Scratch that, switching to .Net

We were told yesterday by our IT leadership that we are switching to .Net. Talk about a change that rocks you to the core.

ColdFusion programmers wanted

We will be hiring anywhere from 3 to 6 ColdFusion developers for 2010 projects. I do not know how soon the job postings will go up but I will updated this post when they do. If you are a ColdFusion Developer please comment or contact me. Our team is on ColdFusion 8 and moving to CF9 early 2010. We use ColdSpring, Model-Glue and Farcry frameworks, MS SQL DB server...

Chocolate Mead (braggot)

I brewed a Chocolate Mead this weekend. I've wanted to do this for a while. Here are the details.

1 gallon batch
------------
1 oz pale chocolate malt - for that roasty chocolate flavor
2 oz crystal 80 - for some sweetness the yeast can't ferment out.
steep above for 10 to 15
3 lbs wild flower honey
boil for 10 minutes to increase the mouth feel increase melanoidin formation
3.5 oz unsweetened bakers cocoa at flame out

yeast: 4g BM45 rehydrated for 15 min - gives a slight berry flavor
pitched at 61F last night.
fermenting at 58F (in same fridge as my Kolsch)

No bubbles this am, but still early. I might have be either up the temp or move the mead since I need to keep the Kolsch cool.

Belgianish Experiment Results

Well its been a bit since I did the Belgianish Ale Experiment and here are the results.

First off I bottled a little to soon and there was lots of yeast sediment in the bottom of the bottles. I hit my FG (1018) so it was done but not clear. This prevented me from presenting it to friends until just last weekend. I poured some for a friend and he was very impressed. It was smooth with that Belgian flavor.

Roggenbier fermenting

Well I brewed a partial mash clone of Schell's Roggenbier this weekend. This was about 4 lbs of grain, the most grain I have ever partial mashed. I decided to break out a cooler and use my two grain bags. Previously I had just mashed in the pot. Well I missed my mash temp a bit, 148 instead of 152 range. I could not add more water since I still only have a 4 gallon brew kettle. Schell's does a step mash with these steps:

• 95F 5 minutes
• 113F 20 Minutes
  
• 144F 10 minutes
  
• 162F 30 Minutes
  
• 172F mash out
  

After that it was pretty good. As always I forgot to take an OG before pitching and darned if I was going to try after that. I'm fermenting it at 62 for the first several days then will ramp it to 68 over several days.

Cell phone phone home

If anyone finds my cell phone please call the Home listed in contacts. Thank you. Last seen Tuesday 9/8 and goes by the name of "cell phone". It might need a charge by now but if it has power it will have a picture of my daughter on the background.

UPDATE: A humming downstairs couch revealed my cell phone.

Free as in Beer Kits

I won a beer ingredient kit from the Brew Bubbas podcast. They had a contest for contest ideas and I submitted several. My idea of a beer with local ingredient won! I just heard they are sending me a California Common Kit from their brew log Craig and Jerry are great guys and their podcast is great for every level of brewer. They are real down to earth guys with lots of respect for the craft and life in general.

BeerXML SDK Project

BeerXML is a standard for storing beer recipes. Some applications and sites can read and export recipes in this format however the compliance to the standard varies WIDELY. A while back I wrote a BeerXML parser for our club web site so we can post recipes. Doing so I said wow there should be some tools to help developers out. So I asked around and posted some messages on blogs asking if anyone wants to form an open source project. After getting two replies I decided to create this Google group. BeerXML SDK to aid in the groups communication and planning.

Current languages represented:
ColdFusion
C#
Java
Ruby

Anyone is welcome to join. The main goal is to make some SDK's to help import BeerXML into native objects and data types. Other goals are exporting and other tools to work with the objects.
However this is all up for discussion.

Model-Glue 3 is here!

