ColdFusion Contractors Wanted

We are hiring some ColdFusion contractors. Skills in OO, web services, xml, MSSQL, Model-Glue, ColdSpring are all desirable. These are senior positions. The positions will most likely be at least a year if not longer. Post a comment if you would like to apply or need more info.

Change vs Progress

When does change become progress? Is progress planned ahead of time? Does change just morph into progress at some point? Or is it only in reflection that you can say progress was made? Our shop is converting technologies and I'm trying to figure out if we are making progress or just change. Its early yet so perhaps progress only comes with reflection.

Voice for Radio

A while back I suggested to James Spencer from Basic brewing a show topic about creating a club web site. What options are out there, things to watch out for etc. I was interviewed Monday for the show. I felt like I was in speech class in high school, nervous. I thought I was rambling, didn't make sense etc... But today I listened to the episode and hey it was not bad at all. That guy kinda knows what he is talking about. Well I hope it helps some club make a decision on a web site.

Avatar Awesome

I saw Avatar in 3D over the weekend and wow. It was a visual feast from the landscape to the native creatures. The story line was very interesting with some parallels from Earths past. You do have to pay attention in the few scenes with both humans and the natives understand the size difference. This movie had mechs, wild creatures, a love scene, nice looking aliens, an uprising, man vs nature, space travel, and a spiritual side. Overall not a bad movie at all.

Cons: I did have issues with the floating mountains. Sure maybe for some reason the rocks floated but could a floating rock have a waterfall from it? Also the mineral they were searching for was Unobtainium. Humorous but kind of a snap out of it moment for me in the movie.

Spreading the merrymint. Mint Lip Balm

Merrymint mint lip balm recipe (kind of like burt's bees)

makes about 12 -15 of the .15 oz tubes

Equipment:

• A sauce pan you don't care about to melt things in.
• Digital scale is really nice to have
• Having a tube filling tray really helps.
• Spatula
• A place to fill the tubes that you can get lip balm all over. I used a cake pan.
  

Ingredients:
1 oz beeswax (our wax was from a bee keeper)
0.5 oz virgin coconut oil (more like butter)
0.5 oz regular coconut oil (more like butter)
0.3 oz lanolin oil (helps to warm it)
0.8 oz sunflower oil
5 drops rosemary oil (high quality)
30 - 40 drops peppermint oil (medium quality)

optional: vitamin E oil.

Process:
Heat all on very low/melt heat.
When melted add the rosemary and peppermint drops.
Pour into tubes.

About the recipe: we started with a recipe off the internet and I used all virgin coconut oil first and found it was to strong of a coconut flavor. The regular coconut oil did not have as much aromatics and was also softer. We also went 50/50 on wax to coconut oils to get a softer stick. You can use 1.5 oz wax to get a harder stick if you like. We also found that our rosemary oil was very high quality and cut it in half.

Enjoy

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