recipe that is passed down only to the oldest of the family.

The recipe actually came that came from the instruction manual of the first bread machine that we purchased all those years ago.

But with a few simple technique improvements; these bread rolls can be taken up a notch from the default bread machine recipe.

So finally for all those people wondering “How”; this is how you make “Mum’s bread rolls.” Try giving them a go yourself.

Mechanical Assistance

For this recipe I use a bread machine. It is a device that my family has used for many years. I think Mum has burnt out three bread machines in her life; running them almost every day when we all lived at home.

I have used a bench mixer with a dough hook when making a double batch of bread rolls with success. The bench mixer can be noisy compared to the bread machine; especially if you have to kneed the dough for 30min. I also hand kneeded the dough while we were away on holidays. It is harder to develop the gluten than the bread machine or a bench mixer; but can be done.

The Recipe

Ingredients

330ml of warm water
2tsp of dried yeast
1tbs of white sugar
1cp wholemeal flour
2 1/2 cp strong baker’s flour
1tsp of Bread improver or 1/4 tsp of ascorbic acid
1tbs of olive oil (or a neutral cooking oil)
1tsp salt

Method

Dissolve the sugar in warm water. Mix in the yeast. Leave for 10min in a warm spot to allow the yeast to activate
Add all the ingredients in the bread machine and start it on the “dough” setting. Watch for the first 10 minutes to ensure the ingredients combine correctly. You are looking for a smooth dough that only just slightly catches to the side of the bread machine. If it is too sticky; add extra baker’s flour teaspoon by teaspoon. If the dough is too dry and not forming together; add water teaspoon by teaspoon. Allow time for the water to get mixed in because it is very easy to overdo it.
Allow the dough to kneed for 30minutes.
After kneeding; allow the dough to rise for an hour in a warm spot.
Punch the dough down and turn the dough out on a floured surface. Kneed for a few minutes to release any large air pockets and shape the dough in a rough log shape
Divide the dough up into individual rolls. Typically I divide the dough up into 12 bread rolls. 16 is good if you are feeding kids and 8 is good if you are making rolls as the feature part of a meal (e.g. a schnitzel sandwich)
To shape the rolls (I’ll do my best to describe the method). Find a un-floured spot on the bench. You need the dough to ever so slightly stick to the bench top. Ppress down on the clump of dough with the palm of your hand. Make circular motions with your hand to move the dough around and slowly raise it while bringing in your fingers. This will shape the dough into a bread roll.
Add the bread rolls to a lightly oiled heavy baking tray.
Place the bread rolls in a warm spot and allow them to rise for about 40 minutes; or double in size. Rising time will depend on your ambient temperature; in the colder months I have to position a tray over a heater vent to encourage the bread to rise
Ten minutes before the bread rolls have completed rising; preheat a oven to 180c. Carefully place a heatproof pan at the bottom of the oven half filled with boiling. This will create steam for the bread rolls to improve the crust on them.
Position the bread rolls in the middle of the oven and bake for 10 minutes. Rotate the tray and cook for another 3 minutes; or until the bread rolls achieve the crust that you want.
Turn onto a wire rack and cool.
Try and keep cousins, children, wife, friends etc from sneaking bread rolls until they are cool enough to eat.

July 12, 2024 by jonny.donker@gmail.com Cook 0

Qlik Replicate – Quickly backing up the Data directory

Just a short post on a trick I learnt when upgrading a whole lot of QR boxes on Windows.

As part of the upgrade process; you need to back up the data directory encase you need to back out the upgrade.

The Data directory by default is located in:

C:\Program Files\Attunity\Replicate\data\

Using the inbuilt Windows compression tool (to me) seems slow and sometime unreliable; especially if there is a large amount of data staged when QR was turned off to do the upgrade.

Then I remember that 7zip can be used from the command line. Also an added feature is that 7zip can exclude certain directories so the often large “log” directory can be excluded.

7z a -r -t7z "C:\Program Files\Attunity\Replicate\data.7z" "C:\Program Files\Attunity\Replicate\data\*.*" -xr!logs

This command can also be used in automating the QR upgrade.

July 10, 2024 by jonny.donker@gmail.com Qlik Replicate 0

Running Postgres and pgadmin through Docker on a Dodgy Linux VM

In the organisation that I work in; I have a good old Windows 10 ThinkPad that has been my work horse for many years.

It does the job and works happily with our on Prem apps and I can do most of my role’s development on it.

