Up and At Them

I just finished a hurried hacking session where I am now publishing an atom feed of the latest deals from the deal viewer. I think it works. The Atom RFC is great. It tells you everything you need to know and once you've implemented the MUSTs, it all just works and feed readers know just what to do. Actually most of them more or less still knew what to do when it was in its half-correct state but now they really know what to do. I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, and it doesn't support filtering (yet), but either way I now drop this new tool in your laps.

One thing that threw me off was the fact that so many deals were showing up for a given updated date. My bot gives all of the deals it finds in one go the same timestamp, so it's not a surprise to see a few with the same date. But this was 40 or 50. Oh, right, Black Friday is this Friday. This is go time for deals sites. I guess I shouldn't be so cavalier with my changes. ;-)

Pesticider

The latest batch of cider is almost done and tastes just fine. Thankfully all of my fiddling with the airlock didn't corrupt anything yet. The original gravity of the unpasteurized cider was 1.060. I stole a pint on Sunday while racking it to the secondary fermenter and measured the gravity at 1.006. Using the ABV calculators, I come up with about 7.3%ABV for this batch, which is a respectable amount. I think most cider drinkers are happy with their 4%, but I like mine as dry as I can get it and with as much alcohol as I can produce. Another day should be enough to let some more of the yeast and other particles settle out and then it will be time to keg this, just in time for Thanksgiving.

What we have here is a failure to customize

I started looking at laptops again and have been toying with the options on a Dell Inspiron 13 at their site. There is a "compatibility alert" preventing me from continuing with my order though.
On the "Entertainment and Editing Software" screen I left the expensive copies of Adobe * Elements unchecked and I went one step further and unchecked the "Wild Tangent" shareware games that they wish to install for free. I don't really intend to use the installed OS but it's silly that you can't get this laptop without a bunch of shareware games. It's also really disingenuous to call this a compatibility problem, since this has nothing to do with compatibility and everything to do with advertisement.

-cide

[Middle English, from Old French (from Latin -cīda, killer) and from Latin -cīdium, killing, both from caedere, to strike, kill]

Making hard cider is very simple. I have now brewed 4 batches and each has been a hit among my alcohol consuming friends. The basic recipe goes like this:

1. Clean, and using iodophor, sanitize 5 gallon carboy, funnel, airlock.
2. Add 1 tsp of yeast nutrient to carboy.
3. Add ale yeast (powder or liquid, some people use champagne yeast).
4. Using funnel, pour about 4.5 gallons of unpasteurized cider into carboy.
5. Insert airlock and rubber stopper into carboy opening.

At this point you just need to wait. After about 5-7 days the yeast will give up and you won't see any more bubbles in the airlock. At this point I rack the cider to a new carboy using a siphon. This step leaves behind a lot of sediment so the final product will be a bit clearer. After a few more days the cider can be racked once more into the keg and force carbonated.

So that's the general plan anyway. This batch has given me some troubles though. I got a little greedy and put a little more cider in the carboy than before. You don't fill it to the brim because you want to leave some head space for the yeast. It tends to rise a bit during fermentation. I didn't leave enough space this time.

It's a little bit surprising the first time you look at the carboy and see that the airlock is completely clogged with yeasty cider gook. It's a little more concerning when we're talking about 4.5 gallons of product, so it's worth fixing. My solution was adapted from others found on the Internet. First, sanitize one side of a piece of tin foil. Using a paper towel, clean up any of the mess that has crept out of the carboy. Commit the atrocity and remove the airlock and quickly replace it with the tin foil by tightly forming the foil over the opening. We've now broken the seal and allowed air into the cider, but hopefully our efforts will minimize any infection. Use your bottle washer to clean out the airlock and rubber stopper. Re-sanitize them and pull the switcheroo one more time.

One of the most imperative rules about brewing is to maintain an impeccably clean environment. But I'm going to make an addendum to that: Maintain a sanitized environment, but don't throw away perfectly good beer. At these quantities it's worth taking some risks to see if you can rescue a troubled batch. I'm pretty sure this is the reason behind many of the alcoholic innovations anyway -- e.g. certain styles of beers are sour and you can imagine some of our brewmaster forefathers ruining a batch but developing a taste for it because, well, it was there.

I left out the final step of my cider recipe. I like to name each batch, and so far each cider has been a pun off of the word. Previous batches included: Suicider, Genocider, and Pesticider. I'm currently thinking about The Deciderer, in celebration of the exit of our current President. I might turn this into gifts for some relatives though, so maybe it should be named Fratricider.

Codeweavers EULA

I had to laugh out loud about this:

CrossOver Linux Professional License Grant

YOU REALLY WANT TO READ THIS, ESPECIALLY THE PART ABOUT 
THE MANDATORY CAR WASH FOR CODEWEAVERS EMPLOYEES...

...<lots of standard EULA junk here plus the GPL for wine>...

OKAY, WE WERE JUST KIDDING. THERE'S NOTHING IN HERE ABOUT CARWASHES. BUT
YOU REALLY SHOULD READ THESE THINGS, YOU KNOW. (It's the Beige Honda 
minivan, if you really insist).

End Torture

Ending torture in America. Right on. If only he could have picked a better running mate.

Brickskeller Menu

The Brickskeller is a legend in the Washington D.C. area due to the sheer number of beers on their menu at any one time. Unfortunately, they are also well known for not having a large number of those beers at any given time. The last time I was there, I ordered 9 beers and had a success rate of 33%. It's really frustrating, particularly when you know you're not ordering the only Peruvian ale on the list.

