Every once in a while its good to indulge in some of your alternative passions. In the spirit of new beginnings I have started this year well by brewing some mead!

Mead is a wonderful honey wine, with arguably the longest history of all alcoholic beverages consumed by man. As a way of recording my attempts at producing a fine quality drink, here are a couple of recipes for meads I’ve recently finished bottling:

Medium Sweet Mead

Makes 2 gallons.

3x 454g Tesco Pure Clear Honey
2x 340g Tesco Finest Orange Blossom Honey
2x 340g Gales Blossom Honey Clear
(2.72kg Honey in total)

1.5L hot water
4.7L cold water

4 tsp sugar, 1 tsp yeast nutrient, 2 tsp yeast

Ferment with high alcohol wine yeast for at least a week, then rack and leave for 2 weeks for secondary fermentation. Wait until all signs of fermentation have stopped, racking periodically as desired, then bottle. Ideally age the mead for at least six months in a cool place.

Medium Sweet Spiced Mead (Metheglin)

In the secondary fermentation phase add the following ingredients per gallon:
1x cinnamon stick
1 inch root ginger thinly sliced
2 tsp nutmeg
1 – 3 cloves
1 – 2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

When it comes to bottling or if racking for a second time, strain through a sieve or if possible wine filter.

Medium Sweet Berry Mead (Melomel)

In the seconday fermentation phase add the following ingredients per gallon:
Roughly 3/4 L raspberry and cranberry juice.

Tasting notes

You can tell a lot about how a mead will turn out from the aroma and and taste of the honey(s) you are using. Out of those used in this batch I have to say my preference was for the Gale’s Blossom Honey. While it is only a blended honey it was lacking the harsher characteristics of the other honeys and might well make a good base honey or starter for a new meadmaker to try. Sweeter meads have more character than dry meads, but due to a higher honey content they can also take on some of the less pleasant flavours of the honey. Therefore they probably benefit much more from the ageing process than drier meads.

From an initial taste the metheglin has a lovely warmth to it, a nice after-taste and a very unusual aroma. In terms of the quantity of spices used these are good experimental amounts, certainly enough to pick out the flavours but not so strong as to be overwhelming. The melomel is a rosé colour and tastes very fruity, not dissimilar to a fruit liquor or fortified wine.

It will be interesting to see how well they age, if any lasts long enough to find out!

Project

My university project is developing nicely, to the point I have a prototype demo and am in the early stages of marketing aspects of it as a commercial software product.  From the initial response, it seems there are various options I could choose in terms of turning the project into a commercial venture. While my ambition is to mould the software into a useful product based on a businesses needs and sell it to them, if I’m unlucky in finding enough direct support I will explore other options. I’m keen to bring logic programming to the enterprise application table and for people to realise the potential of this idea.

Mobile

My foray into the world of mobile application development has proved a mixed bag. It is exciting in terms of innovation opportunities but I don’t believe its commercially viable currently. Mobile apps, much like social-network style web apps, only really make good money in a minority of cases. Being in the right place in the right time and also very lucky is the name of the game. Nevertheless, a profit no matter how small should not be downplayed.

Currently my earnings from my three Android apps are of a scale that is enough to pay my web hosting. While that’s certainly not a lot of money, it is at least an alternative to incorporating advertising into this blog which I have resisted so far due to the intrusion on user experience that web ads cause. If I have satisfied a few people with my fairly simple mobile apps instead, I figure that’s a somewhat more satisfying way to pay for the ability to ramble on and publish it to the world, amongst other more useful material!

Pushing forward

Its easy to get demotivated if people aren’t beating down your door wanting to know about something you’re doing that you think is a great project. However the truth is I have a lot of encouraging things to be thankful for. Not least of all I feel confident I’ll have work of some sort when I graduate, which in at the moment counts for a lot.

Continuing to believe in and develop something has helped me to also develop personally in terms of my skills in expressing and presenting material, and in a loose sense (at the risk of sounding non-technical) improve my soft skills in business project management.

I hope in the near future to bring exciting news about further developments in my project work.

Exams are nearly over, which is a great relief and the sun is shining here in Norwich. Things can indeed only get better as in a weeks time I will be making my way to France for a holiday with my lovely girlfriend and my housemates who will all be graduating this year. Bon voyage!

