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/244.html Imagine an alternative digital currency based on cryptographic principles, designed and launched by persons unknown, running as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable peer-to-peer network. The network has no central authority, and no single point of failure. It is, simply, made up of a self-regulated network of computers connected to each other, speaking the Bitcoin protocol between one another, and nothing more. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2013-06-12 17:03:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/242.html We were visiting my father, who lives in Hong Kong, and went shopping for food in a shopping mall in Hang Hau. The mall was a typical Hong Kong mall: all gleaming marble and glass, so clean you could eat your dinner right off the floor. For some reason we went down into the basement, into a corner, and through some big steel doors. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2013-02-24 20:52:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/241.html Following my analysis of the Norwegian craft beer market some people were wondering what the graph of total craft brewery output would look like. Well, that's not an easy thing to come by, given that there's almost 60 breweries in Norway now. However, I was able to get figures for the main craft breweries, and a couple of smaller breweries. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2013-02-17 11:14:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/240.html A year ago I posted an analysis of craft beer in Norway, where I concluded that craft beer had taken off in Norway, and that the growth would continue in 2012. It's now 2013, so it's time to take a look at how the year turned out. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2013-01-20 17:32:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/238.html The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami must be one of the most widely reported stories ever, so does the world really need another account? When we decided to go to Hiraizumi I noticed that the area worst hit by the tsunami was just next door. Naito-san suggested that we go, but I felt unsure about it. I admit I wanted to see for myself, but at the same time it felt ghoulish to go there to stare at the destruction like some tsunami tourist. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2013-01-04 13:54:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/239.html I've written before about how Lithuania has a beer tradition of its own, different from any other country on earth, but back then I didn't really know very much about it. I'm still far from an expert on Lithuanian beer, but by now I've learned a bit more, which I want to share. One reason is that I find that although Lithuania is just a short (and cheap) plane ride away, people don't seem to have any interest in exploring this world of beer unknown to just about everyone. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-11-18 20:36:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/237.html We really came to Shiogama because we happened to be passing by on our way from Matsushima Bay to Sendai. But once there, Naito-san wanted to see Shiogama Jinja, one of the most important temples in Tohoku. And, he told me, we had to have sushi, since Shiogama was famous for its sushi. That's no exaggeration. The port unloads more fresh tuna than anywhere else in Japan, and it has the highest density of sushi restaurants on earth. Arriving into Shiogama by boat from Matsushima Bay, I noticed a huge hulking concrete building towering over the harbour. That, the guide told us, was the fish market. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-11-09 16:17:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/236.html On the face of it, Matsushima is just a small Japanese port. However, it's also home to a famous temple, and Basho considered the islands in the bay outside one of the three great views of Japan. In fact, "a vision of the moon at Matsushima" was one of the things that convinced him to set out on his great journey. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-11-03 10:49:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/235.html Basho passed through Ichinoseki on his journey, but failed to mention it, focusing instead on Hiraizumi. Today Ichinoseki is much the bigger of the two towns, even if Hiraizumi is culturally more important. To us, however, Ichinoseki held an important attraction: the Sekinoichi Shuzo sake brewery, which also makes the Iwate Kura beers. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-10-28 10:11:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/232.html For years now everyone's been wondering when Ringnes was going to wake up and realize that the old days of selling cheap industrial beers were over. Overall beer sales have been down consistently year after year for many years, while craft beer sales have boomed. Surely the biggest brewery in Norway had to sit up and notice at some point? Particularly when their owners, Danish Carlsberg, have already started two craft beer brands in Denmark (Kongens Bryghus and Jacobsen). larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-10-04 20:25:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/234.html In Japanese language, no articles. In Japanese hotel room, not many articles, either. Actually, that's not quite true. Japanese hotel rooms are much like their western counterparts, but the traditional Japanese inns are something else entirely. There's two main kinds: the expensive ryokan, and the cheaper minshukus. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-09-28 20:53:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/231.html There's a huge range of triple stores out there, and it's not trivial to find the one most suited for your exact needs. I reviewed all those I could find earlier this year for a project, and here is the result. I've evaluated the stores against the requirements that mattered for that particular project. I haven't summarized the scores, as everyone's weights for these requirements will be different. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-09-17 19:56:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/230.html One thing that's struck me about Japan is how amazingly rich their history is, and how you could spend your entire life digging into it, without ever running out of things to learn. That history is still very much alive to the Japanese themselves, and everywhere you turn you are reminded of it. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-09-14 17:41:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/229.html In 1100, the Fujiwara clan made Hiraizumi their capital, and ruled almost a third of Japan from here. The city grew to a metropolis of at least 50,000 people, a shining example of Heian Era architecture and culture, to rival even Kyoto the capital. After the fall of the Fujiwaras, however, the town shrunk, and today it has only 8000 people. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-09-02 20:48:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/227.html Once I'd bought the tickets, the next question arose: where to go? I had one week in Japan, but where to spend it? The last time I was in Japan I'd travelled south from Tokyo, so I figured this time I would go north. I'd really love to see Hokkaido, but with only one week I would have spent most of my time travelling, so I decided to not travel that far. Basically, that meant going to the Tohoku region. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-08-05 09:50:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/225.html I made an engine called Duke that can automatically match records to see if they represent the same thing. For more background, see a previous post about it. The biggest problem people seem to have with using it is coming up with a sensible configuration. I stumbled across a paper that described using so-called genetic programming to configure a record linkage engine, and decided to basically steal the idea. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-03-18 10:06:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/223.html I don't normally do straight beer reviews, but this is not just any beer, and I think it deserves much more attention than it's received so far. It's both wildly unsual and one of my all-time favourite beers. And now that Nøgne Ø is brewing Red Horizon 2 and 3 the time seems right for a little write-up. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-02-25 14:02:00 CET http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/224.html GlavPivTorg is not just a brewpub. It is also a theme restaurant. The name is a Soviet-style acronym meaning "Main Beer Cooperative," and the place is designed to look like an elite Soviet restaurant from the 1960s. This is the sort of place where the high-level Soviet apparatchik would dine. Even the menu is designed according to the state cookery manual for restaurants. larsga@garshol.priv.no (Lars Marius Garshol) 2012-02-19 18:17:00 CET 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