Erlang2Facebook Updates
Leave a CommentI’ve just committed a couple of minor updates to the erlang2facebook library that I’m sure some of you are interested in.
The first (SVN revisions 7 & 9) is an API update to follow the Facebook team’s changes to profile_setFBML. Now, instead of just passing a single chunk of FBML, containing markup for the profile box, profile actions, and mobile profile, there are three distinct fields to shove those chunks in. Sorry about the non-consecutive SVN commits. 
The second update (SVN revision 8 ) is intended to show how to use ErlTL better (thanks for the tips, Yariv!). I’ve created render.et, and moved all of the render_* functions from canvas_controller into it. This allows me to use the more HTML-like syntax (code efficiency), while also taking advantage of ErlTL’s automatic use of Erlang’s binaries (runtime efficiency).
Erlang2facebook has Users!
Fun news this morning. BeerRiot’s Facebook App is no long the only Facebook App based on Erlang! The word is that these four are also using the erlang2facebook library:
Awesome! Care to step up and take credit for your accomplishments, Mark?
Beer for Wine Lovers
As I sit here enjoying a home-brewed wine (!) that my parents made last fall (great, guys, by the way!), I’m reminded of a thought I had a few days ago, reinforced at yesterday’s NERAX North event. I was reading a piece in the New York Times about cask-conditioned ale, when I noticed that the piece was written by their wine reviewer.
As I was grumbling about a the Times sending their wine reviewer to do a beer review, it occured to me that the pairing was actually perfect: there is no beer that a wine-lover is more likely to enjoy than a properly-served cask-conditioned ale.
Think about it. What are the main differences between wine and your typical beer? Forget grapes vs. barley – those are inescapable. The three that come to my mind are: carbonation, serving temperature, and flavoring particles.
To start with, most wine is uncarbonated. Unless you’re specifically talking about champagne or sparkling wine, the assumption is that wine is still. Some people prefer their beverages this way. No sparkling on the tongue or in the nose, no unfortunate gaseous releases to deal with later.
What they don’t know is that most craft beer, especially true for cask-conditioned and “real ale”, has much less carbonation than macro-brewed beer. Artisanal brewers realize that large amounts of carbonation only hide the flavor of beer. The mild carbonation is intended only to keep the beer dancing on the tongue, and they stop before it goes all house-bouncing-rave style. Someone expecting a typical beer may even complain that what they got was flat. I think a wine-lover could truly appreciate the stillness and lack of distraction from the beer’s other flavors, though.
Most wine is also served only mildly chilled. Whites are often cool on the tongue, but reds are usually nearly room-temperature. Again, a certain amount of personal preference plays into the choice. Teeth are sensitive to temperature swings. There’s less pressure to finish a beverage before it gets warm, if it starts out at room temperature.
But, here again is a place where cask-conditioned ale stands apart. Casks live in, and are served from cellars. As such, the beer in them is served at “cellar temperature”, usually around 50ºF. At this temperature, the beer’s flavors are much more available to the tongue. Beers served colder, sometimes even “ice cold”, numb the tongue as they’re drunk. The tongue is so frigid, it can’t tell if it’s drinking beer or iced tea.
But what about the flavor? Even if you serve with less carbonation and a higher termperature to allow the tongue to taste more, what if you don’t like the taste of beer? Certainly, wine is made from grapes, and beer is made from barley, and they taste different. But, there is one flavor aspect that are extremely important to many wines: tannins.
Tannins come from woods, and that skins of fruit, leaves of plants, and hulls of grains (really just the “fruit” of grasses). Homebrewers are familiar with cautions not to heat grain too high lest they extract the tannins of the hulls. However, cask-beers do extract tannins from another source – the cask! Yes, the wood in the barrel, often the same wood used in wine barrels, contributes tannins to the beer contained within. Familiar flavors for the wine connoisseur, right there in cask-conditioned ale.
Wine, served still, at or just below room temperature, drawn from a wooden container. Beer, served only slightly sparkling, just below room temperature, drawn from a wooden container. Now you’re just down to grapes vs. barley and hops. I think there may be hope for converting the wine-lovers yet. 
