We had a good, inspiring orchestration meeting at the Guix day pre-FOSDEM and as part of that I've been working on making public AWS cloud images available for Guix. This post serves as a status report, since we're not quite there yet. The code that runs the builds is available on Github. The idea behind this is, to facilitate people building their own customized Guix images for the cloud in addition to building a Golden Master. The strategy I employ to get a working Guix image is very simple. I…

A friend asked me today if I could do some Perl programming for him. I'm a bit rusty in Perl, but I still understand it well enough to port it to Python. The source module was on CPAN and basically scraped all of the metadata off of distrowatch.com. The new modules lives on PyPi as pulldistros. It will basically scrape most of the metadata. The main libraries used are BeautifulSoup and requests. One nice thing to note, BeautifulSoup allows you to use different parsers. The default Python HTML parser…

Sunday was great weather, 0° and sunny, after breakfast I went outside on a 90 minutes long walk and three podcasts: The Bicycle Artist by Home of the Brave An interview with a bike designer in Walnut Creek, California, that has his own opinions on bike design, and about what he thinks makes a great bike. Refreshing. Two More Stories About Mountains by Home of the Brave Starts off with a monologue by the author and then continues into a story that first aired in '96 on public radio. A…

I'm currently reading Haddawys new translation of 'Arabian Nights' and I enjoy it greatly. The short format of each story or 'night' is delightful. I'm totally blown away, that something stemming from a 14th century manuscript could be translated into this kind of vivid, modern English. And the short-story format is very friendly, when you just have three tube stations time to get some reading done, before you spend the rest of the day at work. With texts this age you always feel like the value canon of the character…

I started educating beer judges two months ago and the upcoming topic will be 'fermentation'. This peaked my curiosity a little. I do have two text which cover this. This is Heinrich Lüers "Wissenschaftliche Grundlagen von Mälzerei und Brauerei" and White and Zainasheff "Yeast". Lüers is more of a basic science text, written in 1950, while White is specifically aimed at the ambitious homebrewer and maybe the microbrewer. Let's review Lüers most important ideas. Yeast population growth Lüers give for the population growth: $$ N_f = N_…