I am happy to to announce ErlangCamp Chicago 2010 (http://erlangcamp.com/) has gone live and is ready to take registrations. This has been in planning for quite a while between Martin Logan, Eric Merritt, Tristan Sloughter, and myself. We are trying to help build the Erlang community here in the U.S. We hope by providing an affordable conference that focuses on the fundamentals of production-grade development, we can foster a solid base of strong Erlang programmers. If you have used Erlang and are interested in learning more, I encourage you to attend. With the prevalence of new Erlang jobs becoming available here in the United States, having advanced OTP knowledge will prepare you for working for them. Hope to see you all there!

First I want to go ahead and fill in a few more details of the story. Thanks to a very nice man, Henry Walli, who had his 1930 Ford Pickup in the scene, I was able to find out that Johnny Depp was in fact right in front of my house from 4am to 6am on Thursday morning, while I was unfortunately sleeping, thinking he wouldn’t show up. Anyways, he was able to fill in some of the details of the scene. It appears that the scene they filmed in front of my house is where Dilinger(Johnny Depp) picks up his girlfriend Billie(Marion Cotillard) who is dressed as a man. I actually have pictures below of the scene they filmed Friday night where she is in the back alley walking icognito through a passageway between the houses to the front of the houses on Newport Ave. This would match up with what Henry Walli said in the comments of my previous post about Johnny picking her up then speeding off East in his Black Buick Coupe. In fact he saw them strap Michael Mann to the fender of the Buick! I recommend reading all of Henry’s comments on my previous post, as he also talks about how we was picked to have his truck in the movie. It is all very interesting. If anyone can fill in more details, it is appreciated.

The next time a major movie is filmed on my street, which I am sure will be never, I will definitely never sleep. Now time for the pictures! To get the full set of pictures I have, go here.

This first picture is of a set crew person adding license plates to cars. The green 1930 Ford Pickup is the one owned by Henry Walli.

The next two photos are of Michael Mann telling his helpers what to do to get the shot better and of Billie(Marion Cotillard)’s stand in doing the pre-filming.

These next two pictures are of Billie(Marion Cotillard) getting her wardrobe on. In the second picture you can see her in the back, while her stand in is still doing a few more takes to get the shot ready.

This is Billie(Marion Cotillard) doing the actual scene. You will notice when she walks back to do the scene again she gets an umbrella, unlike her stand in. :) The final picture is after they were done shooting the scene. She is under the umbrella and you can clearly see her face.

Finally, a couple of pictures of the crew.

I did have trouble finding Liquid Rice Malt Extract(LRME), but thanks to Tristan, I was able to find the LRME at an online brewshop in South Carolina. The only real adjustment I made in this brew is I cut the amount of hop oil in half from last time, as I thought it was little “too hopped” the first time I brewed this recipe. For those unfamiliar with hop oil, you use roughly 1/4th of the amount of hop oil then you would normal hops. For instance, if your beer called for 2 oz. of hops, you would use 0.5 oz. of hop oil flavoring. I ended up with an Original Gravity of 1.012, a little stronger than last time, but still within means. The full recipe is as follows:

Specialty Grains
* 1.50 lbs. Rice

Fermentables
* 0.5 lbs. Right Malt Syrup (boil for 60 min.)

Boil Additions
* 0.00000030108 oz. Hop Flavor Oil (0 min)

Yeast
* Wyeast #37337 American Bread Yeast

My favorite part about this wonderful beer is how versatile it is. You can pair it with almost any food. You can drink it in the morning, afternoon, and even in the middle of the night if you wake up thirsty. You can also cook pasta with it, give it to your cats, or even make another batch of beer with it if you are so inclined. Overall, this is probably the best beer in the world.

You know things are bad when Flameeye’s himself is “disappointed” with Gentoo.

I had hoped to get rid of Gentoo back when I posted, but unfortunately have been too busy with things until now. I first installed Xubuntu on my laptop. Everything went completely smoothly, so I decided to to install it on my main system. Now I am installing it on my server and my work machine.

The only slight problem I ran into was migrating Thunderbird. In Gentoo, Thunderbird stores the files in .thunderbird, whereas Xubuntu stores them in .mozilla-thunderbird, which means a simple mv .thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird solved the problem.

The best part I like about X/Ubuntu is the ability to setup a LUKS Encrypted Filesystem during the install. This allows you to have your whole file system(except the /boot partition) to be completely encrypted. It was just a few clicks and now I have an extra layer of protection on my system.

Anyways, I just have one thing to say, please X/Ubunty community, don’t turn into another Gentoo. I am tired of having to switch to a new distro every 2-3 years.

First, the reason why. For those familiar with homebrewing, you know that aerating the wort can be important, especially for a brew that has a very high original gravity. Generally, this is done either by shaking around the carboy with the fresh wort inside, or you can buy a special aerating stone or pump.

Now for the cool part, you can use olive oil to “aerate” your wort. The process, detailed below, is absolutely simple. The reason this works is as follows. When yeast is getting ready to ferment, it takes in an oxygen atom from the wort in order to take a hydrogen atom away from an 18 carbon chain unsaturated fatty acid, which makes an 18 monosaturated fatty acid, which helps the yeast grow. Now, olive oil just happens to be made of these 18 carbon monosaturated fatty acids. This means the yeast can just use these directly from the olive oil without having to make its own. This of course means the yeast does not need oxygen, and thus there is no need to do a real aeration. If you are saying to yourself, “That is crazy!”, you are right, it is! I had the exact same reaction. The technique was developed at University of Leuven in Belgium and put to practice at New Belgium Brewing. Those Belgians sure know how to get homebrewers excited! Since you are essentially skipping the aeration process with a much easier and equivalent process, the fermentation can also start occurring much quicker than it normally would and with the same intensive fermentation as if you had used a professional aeration system.

