Just brewed a BIG Imperial IPA. OG 1.095. Should be VERY Tasty.

There is so much food value in it that the yeasties are having a little party.

Just kegged my new top secret* xmas ale/barleywine. It is a very strong (approx 9%) dark ale, very thick, and very tasty, with orangepeel, cinammon, chai spice, and golden syrup. Nom.

After my pale ale turned out so well, I decided to make a batch of tasty tasty stout. Dan's brewing supplies had a very "Guinness-y" recipe, which I wanted to make, so I got all the ingredients there for an all grain batch. Never having tried all grain before, this was a bit of an adventure.

Much like the partial mash that I made last time for the Strathcona Pale Ale, this turned out to be a piece of cake as well. I did my best to remember my mindset from high school organic chem labs, and methodically followed the instructions, and everything seems to have worked out OK.

I have attached my brew log for the curious.

Why does debian/ubuntu package Ganglia from 2004 in their newest operating systems? I am not kidding, RHEL 4.x has newer packages at this point. This is a pretty stunning indictment of their ancient and dysfunctional ganglia packages. If you were wondering why your monitored debian servers never show up on your RHEL ganglia nodes, well, now you know why. 2.x and 3.x are not compatible with each other.

UPDATE: I created new i386 packages since there were missing plugins.

Anyhow, here are some packages (Ubuntu Jaunty only, no warranty, stated or implied, may be infected with the SchweinFlu, etc):

So I finally splurged and got a beer fridge. SWMBO and I headed down to Bellingham to pick up a slightly freight damaged fridge that we found on Craigslist. We were pleasantly surprised by the lack of damage, and the ludicrously cheap price tag. I had already picked up a keg of Storm Highland Scottish Ale in anticipation, and we had to do a couple of trips back and forth to Home Despot to get some air fittings and hose to match our slightly smaller Cornelius keg fittings, but all in all everything worked out awesome.

Sadly, we have no pictures of ourselves ENJOYING the beer, since we got into about half a dozen each before we were satisfied that everything was working properly ;)

At #VHS, SGNL (among others) started work on a beer fridge for the members. They have all kinds of great ideas, including metering, measurement, internet integration, etc. Metering was already taken care of, and there are some cool plans for user authorization and authentication, but there were still some mechanical things that needed doing...

This year at Defcon, I am going to do something a little different. I am bringing a video recording kiosk which will be set up to record and upload videos to the Defcon CCTV system.

Every year, I have things set up so that people can upload to the CCTV in the Riv, but people seldom do, so this year, I am sticking it in their faces. We will have a hacker confessional. Based on the idea of Speaker's Corner, hacker confessional will give attendees the chance to talk for 30 seconds and get up on screen on the CCTV system. Sound will probably suck, so bonus points for creative methods of communication :)

This is my new bonsai throbber prototype. It uses an AT-Tiny26 from Atmel to provide control of an LED, which pulses every 30 seconds or so when the two supercaps are charged up enough (3 volts or so).

I am using a high intensity white LED, but you will get better life out of a red LED since they will use about 1/4 of the current. When fully charged, I get around 6-8 hours of throbbing.

Also note: this is a THROBBER, not a PUMMER, and the led smoothly ramps on and off over about a half second.

Also also note: Code and makefile for GCC is included below, and is a pretty good example of how to build a power saving idle sleep mode app with avr-gcc.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, but in great eons, even Enki can get off his fat ass and reboot a server :)

Yes, folks, it's true. Cthuugle is BACK! Bigger, stronger and better than ever! Please feel free to Digg it.

UPDATE: I did some upgrades to the search grouping and paging algorithms to get more (4x) efficiency.

When I originally created the HP Lovecraft themed Cthuugle search engine, there was a library of Lovecraft's work which allowed users to read his stories online. Shortly after I launched the engine, legal threats took this library offline. Years went by, and I kinda forgot about Cthuugle except for whenever my renewals came up. Everybody else still remembered it though, to the tune of 3000 unique visitors per day or so.

When this year's renewal came up, I decided to read some Lovecraft stories, and was shocked to discover that the copyrights on all of his stories had expired THIS YEAR! Clearly celebration, and some hacking, was in order.

The old ht://dig search engine is pretty stale at this point, so that was a non starter. I have been looking for an excuse to install Lucene on one of my servers, so I created a vhost on one of my virtual machines and got things started. The new Cthuugle uses Nutch with Lucene and Tomcat. I wrote some custom crawl and merge scripts, and set things to autostart, and now we have a working search engine. After a little tweaking of the JSP, the original look and feel were easy enough to duplicate as well. The added bonus of more granular results and the ability to view explanations for search results were also really nice. One NginX proxy was added for flavor. Done.

I quickly added The Temple of Dagon to my index, where Aleister had so nicely collected all of Lovecraft's work. Now Cthuugle can find all of Lovecraft's stories, poems, and essays.

If I missed your Cthulhu themed site, let me know at derek squiggle armyofevilrobots dott com

Just soldered up the control board for my next balancer project. I had purchased some arduino motor control boards quite a while ago, but hadn't yet gotten around to assembling them.

One of the things that was really annoying was trying to find some female-male long legged headers so I could stack yet another board if necessary. I ended up purchasing some SAM1123-32-ND headers from Digikey, which are cool because they are long enough to span TWO boards, which is useful on an Arduino where not all of the positions are filled by the shield.

Please don't heckle my soldering job too badly :)