The long awaited release of Model-Glue 3 (Gesture) is here. http://model-glue.com/coldfusion.cfm
Some of the features I like are helpers, formats and event types. We've been using concepts similar to some of these features and had Joe on sight a few times and he was the inspiration for a few. What a great MVC framework. We use MG across several of out applications both as the entire site or several MG apps nested within another framework. Model-Glue helps use split up the view and model tasks very nicely.

Thank You Boston Beer Company

I entered a raspberry wheat beer in to the Samuel Adams LongShot 2009 competition a while back. Its a free competition to enter and you get BJCP score sheets back. I placed 4th out of 10 in the fruit beer category for my region. Not to bad. An average of 32 for score. I have to say this was not my best version of the raspberry wheat in the first place. I was brew at someone elses house at the same time we where and mistakes were made. But not a bad placement.

So I received my score sheets and one thing I totally did not expect. A free hat, almost as good as free beer. This is a very nice hat with embroidery on the back that says LongShot and on the side that says 2009 homebrewer. There were 1500+ entries nation wide so the Boston Beer Company put some real dollars behind.

The Belgianish Ale Project - Update

Fermentation is going strong at day 11 since the first feeding. I ramped up to 72F over several days and its been there for the last several days.

Feedings #?
Well as always time got away from me and I was not able to brew a 3rd batch of wort to feed it and since its so far along I'd rather not expose it to any O2.

Just for review I went from a week old starter to the first wort feeding of a 1051 OG wort. After 3 days I added a 1095 OG wort and ramped the fermentation temp up from 68 to 72. Might bump to 73 here since its still going.

The Belgianish Ale Project - Feeding a fermentation

Well after listening to an interview with Sean Paxton the homebrew chef talking about how Rochefort brews their beers I decided to try an experiment. Rochefort brews 4 days and pitches the entire yeast on day 1 and adds the wort, then adds more wort the following days. They are doing this on a 1078OG beer. So I wanted to try something like this and partial because I have a 1500ml Wyeast Belgian Ale 1214 starter that was ready but did not have the time to brew with yet. So I brewed up a 1 gallon belgian style 1050 OG wort to feed to the starter. In a day or two I'm going to feed it (add to it) another wort in the 1095 OG+ range. I'd like to feed it one more time to build it up to a little over 3 gallons of around a 1080 beer. I might also feed it belgian candi syrup (dark) after that but prob only if I have time and only if its active fermentation.

Feeding 1 recipe (brewed 7/21)

Feeding 2 recipe (brewed 7/24)

Feeding 3 - life got in the way and did not do this.

Feeding 4 - ???

3 gallon batches of beer

Most homebrew batches are 5 gallons of beer. However for a long time now I have been doing smaller batches like one, two and three gallon batches. I've really come to like the three gallon batches. They fit in a 5 gallon carboy with no blow off of overflow. They are about 30 bottles so just right for having some to share/trade but enough to have some of your own. As you might guess, I still bottle. So bottling 30 bottles saves some time. Also I just did two 3 gallon batches at once. I find that I can brew more often yet get a good amount of beer still. It also saves a bit.

To accomplish this I use hopville.com for formulating and scaling recipes. I keep the percentages and OG, IBU and stats as close as I can. Sometimes its hard to keep SRM the same as some quantities do not split nicely. Hopeville.com does not do grams either so sometimes the spec'd recipe is a bit off from brewday. Overall I have had great success in small batches. You do have to watch the pitching rate but 3 gallons for a smack pack or vial is a good amount.

I'm also looking a making a 2 liter bottle keg.

ColdFusion 9 & Bolt Public Beta. Special CF Meetup today.

ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder (formerly Bolt) are now on Adobe Labs.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusionbuilder/

Also there is a CF meetup special session today with Terry Ryan presenting on Centaur and Bold. This is basically an online CFUG meeting done via Adobe Connect. Just bring your browser. http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/10841349/?a=nr1p_grp

CF 8.01 - vulnerability

UPDATE: Adobe hotfix for below issue. http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-09.html

Please read.
http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/07/
http://www.codfusion.com/blog/post.cfm/cf8-and-fckeditor-security-threat

FCKEditor vulnerability http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2009-007.html
FCKEditor patch 2.6.4.1 http://www.fckeditor.net/whatsnew

Mayo Clinic Hiring ColdFusion Developers

My team is hiring senior level ColdFusion developers. Below is the posting.

Senior Analyst Programmer

Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Senior Analyst Programmer. Our Global Product Service is in immediate need of a highly motivated individual to be part of the Population Health technical team who is capable of designing and implementing interactive web-based applications and services. Duties will include supporting the monitoring and maintenance of multiple web sites and working closely with other members of the Population Health technical team to help architect applications for the EmbodyHealth portal. You will also assist in the integration of EmbodyHealth with other business units at Mayo and other vendor partners. To qualify, you must have a Bachelor's degree and three years of professional software development experience; or an Associate's degree and five years professional software development experience; or nine years of professional software development experience. Three to five years' experience in web application development and a background working with ColdFusion are required. Experience in data modeling and design on enterprise level DB such as Microsoft SQL Server is also essential

Mayo Clinic, one of Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For," offers an excellent salary and benefits package. To apply or learn more about this or other opportunities, please visit http://www.mayo-clinic-jobs.com/job/ROCHESTER,-MN-Senior-Analyst-Programmer-23956-Job/497314/

Stephanie Bowron, Human Resources Phone: 800-562-7984

Mayo Clinic is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. Post-offer/pre-employment screening is required.

Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection in CGI scope

This is not another post telling you what 100 other have. We all know you need to check....
However often times there are a few variables forgotten when checking for CSS and SQL injection.
In ColdFusion there is a scope called CGI. It contains things like CGI.QUERY_STRING and CGI.SCRIPT_NAME. If you use either of these in your code these are susceptible to attack also. I have seen a malformed URL create attacks in both of these.

Here is one SQL injection tool that may help you. http://portcullis.riaforge.org/

Code - more like a bar top than I thought

You ever look at some code and see "blonde, brunette, redhead ", okay Matrix quotes aside. You ever look code and see different coding styles from multiple programmers touching it? Its like a well worn bar counter or that worn door handle. Fingerprint here, smudge there and worn down here. It just seemed interesting to me.

Performance Tuning ColdFusion

This is a great place to start "Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications". Don't be scared off by the Jvm memory tuning stuff. If you can tune your JVM this article has other good nuggets of info.

My tuning tips:

• Turn on the debugging info and the "Report Execution Times " setting. Or just this setting as enabling everything can suck up a lot of memory. Look for not only long running code but code that you did not expect to run more than once or N times. If something only takes 30ms but runs 100 times maybe you could still tune it to run less. Especially something that may only take 30ms in development could make a huge impact if it starts taking 100ms say.
• Indexing your db tables properly can help a lot. Sometimes we create tables, write a bunch of code and forget to go back and look at what fields we actually used in the where clause or joins. Sometimes things change and that primary key may not be "the field" you used.

Enjoy

Pomegranate Saison?

A couple weeks ago when I bottled the Saison Du Mont from the big brew I added pomegranate juice to a bit of it. Last night I opened one. For starters I had targeted 3 volumes with the priming sugar before adding the juice, needless to say it was a little over carbonated. After the foaming out of the bottle was done I tasted it. Below are my notes.

Appearance: It is more cloudy than the normal batch. Pectin?

Aroma: a flowery aroma and then that Belgian funk with some citrus.

Taste: Its a bit more tart than the normal batch and you can't really taste any fruit.

Mouthfeel: Its very smooth and a bit creamy on the tongue. The extra carbonation maybe or perhaps more body.

Wife test: My wife liked this version compared to the normal batch.

Overall I think we need to do a side by side next time. If I did this again I'd back off on the priming sugar for the juiced batch.

Brew on