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Larsblog

Experiments in blind tasting

I've written before about my experiences as an uncertified beer judge, and when the Norwegian homebrewer's association offered their beer judge certification course again this year I decided to apply. My goal was to learn more about the beer brewing process, to improve my ability to analyze beer, and to learn about specific flaws in beer and how to detect them. If I'd also have to teach myself the Norwegian beer style guidelines I decided that was a price I'd be willing to pay. ...

Read | 2008-11-20 15:39 | 7 comment(s)

Amber Gold and Black — a review

Amber Gold and Black is Martyn Cornell's new book on the history of British beer, currently only available in self-published ebook form. Getting it as a PDF wasn't ideal for me, as it meant I had to pay quite a lot to get it printed, but since Martyn is extremely well-informed on British beer history and passionate about getting his story right, I was more than willing to put up with this in order to be able to read the book. ...

Read | 2008-11-17 18:06 | 0 comment(s)

Samuel Adams Utopias

Samuel Adams Utopias is the world's most expensive beer in regular production, costing about USD 100 in the US. In Sweden the government alcohol monopoly takes in a few bottles every time it's produced, and a friend managed to get hold of a bottle from a pub in Gothenburg. It cost about USD 300 there, though, so he wisely decided to split the bottle with others. In the end we were eight beer enthusiasts who gathered in a flat in Oslo to try it. And, of course, since we were getting together anyway, we brought a few more beers to try at the same time. ...

Read | 2008-11-15 21:40 | 1 comment(s)

European Beer Festival '08

The Danish Association of Beer Enthusiasts have been arranging beer festivals for several years, but this year was the first time I was able to go. In fact, this was my first ever real beer festival, since the only ones I'd been to before were the Norwegian ones, which don't really count, as they rarely have any new beers, or even that many people. The EBF, on the other hand, was the real thing: roughly 1200 beers on offer from all over the world and more than 21,000 guests. ...

Read | 2008-11-13 15:25 | 2 comment(s)

TMShare the Second

Graham Moore and Marc Wilhelm Küster presented a new Topic Maps protocol called TMShare at TMRA 2008 this year. Many Topic Maps protocols have been presented already, mostly similar in conception, but TMShare is actually a completely new kind of protocol. Unlike earlier proposals it does not allow random access to topic maps on the server, but instead provides a feed of the changes to those topic maps. So essentially it provides a mechanism to replicate a topic map or part of one to another server. (I call this TMShare the Second because there was another TMShare protocol before this one.) ...

Read | 2008-11-08 15:45 | 1 comment(s)

The get-illustration web service

I'm working on a site that lists the various Topic Maps-related software that's out there, in an effort to make all the tools that have been released more visible. The site in question is, of course, Topic Maps-driven, and so it has, of course, topic pages for the people who created the tools. Those pages inevitably become pretty boring, because the tools site isn't the place to collect lots and lots of information about people. ...

Read | 2008-10-28 15:20 | 3 comment(s)

TMCLedit

In the open space sessions at TMRA 2008 Hannes Niederhausen, a member of the Topic Maps Lab, presented his thesis project, which he calls TMCLedit. This is essentially a graphical modelling tool based on the initial GTM level 1 proposal. His idea is that it will let users graphically model their ontologies, and be able to import and export them to TMCL. ...

Read | 2008-10-26 17:30 | 1 comment(s)

GTMalpha

At this year's TMRA Hendrik Thomas presented GTMalpha, a proposed graphical notation for Topic Maps. This proposal was born out of his experiences with drawing Topic Maps examples in discussions with his colleagues, where he got fed up with confusion over what the drawings were meant to show. His presentation is essentially a private proposal for GTM level 0. ...

Read | 2008-10-24 14:10 | 1 comment(s)

A TMCL tutorial

The TMCL standard now seems more or less stable, and so now it is finally possible to explain to outsiders what the language looks like and how it works. The first thing to note is that TMCL is firmly meant for validation, and not for reasoning. In other words, TMCL is a schema language, rather like DTDs, RELAX-NG, XSD, EXPRESS, SQL DDL, and so on, but one specifically designed for Topic Maps. Note: this has been updated to the latest 2009-06-16 draft. ...

Read | 2008-10-03 17:33 | 9 comment(s)

A sudoku solver in Python

My girlfriend likes to solve the sudoku puzzles in the newspaper, but I never bothered with it myself, thinking that I shouldn't spend time on something a computer can do for me. Writing a sudoku solver, however, sounded like it might be fun. And, so, since I had nothing better to do I decided to give it a shot. ...

Read | 2008-09-10 16:40 | 15 comment(s)

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