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 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

I have been getting a little tired of temperature surfing on my Rancilio Silvia coffee machine, so I decided to purchase a PID controller for it. Auber instruments had a pretty good deal going, so I ordered it. What follows is a post showing the installation and results...

Woah! It has been FOREVER since I last blogged! I figured I would continue this little stream of consciousness experiment now that I am taking a sabbatical for the summer. I had some great plans to build robots and other devices over my break, but I find myself gravitating back towards Python development over and over again. Does this mean that I am doing for a living the thing that I enjoy most, or is it just that familiarity brings out habits I cannot break? Perhaps it is just that shipping robot parts leads to multiple week long delays...

Anyhow, my current playlist consists of (updated Sep 6/09):
- Learning erlang (say it 10 times fast)(Done. Cool, but not always the right tool)
- Learning Pylons, in great detail. Meh. Django won. FapWS in other cases.
- Experimenting with distributed document oriented DBs like CouchDB
- Arduino CANbus library development
- Linux EMCDone! Converted over 100% This is awesome software.

Whoo. Lots of ground to cover there, huh? I'll be using this blog as a pastebin to store my results.