They need to publish their stock. The onus is on them to actually keep track of the stock but one has to imagine that they have a good idea of what's there and what's not every week or so. So once a week, the list of beers in stock gets updated in a database table and then gets published to an atom feed. They could and probably should stop right there. Why? Because people like me will create interfaces that read that feed and display the available beers for users. We'll let them search, sort, and filter. Then, when you're at the Brickskeller with your iPhone or whatever, you'll just look up the list and might even get the first beer you ask for.

That raffled EEE

At our company party, the President of the company mentioned that he picked up the Asus EEE PC to give away as a raffle prize after reading a blog post by "Kevin." There are only two Kevins in the company, and I think I was the only one in attendance at the party, but I couldn't remember writing any blog entries about the EEE PC. I googled for '"Kevin Dwyer" EEE' and so now I'm pretty sure he was talking about this post. I need to make a nice URL for my deal app so it's easier for Presidents of companies to plug.

NüSpam

Spam doesn't often make it past Google's filtering to my Inbox, but when it does it usually is fairly novel. Take this excerpt for example:

From: awele2@live.com
To: kevin@pheared.net
Subject: ESRI article sent by a friend

awele2@live.com recommends this article from ESRI.
    Included message:
    Mr Awele Nwoboshi
Spring Bank Plc,

My Dear friend,

I got your contact through the internet and I decided to reach
you because presently...

And it goes on with your standard Nigerian 419 scam. The nice wrinkle here is that the spammer found a form at ESRI's web site and used it to send me a link to one of their articles. Then they included their spam in the body of the message which is normally reserved for the user to say to their friend: "Hey, I thought you would like to read this because you're a big GIS nerd."

Google didn't pick it up as spam, probably because this link sending mechanism is used widely and people probably have trained the filter to believe it is ham. Even the SPF isn't a slam dunk. It says it was a softfail:

Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning awele2@live.com does not designate 198.102.62.104 as permitted sender) client-ip=198.102.62.104;

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning awele2@live.com does not designate 198.102.62.104 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=awele2@live.com

Since I only recently started publishing an SPF record for pheared.net, I decided to look into this softfail and what exactly a transitioning domain is. Microsoft is publishing the following SPF record:

live.com. 2680 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:spf-a.hotmail.com include:spf-b.hotmail.com include:spf-c.hotmail.com include:spf-d.hotmail.com include:_spf-ssg-a.microsoft.com ~all"

This record details which mail servers can send mail for live.com addresses (and there are quite a few more, because you have to follow all of the includes) but then at the end they specify "~all." This is the key, because it says to anyone checking the SPF record, that Microsoft isn't confident that they have listed all of the possible sources for live.com addresses, so if you get mail from somewhere else, don't fail it completely, just softfail it.

I'm also publishing ~all, but after this experience I'm wondering if I should change it to the harsher -all. One side-effect is that if you were a pheared.net user, you would get failed SPF checks if you ever used one of these services that fakes an e-mail from your address. I personally hate those and my users are subject to my whims so this isn't a strong argument. It would hurt anyone who sends legitimate mail from pheared.net without using our outgoing SMTP server. There might be some of that going on, but even I was able to fix my exim so that it forwards everything through google's outgoing servers.

*Bama Trends

In the year leading up to the 2008 election, many bad Internet arguments devolved into either "Nobama" or "Gobama." I have no idea what this means but I plugged this into Google Trends to generate some more useless statistics. I think it says that people propagating the Nobama meme should just give up already and reduce the noise on the Reticulum. I should revisit this after Google publishes November's data to see if they do just that.

JOSM and Satellite Imagery

I started seriously working with JOSM (Java Open Street Map) last night and started to get the hang of things. One very useful feature is the YWMS plugin which to loads satellite imagery into your map. This helps you get your bearings and can help you line things up with your GPX tracks.

The images come from Yahoo! through a very weird and brittle process. They are also not very high resolution in some areas so YMMV. The process involves sending a link to a gecko based browser which will render the resulting images and dump them to a file, which is retrieved by the plugin and loaded into your map. When I first tried this, I failed miserably. I'm using Firefox 3, and apparently 3 is not supported yet. So I downloaded Firefox 2, but some interaction with Ubuntu 8.10 renders 2 unable to connect to the network and so it fails for me. Some further research turned up the fact that YWMS just wants a gecko based browser. So I tried galeon and epihany and struck out. What finally worked for me was Seamonkey, which can be easily installed using apt-get. Once you point YWMS at Seamonkey, everything works.

That is, as far as you can call this convoluted process "working." I think that the YWMS plugin developer found a nice cheat around doing any tile stitching by using Firefox's javascript engine to render the imagery and paint it to a file. It's a clever hack, but this is really way too brittle as evidenced by the FF3 breakage. I might take a look at Yahoo!'s REST API to see if I can do a little better here.

Guerilla Street Mapping

Take that, poorly licensed GIS data! We went out to Arlington, VA on Sunday to participate in day two of the DC area mapping party. OpenStreetMap is a community based project that creates and provides free maps to anyone who wants them. Since I had no experience at all with this, but am fairly handy with a GPS and am ambulatory, I took the baby and a couple of friends out for a walk to check on the ground truth of the census data that is used in the US portion of the open street map. We were happy to find some errors! I'm working on correcting them in the very cumbersome JOSM application, and have uploaded some changes already. We also found (and will soon have mapped) a very nice park which Kassidy was happy to explore.

Check out our first GPX trace.