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/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 http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/199.html I've been using Twitter for just about a year now (username: larsga), ever since Tim Bray wrote enough about it to make me curious about what it was. I've since come to enjoy it as a kind of mix between blogs and chat, and have developed a very mixed crowd of people that I follow. One day I started thinking about categorizing these people, and I started wondering what clusters of Twitterers I was really following. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-04-05 20:43:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/197.html The ISO SC34 meeting in Prague was a big affair with five different working groups and many attendees. Working group 3 had a lower attendance than usual (for a number of reasons), and perhaps for that very reason had a highly productive three days focusing on TMCL. The status before the meeting was that we have a quite loose draft that shows in rough outline the intended functionality of the language and gives a good indication of the way it's intended to be specified. The task of the meeting was to process this to the point where the editors could write something quite close to the final specification. I'm happy to say I think that's what we did. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-04-02 10:50:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/196.html Beer consumption in Norway may be falling, but craft beer production is booming. To cope with increasing demand Haandbryggeriet recently ripped out their old brewing plant, replacing it with a new one. The old one had a capacity of 900 liters per batch, whereas the new one does 2000, more than doubling the batch size. In fact, since the old one could only do 700 liters of strong beers (because of the amount of malts), capacity is close to tripled for these beers. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-02-22 13:00:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/194.html I don't usually do beer reviews on this blog, but I got "reviewer copies" of the BrewDog Paradox Smokehead and Isle of Arran, and thought they were worth writing about. Contrary to what you might think, this doesn't mean breweries have suddenly started to send me their beers, clamouring for me to review them. BrewDog sent them to Knut Albert, who kindly passed them on to me. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-02-15 13:35:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/193.html It's odd that the pub should in one sense be the ultimate English tourist attraction, since all countries have their own bars and cafés, but somehow the English pub has become part of international culture. And deservedly so, because there really is something special about English pubs. A good English pub is almost like a communal living-room; a kind of home away from home. That is, the good English pubs are like this. They are of course outnumbered by the indifferent or even bad pubs, which are just boozers like those you find anywhere in the world. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-02-10 12:34:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/192.html The summer after finishing high school a friend and I set out on an interrail trip through Europe. In England, one of the things we wanted to experience was a proper English beer. So we ordered a Guinness. This was a mistake on many different levels, but I'll limit myself to three here. First, Guinness is of course Irish, and not English. Secondly, we could have had it just about anywhere in Norway. But perhaps the worst mistake was that what's most unique about British beer culture is the cask method of serving beer draft. Guinness, however, even in England, is served from keg, like draft beers in the rest of the world. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-01-25 15:07:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/189.html Not long ago, my advice to anyone wanting to try Norwegian microbrew in Oslo would have been to buy bottles from the Wine Monopoly stores and drink them in the hotel room. Not very appealing, of course, but the alternative would have been to hit the two or three pubs that carried a couple of such beers each, where you would have had to argue with the waiters in the hopes of perhaps persuading them to sell you one. (To be fair, Bar & Cigar could be relied on to not just have some, but to also sell them.) larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-01-17 13:08:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/190.html I bought myself a DSLR almost exactly one year ago, and have been working on my photography skills ever since. I've been reading up on theory and equipment, and also worked on trying to make the most of the new camera. I'm happy to say that I think I've made progress during the year. I attribute the improvements to better theoretical knowledge of photography (understanding aperture, ISO, depth of field, etc etc), much better equipment (camera and lenses), and also better post-production. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-01-10 16:14:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/188.html Once again it's time for the annual travel map. This year's is not the most extensive, as I knew when I made last year's, since I knew I was ill and that we were having a baby. This is also why, for the first time in many years, there was no intercontinental travel, and no trips to anywhere even remotely challenging. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2009-01-03 16:06:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/187.html 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. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2008-11-20 15:39:00 CET