Beer, brewing, cluetrain, homebrewing, responsiveness

BeerTools Pro Comments

Leave a comment

Currently entering a recipe in BeerTools Pro. A few quick comments. Overall, I do like the program but it’s not revolutionary. I have a lot of ideas about a complete brewing database program, including brewclub and brewshop features. I wish I could code in PHP/MySQL just so I could implement some of these ideas.

So, BTP.

What’s neat:

  • Responsive staff (even on a Sunday!)
  • Ease of entering ingredients
    • Searching for ingredients
    • Add multiple times
  • All ingredients view
  • Templates
  • Download from BeerTools.com

What I had to learn to do (or could be made clearer in the UI):

  • Back-tab to select next ingredient in recipe’s list
  • Grams before quantity (to prevent conversion)
  • Distinguishing between database ingredients and current ones (price, vitals)

What’s not so neat (bug or bug-like non-feature):

  • Doesn’t automatically add .btp to template filename (so file isn’t recognized as template)
  • Direct heat adds volume
  • Can’t export to common formats
  • No stage for grains (mash or infusion)
  • Recipe ingredients aren’t added to database directly
  • Style listed by BJCP numbers, field can’t be searched

What could be neat:

  • Duplicating ingredients in database
  • Search all ingredients
  • Add ingredient on double-click
  • Grains and adjuncts together
  • Multiple additions same grain (adjust proportion)
  • Add schedule steps visually
  • Mash volume in schedule graph
  • Style templates
  • Date field (calendar)
  • Multiple dates (recipe formulation, brewing, tasting, etc.)
  • Download data for new ingredients

The last few items are somewhat connected to what I have in mind for the ideal brewing application. What I envision is really more than recipe formulation. It includes references between batches, tasting comments, lots of observations, blogging features, beer-related social networking, etc.

I really should blog about my “vision” but that will have to wait for another day.

Education, Learning, Teaching

Free, Open, Online: Rethinking Learning Materials Online (Files)

6 Comments

ZohoShow – FOF-ppt by enkerli

Free, Open, Online: Rethinking Learning Materials Online (PDF)

[slideshare id=49573&doc=free-open-flexible-rethinking-learning-materials-online-10255&w=425]

Free, Open, Online: Rethinking Learning Materials Online (PPT)


Free, Open, Flexible: Rethinking Learning Materials Online (MP3)
Free, Open, Flexible: Rethinking Learning Materials Online (podcast)
FOF Discussion (MP3)
FOF Discussion (podcast)

Francophones, Montreal

Traducteurs francophones recherchés

Leave a comment

Puisque les traducteurs parlent d’échanger des contrats, voici une firme qui contacte des traducteurs montréalais, à la recherche de pigistes francophones: Professional Translating Services, Inc. Aucune idée des conditions ou même du sérieux de l’entreprise. Un message à leur sujet a été envoyé sur une liste de diffusion pour les spécialistes du langage à Concordia.

Uncategorized

Suivez mon regard

Leave a comment

Pour ceux qui veulent voir les pages Web que je visite, le meilleur plan c’est de suivre mes flux sur Spurl.net, disponibles en formats RSS et en Atom. Spurl est loin d’être parfait comme système mais c’est une façon de combiner «signet social» et archivage de pages Web. C’est aussi la version paresseuse du nanobloguage à la Twitter et Jaiku. Ces temps-ci, je spurle pas mal tout ce que je trouve le moindrement intéressant, comme pages Web. Je blogue certaines de ces pages, mais je me sens pas trop obligé de faire un billet pour chaque nouvelle qui attire mon attention.

Espérons que je vais pouvoir intégrer mes habitudes de spurlage avec la prochaine version de Flock.

Envoyé à l’aide de Qumana

Digital Life, social bookmarking, tagging, Twitter, workflow

TIU: Spurl

6 Comments

Tools I Use: Spurl.net 1.0 – Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Been using Spurl for a while now. Far from perfect but very useful. To me, it brings together the functionalities of Del.icio.us (and other “social bookmarking” services) with those of the Scrapbook Firefox extension. Like Delicious, it allows you to tag and share bookmarks. Like Scrapbook, it keeps a copy of the bookmarked page.

