http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/ Personal blog of Lars Marius Garshol. en larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/222.html When I first got seriously interested in beer, roughly ten years ago, Norway was a miserable place for a beer enthusiast. Norwegian beer was pretty much limited to four styles of lager from the industrials plus two half-decent brewpubs. As for imports, they were not very impressive, either. Two pubs had some Belgian beers, but that was about it. I used to memorize which pubs in Oslo had Erdinger, so I could get something decent to drink while out. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-01-26 19:44:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/221.html I can still remember my first sip of lambic. I was sitting in the tasting room of the Cantillon brewery in Brussels after completing the brewery tour, all eager to try the final product. The shock of actually tasting it was all the greater. It was sour! So sour it almost burned. And what's more, it was thin and tasted of metal and grain. This was lambic? larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-01-13 17:37:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/214.html Lithuania may be a small country today, but once the joint Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth included much of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, and Ukraine. This is why Vilnius has one of the largest surviving medieval towns in Northern Europe, covering well over three square kilometers. So Vilnius is well worth visiting just for the sights, but it also happens that you can find a very rare beer style here: kaimiškas, or Lithuanian farmhouse ales. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2011-05-14 10:40:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/219.html Beer enthusiasts like to say that people who argue over which industrial pale lager is best are missing the point, because they all essentially taste the same, and none of them are very good, anyway. I personally agree with that, and that now that there are so many good craft beers available everywhere, there's really no reason to drink this stuff at all. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2011-05-08 16:23:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/218.html I was recently invited to give a presentation on Topic Maps at Vestlandsforsking in Sogndal, as part of their 25-year jubilee seminar series. I first tried to fly there in December, but because of fog the plane was never able to land. Ironically, the flight itself was absolutely beautiful. The little propeller plane flew over an endless expanse of snow-capped mountains in blazing sunshine. Just before arriving in Sogndal we could clearly see the Jotunheimen mountain range in the distance, sticking up over the smaller mountains. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2011-04-03 10:18:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/217.html Stian Danenbarger has been telling me for a while about entity resolution (as he and many others call it), or identity resolution (as Wikipedia calls it). Basically, it's the process of working out which records/entities/objects actually represent the same real-world things by comparing their properties. Once Stian confirmed that Bayesian inferencing was a common method for this, I suddenly saw how you can actually do a poor man's version of this with just a little basic scripting. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2011-02-11 13:23:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/216.html While RSS and Atom are a great way to stay up to date on what is published around the web, I think the feed-centric approach taken by most feed readers is suboptimal. For some feeds I want to read everything that is posted, but for others I want to read only those few posts which are about subjects I care about, or by authors I like particularly. Another problem is that some feeds (for example those of newspapers) have hundreds of posts every day. Staying on top of that is just too much manual effort. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2011-02-03 19:50:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/215.html Graham Moore a few years ago came up with the idea of publishing changes to topic maps using Atom, and a CEN project has now developed and published a specification for it called SDshare. Work is also underway to make SDshare a full ISO standard. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-11-21 14:29:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/213.html A flood of industrial lager has swept away the native beer traditions of just about every country in Europe except, famously, for the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, and the UK. Oh, and, it turns out, Lithuania. If you haven't heard about Lithuanian beer traditions, don't worry, because nobody else has, either. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-09-18 21:09:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/210.html It's far and away the most spectacular brewpub I've ever seen. Part of it is the location, at the end of a Norwegian fjord surrounded by tall mountains that seem to tower over the little village. But it's just as much the brewpub itself, a dark, bulky wooden structure looking vaguely like a stave church that's lost its tower, decorated with wooden dragons on the roof, in true dragestil. Inside it's no less unusual, as we'll get to in a moment. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-08-05 20:33:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/212.html When I heard there was a third gose in Goslar I didn't want to believe it. After all, we travelled to Goslar in 2008 specifically to try the two goses from Brauhaus Goslar, carefully hunted down both the pale and dark versions, and tried them both several times. I then crossed Goslar off my list of "places to visit before I die," and was ready to move on. So to be told that there was another gose in Goslar was not what I wanted to hear. Especially not that it was only available in a place I'd already tried to get in, and failed because it was reserved for a private party. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-07-17 11:44:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/211.html Disclaimer: Work on this in the Norwegian government has been going on for years. I worked on this for four months, producing a 45-page report. This blog posting oversimplifies most of the way through in the interests of brevity. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-05-09 20:47:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/208.html In the Nordic countries there is a whole style of brewing that has so far almost completely escaped the attention of beer enthusiasts, although some tips of the iceberg are showing above the surface here and there, if you look carefully. I'm referring to the traditional homebrewers, who have just about nothing in common with the new wave of US-inspired home brewers. What makes these brewers so interesting is that the beers they brew belong to styles that are almost completely unknown outside of these communities. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2010-01-16 14:48:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/207.html When I saw that Dr. Jekyll's Pub in Oslo was arranging a tasting with Brewdog, featuring their Tactical Nuclear Penguin beer, the world's strongest at 32%, I knew I had to go. Unsurprisingly, so did Knut Albert (his blog posting is here) and Geir Ove. The tasting was given by James Watt, who is responsible for Brewdog's marketing. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-12-17 08:41:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/204.html It's hard to find the really good pubs in most places in the world of any size, but London presents special challenges, for a number of reasons. First, there is the sheer size of the city, which has a population larger than many countries. Second, there is the enormous number of pubs (about 4000, according to many sources). And, third, there is the vast difference in quality between the average pubs and the really good ones. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-10-18 13:26:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/205.html I sketched a little path-based query language for Topic Maps this summer, mostly to explore what such a language might look like. My TMQL co-editor, Rani Pinchuk, asked me to write up a more detailed description of it, and that's what this blog posting is. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-09-23 11:01:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/203.html It's long been generally assumed that TMCL (the Topic Maps Constraint Language) should be able to validate datatyped values, but very little thought has so far been devoted to exactly how. It may look like a trivial issue, but in fact datatypes is an enormous tangle of complex problems. To pick one example at random, consider the ordering of time durations in XML Schema. This posting is an attempt to consider what TMCL should and, equally important, should not do. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-07-20 14:37:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/202.html I didn't know much about lenses, having only ever used the one I bought with the camera. I was fairly pleased with it, but discovered that taking photos of our newborn daughter (indoors, necessarily) gave disappointing results. The problem was the same one that made me give up my compact camera: not enough light. I could use high ISO, and get grainy photos, or low ISO, and get blurry ones. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-07-17 21:14:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/201.html Innis & Gunn has met with a divided reception among beer enthusiasts. Some really like it, some think it's not bad, and some hate it. Personally, I quite like it, and it's one of the very few beers that are oak-aged and fairly widely distributed. So when Dr. Jekyll's pub in Oslo announced a tasting with Dougal Sharp, the creator of Innis & Gunn, I signed up. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-06-21 19:23:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/200.html The idea of a Topic Maps file system is not new. Robert Barta presented one such at TMRA 2008, and Inge Henriksen is also working on one. However, I had my own take on this that I wanted to realize for several years. The starting point was the Mac screensaver which shows all photos from a given directory as a kind of slide show. I've set it to the root folder I store my photos in, but then it shows all photos, which is not always that pleasant when you're on a projector in a meeting, for example. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-06-03 16:25:00 CET