There are areas where the work horse cannot help me out. For instance, I needed to develop a JavaScript function on a Postgres database to split a field into different elements. I do not have access to be able to develop on the target database; so, I turned to Docker to run a containerised version of Postgres and pgadmin to have a safe area to play in.

The dreaded Linux VM

The “cool” developers have access to Macs to run their DevOps tools on.

I have a Linux VM, running Ubuntu 20.04 on.

It loads slow, it runs slow and the support VM application hogs a significant amount of the memory available, leaving little left for me.

But does allow me to run Docker containers.

The first container I created; broke the VM. The VM support team speculated that a port for Postgres or pgadmin broke the organisation’s VM ports. They rebuilt my VM and I tried again.

docker-compose.yml

This is my docker-compose.yml file for Postgres and pgadmin

version: '3.3'

services:
  db:
    #image: postgres
    image: clkao/postgres-plv8
    container_name: local_pgdb
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "9432:5432"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=verystrongpassword
      - POSTGRES_USER=jonny 
      - POSTGRES_DB=work

    volumes:
      #- ~/apps/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
      - ~/apps/postgres-plv8:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    
  pgadmin:
    image: dpage/pgadmin4
    container_name: pgadmin4_container
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "9888:80"
      - "9443:443"
   
    environment:
       PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL: jonny@craftcookcode.com
       PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD: verystrongpassword
       
       # Fix for IPv6-disabled systems https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68766411/pgadmin-4-in-docker-failed-with-gunicorn-server-start-error
       PGADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS: 0.0.0.0

    volumes:
      - ~/apps/pg_admin/pgadmin-data:/var/lib/pgadmin

volumes:
  local_pgdata:

There a couple of changes from the boiler plate docker-compose.yml files on the internet:

The ports are mapped to non-standard ports. This is to avoid any potential problems with ports conflicting with the VM software
I had to change the volumes to my home drive due to security settings on my VM

Errors, Problems and Issues (Oh my)

When initially running the docker-compose; I got the following error and pgadmin wouldn’t start.

pgadmin4_container | ERROR  : Failed to create the directory /var/lib/pgadmin/sessions:
pgadmin4_container |            [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/pgadmin/sessions'
pgadmin4_container | HINT   : Create the directory /var/lib/pgadmin/sessions, ensure it is writeable by
pgadmin4_container |          'pgadmin', and try again, or, create a config_local.py file
pgadmin4_container |          and override the SESSION_DB_PATH setting per
pgadmin4_container |          https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/8.9/config_py.html

This issue was resolved from an article from a Stack Overflow thread by changing the ownership of the pg_admin trigger to 5050

sudo chown -R 5050:5050 ~/apps/pg_admin

The next error I had was a “Can’t connect to (‘::’, 80)” error in pgadmin

pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:25:58 +0000] [1] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 22.0.0
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:25:58 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second.
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:25:59 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second.
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:26:00 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second.
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:26:01 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second.
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:26:02 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second.
pgadmin4_container | [2024-07-09 05:26:03 +0000] [1] [ERROR] Can't connect to ('::', 80)

Again Google and Stack Overflow came to the rescue. The issue was potentially caused if IPv6 is disabled on the VM. I added in the the following line to the yml file:

PGADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS: 0.0.0.0

This resolved the issue and now pgadmin could start up.

Inside pgadmin

When I got inside pgadmin; for the life of me I couldn’t connect to the Postgres database.

I could see that the Postres container was running with no errors. I could see the remapped ports. I could connect to Postgres with psql. Why couldn’t I connect to the Postgres in pgadmin?

I was frustrated and tired after a long day of work and had walked away from the computer.

When I got back after a walk around the block and a cup of tea – I could now see the problem and the solution:

Initially I was using “Hostname” as 127.0.0.1 and port as 9432. Because that’s where my mind went to how to connect to the Postgres database running locally.

But because pgadmin is trying to access Postgres from within the docker network; it will be looking for port 5432 instead of 9432 and the container name local_pgdb instead of 127.0.0.1

If I am running from outside the docker; I would use localhost and port 9432. For instance I imported some data to develop off:

psql --host localhost --port 9432 --username jonny -d work -f ~/some_postgres_data.dmp

Once I entered the right details; pgadmin works fine connecting and I could develop the Postgres function in a safe area.

July 9, 2024 by jonny.donker@gmail.com Code Postgres 0

July 2024