At this point, I got the habit of spurling just anything that I find interesting on the Web. In some cases, I also blog on the bookmarked item. But I don’t necessarily feel a need to put everything in my “to-blog” list. I don’t even tag my bookmarks.

The upshot of my spurling habits is that anyone who wants to know what I’m reading on the Web can just look at my Spurl RSS feed (or Atom feed). In this case, Spurl serves one of the purposes people are using Twitter and other nanoblogging tools for. Yeah, I know it’s not the same thing at all. But, to me, spurling is the lazyperson’s version of nanoblogging.

Now, once the Flock browser does “spell as you type” and Spurl does del.icio.us syncs, I could just use keystrokes to spurl pages I visit.

Hey! Who do you call “lazy?”

Africa, creativity, globalisation, innovation

Acknowledging Africa's Innovative Spirit

Leave a comment

Good news! (Though a bit late. Got the link through a thoughtful pitch by a Radio Open Source commentator.)

Next month’s TEDGlobal conference will be in Tanzania!

TED | TED Conferences | TEDGlobal 2007 | Program

Not only do I really enjoy the TED Conference presentations (available as podcasts and streamed videos) but I think the organisers grok something important about the world in which we live. TED Conferences actually go much beyond the fields of “Technology, Entertainment, and Design” that gave them their name.

Of course, TED still follows a U.S.-centric model, inspired by commercial neo-liberalism and innovation with direct practical results. But as these things go, TED participants are “thinking outside the box” more actively than many of their colleagues.

Beer, brewing, podcasts, science, sophistication

Beer and Science

2 Comments

The weekly SciAm Podcast Science Talk had an interview with UCDavis beer science professor Charles Bamforth. The interview was mostly concerned with Bamforth’s 2003 book on beer and science. Many of the things discussed on the program are common knowledge for most beer geeks but it’s still fun to have science media cover some part of the beer world.

As explained in this interview, beer is a much more complex beverage than wine. In North America, many people seem to associate wine with sophistication and beer with college drinking. The interview does fairly little to debunk these associations but does give some idea of how interesting beer can be from a scientific perspective.

Québec

Diversité culturelle et création média

3 Comments

Reçu par courriel, l’annonce d’un concours de Radio-Canada International appelé Métissé serré. Les principaux thèmes sont des personnages intéressants provenant de «communautés culturelles» ou des histoires liées à l’immigration.

Bien content que RCI puisse s’intéresser à ces questions.

Pour participer, il faut soumettre une capsule audio ou un court métrage de trois à huit minutes avant le 30 juin 2007 (le 29 juin à 23h59). Les participants doivent avoir entre 18 et 35 ans en date du concours. Le règlement est assez clair, y compris les questions de propriété intellectuelle.

pedagogy, trends

Jongler avec des idées

4 Comments

Coudonc, c’est-tu juste moi ou bedon la mode est au jonglage, ces temps-ci?

Non seulement je vois de plus en plus de monde enseigner ou apprendre à jongler et, comme je l’ai blogué l’autre jour, un prof utilise le jonglage pour aider à des jeunes à apprendre, mais il y a des journalistes qui commencent à s’intéresser au phénomène:

The State | 05/05/2007 | How good jugglers become better students

Ça doit être une mode. Le hula-hoop de l’année?

academic publishing, Anthropology, Concordia, Concordia University, open access, Sociology

Concordia Repository

4 Comments

In the Concordia Journal, an enthusiastic write-up about Harnad’s recent talk on Open Access self-archiving.

Increasing the impact of the academy

William Curran, head of Concordia’s Library, said in an email that “the whole philosophy and pedagogical role of the library ‘business’ is to provide access, i.e., open access to the compendium of the world’s knowledge.” He anticipates that Concordia will have an institutional repository within the year for, at minimum, completed theses and research papers, “which represent the intellectual output of the university.”

As Harnad himself noted in an email, this write-up doesn’t mention that he was invited by our department (Sociology and Anthropology) nor does it describe the mixed reception to several of Harnad’s points. It does, however, address the fact that some academics are wary of Open Access, often because they associate it with potential revenue loss for journal publishers.

My own take is that Open Access is not only a necessity but mostly a step in the overall process of reevaluating academic publishing.

A bilingual blog on disparate subjects. / Un blogue disparate bilingue.