Have a look and see if the suggestion in this link helps: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=2680b41d121dc73a&hl=en

(you may have to hunt for the directory in order to run the relevant file)

I became frustrated by this problem myself which has occurred several times now on my Vista laptop. The solution, which I haven’t really looked at in any detail, seems to involve forcing a rename of a google exe using the setup.exe

I suspect chrome fails to properly rename the relavent exe when it updates itself. Previously I went to the trouble of uninstalling then reinstalling the browser, now at least this provides a quicker solution. On uninstalling I provided feedback on multiple occasions that I was only doing it because the thing stopped working, and otherwise I was relatively satisfied with it !

I thought it worthy of a post to raise the profile of this obviously relatively common issue so that at least people can resolve it for themselves quickly. Hopefully though the chrome updating system will eventually be fixed so that this no longer occurs.

holiday snap of glenroy in scottish highlands

After taking a lovely relaxed break in Scotland, I’m back home for some serious work over the summer. I’ve been very fortunate in securing some interesting software development work at a company that deals with, to put it in an oversimplified form, automated financial transactions. So far so good, but as a result I anticipate I might not have much time in the coming weeks and possibly months to continue any posts relating to OpenLaszlo and my menu project. Hopefully I will have enough time to inject the odd snippet of information (including anything broadly related to my summer work, which isn’t confidential) that might be useful to someone out there reading!

In my opinion the query method which is currently documented and seems to be available to use is not actually as practically useful for web apps as the data method which is not yet documented.

It would be a very useful resource to integrate into an application where data on a specific subject such as statistics are required. For example the cities search on my website which simply queries an SQL database could be replaced with a Wolfram Alpha search allowing access to a much broader resource of information.

As the results are provided in XML format they will be easy to process using XML parsers or in the case of a platform like OpenLaszlo the data can be bound straight into the application.

Creating a page to display RSS feed information proved surprisingly straightforward with Sun’s RSS utils package available at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaserverpages/rss_utilities/

Essentially RSS utils retrieves the XML page containing the RSS feed and processes it, allowing you to retrieve the feed by simply using the custom XML tag library provided. Of course you could go and create your own RSS parsing utility, however as Sun have provided this facility it seems like a wasted effort, particularly if you’re planning to use it to implement RSS feeds rather than just learning about XML itself. That said it is important to understand how XML files are structured as they are becoming more important in web programming.

My view on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) itself is that it can be both a blessing and a burden. For defining arbitary data instances [read: stuff] that needs to be passed around between other parts of a system it can be very useful. However there is a problem in that it can be used uneccessarily, probably mostly due to the fact that XML is basically nothing tangible.

In fact to prove this ask someone (or yourself) to define XML and its possible uses. You will probably find it is not that easy to articulate!

In essence XML is a building block, a foundation / specification. And there isn’t even that much to it in its raw form, XML states:

<house>

<window>Double glazed</window>

<door>Front door</door>

</house>

Obviously there is more to it than that, but that’s defined by what you want do with XML.

So just to re-iterate to anyone new to XML:

• You can’t compile XML – it’s not a programming language!

RSS is a format of producing snippets of information, which are often news articles and blogs containing links. An RSS feed is essentially a manually or dynamically updated XML file formatted in a specific manner.

Then I’ll look at the possibility of using RSS feeds for simple content management of web-sites. RSS should provide a reasonable platform for storing and retrieving simple text data in XML files. This may have some advantages such as the possibility of easily rendering the XML data in different ways for different clients. However it does require file I/O on the server side which may prove more complex than simply using an SQL database to store and retrieve content. Alternatively the RSS feed could be stored within an SQL database, however I haven’t yet considered if this would be advantageous or not.

I will start with a post about beginning to learn Microsoft’s ASP.NET platform with C# for web development for those with previous java experience.

It is a quick guide for those familiar with the Java web platform looking to extend their skillset or at least gain some understanding of how .NET operates on the web. Many people on university courses such as mine which favours Java for web apps may have little idea about Microsoft’s competing technology and how it can be used. I will attempt to be somewhat impartial in this explanation.