So how do you do it? It is very simple. All you need to do is take a toothpick and dip it in some olive oil, then stir it around in your yeast starter, or in your wort if you did not use a yeast starter. The trick is to use a very little amount of olive oil. Even a drop is too much(it will hurt head retention). That is why you need to use the toothpick trick.

From what I have read, you want to be careful(especially if you have never used an aerator before), as doing this trick will result in a much stronger fermentation, and possibly require use of your blowoff tube, so check your fermenting wort often!

I plan on doing this for my next batch of beer in a week or so, so I will let everyone know how it turns out. If anyone has tried this method, or plans on it, let me know!

You can read more here and here.

We had a caucus for the republicans in the group. This was the one vote Ron Paul got.

Eddie shows everyone how old he is.

Everything Tristan needs for his presentation.

Kevin videotaping himself being cool.

Eddie singing karaoke.

An anonymous person watching Eddie rap.

Fall is my favorite time of year and it just happens to also seem to be the best time for making some really great beers. Nothing is better than a nice spiced ale on a chilly fall evening. That is why I decided to start my homebrew voyage with the Spiced Winter Ale kit from Northern Brewer. It is described as a malty, medium-bodied Scottish-style ale with mulling spices(ceylon cloves, cracked cinnamon, allspice, cardarmom, and mace) added in.

Specialty Grains
* 1 lbs. Simpsons Dark Crystal

Fermentables
* 6.3 lbs. Gold Malt Syrup

Boil Additions
* 1 oz. Kent Goldings (60 min)
* 0.25 oz. Mulling Spices (60 min)
* 0.5 oz. Mulling Spices (0 min)

Special Ingredients
* 1/4 oz. Mulling Spices (add to secondary)

Yeast
* Wyeast #1728 Scottish Ale Yeast.

My first brew experience went very well. With the knowledge of my mentor firmly in grasp, I was able to go smoothly through the brew process. I had an original gravity(OG) of 1046, which should give roughly an 4.7% ABV. The expected OG is 1047, so not bad for my first time. The brew mixture started fermenting within 12 hours, so that is a good sign as well. After fermentation stops in about 3-4 days, the recipe calls for a secondary fermentation with additional mulling spices. I calculated the secondary fermentation time to be anywhere from 14-32 days. I am in no big rush, so I will probably let it sit in the secondary fermenter for a good 3 weeks. After bottling and conditioning for an extra 2 weeks, I should I have a brew that is ready just in time for Halloween, though I will be certain to age a large portion until the first snows arrive.

Overall, I was very pleased with Northern Brewer’s deluxe brew kit. They have a great deal going on right now on shipping. I was able to get the brew kit, kettle, and spiced winter ale kit shipped for only $5.99. It also arrived in two days.

For my next brew I am looking strongly at doing a Saison, but have not decided for sure yet.

If anyone has any further features they would like to see added. Please let me know.

Finally, pictures from the meeting are also up. You can find those here.

For those of you who remember the old Microsoft Visual C++ days, you could write a text program and it would be compiled into some ugly looking GUI with a text box and a little menu that could close the program or find about information. So I compiled the program and sent it off to the cool hacker group on IRC. When they got the program, they claimed that I didn’t write it. I asked them why? They said because the “About” dialog from the menu said Microsoft Windows. Therefore, the said, I had stolen it from Microsoft. I almost fell out of my chair from laughing. I may have been pretty young and naive, but that was just hilarious to me. Needless to say I didn’t join the hacker group.

It was a good learning experience though. From that day on, I realized a hacker wasn’t someone trying to impress another group, but rather someone just interested in wanting to learn, so that is what I did. I learned more C++, then some GUI programming with wxWindows(now wxWidgets), etc.

Learning was a lot of fun when you were learning just for fun. I remembered the first time I booted into Linux, it was almost magical! There were all these free games, free programs, all these new desktop options I had never even heard of before! I ended up having to buy an external serial modem, since the one I had was a soft modem, and back then there was zero support for them. When I finally was able to get on the Internet with Linux, I never went back. I started learning how to do other things, like setup my own firewall, did Network Address Translation, and even ended up setting up my own OpenMOSIX cluster using 10 i486 machines that I bought for a hundred dollars total.

Those were good times. I still have a lot of fun these days programming and researching, but I don’t think anything will ever beat those first magical moments when I was learning to write my own programs and use Linux.

I also learned another important fact. Without the help of J.R. Wessels, from helping me write my first C++ program to recompiling my first kernel, I would have never been where I am today. His unrelenting kindness and friendliness was the difference between me learning more than I probably ever would have. I try to return the same favor to other people just starting with programming and Linux whenever I can, and I encourage everyone else here to do the same thing. Being there and helping people out along the way for their first steps can really make a huge impact later on.

With that said I thought I would share a few pictures from my earlier days. The rest can be found here. Congratulations to all my friends graduating this year and those others who will be graduating in a few years. Just remember all the kind people that helped you along the way, and try to keep the spirit alive.