(And if you really want to push the grapes vs. barley and hops argument, I’ll offer two for comparison: mead (honey wine) and Brackett ale (honey and malt). Where’s the difference now?)
RSS Feeds
In case you’re using this blog’s feed to get updates about new features on BeerRiot, here’s a notice that BeerRiot now has its own feeds.
I’m pretty green to the RSS scene, though, so if I’ve committed some terrible crime against RSS, please let me know, and I’ll get on fixing it. Or, if there’s just some way that I could improve the experience, which all of you RSS-fiends know about, those suggestions are most welcome.
BeerRiot Forums
Yes, the update I promised earlier in the week is now live. BeerRiot’s Forums are now open for discussion.
I know what some of you are thinking. “Forums?! Every site under the sun has forums. What did you waste weeks on forums for?” Clearly, if there was an ounce of sense in my head, I would have grabbed the nearest PhpBB implementation, tossed it up, and been done with it.
Well, I agree.
Except that I just couldn’t bear having such a disconnected, tacked on hunk of lameness. Even assuming that people wouldn’t mind the pain in the neck of having a second logon for a forum system, what I really wanted was a system that could really relate to the rest of the content on the site.
For example, I expect people to want to talk about a group (or several) of beers. Maybe someone will have a question about how two styles relate (porter and stout, hefeweizen and wheat, …), or they will have just returned from an event with an interesting selection. I think they should be able to easily set up a discussion about exactly the set of beers they want. So, since we were already doing this to some extent with tags, I have made it a key feature of discussion topics that they should be able to have tags associated with them.
I also expect people to want to get the word out about upcoming beer events. They’ll want to tell people where, and when, but then also discuss how it went afterward. So, in the events forum, all topics are allowed to have dates and locations associated with them.
As such, I went on my merry way developing. An opportunity to sling more Erlang code – how could I resist? 
As if that weren’t bad enough, there was the realization late in the project that the new forum system was so much better than the beer comment system that there was no way I could leave the elder in place. So, out came the old, and in went the new. And hey – I always wanted to let people comment directly on breweries, why not add that in too?
If you’ve been anywhere near the software industry (or, in fact, I suspect any industry), you recognize now the project spiral. “Just one more thing, then it will be ready.” That’s how it went for the first couple of weeks. Luckily I recognized the spiral at that point too, and cut off some of the broader plans to get this pushed out (don’t worry – they’re still on the agenda, just on a different deadline).
Believe it or not, I believe I was lucky enough to be able to pick joints at which to truncate plans, that after this big, bulky update I should be able to roll out some nice, smaller updates fairly quickly and smoothly. The next news item shouldn’t be three weeks away.
So that’s that. In case you’re wondering, no, I still don’t regret choosing Erlang/ErlyWeb for this project. I didn’t run up against anything in this development that this system was incapable of handling. As mentioned above, I likely would have been delving deep into the guts of any forum system I chose, so development time would have been just as long. Getting to do it in a language that doesn’t annoy me [yet] was a real treat.
Despite reports to the contrary…
…I’m still alive and plugging away at BeerRiot code. I thought you all might just like to hear that despite the fact that I haven’t made a post here in a while, or updated the news section on the site, development is far from dead. There are things in the works, and I hope they will be ready soon.
But, I’m running into the oldest code-project slow-down in the book.[1] New code is making me rethink old code. Especially since I was much more of an Erlang amateur at the start of this project, my old code often looks ugly now. So, since my new code is doing very similar things to some of the oldest code here, I’m reworking the old stuff – mainly to avoid duplication, of course, but also because I understand the domain better now.
Unfortunately for you, the user, I’m still having quite a fun time slinging Erlang around, so it’s hard for me to just say, “Enough – post it!” But, I think I’ve defined the final goals, and the web of changes is starting to contract. The updates should happen soon (probably within a week), and then there will be lots of new toys to play with.
[1] Okay, so actually, there are older slowdowns in the book, but I ran into them too (that is, real life has demanded extra attention recently). But I think there’s a lull in them for a while, so things should progess faster now.
Why YOU Should Drink Green
Wait! Before you skip this post thinking that I’m just another “tree hugger” ranting about saving the planet, I want to tell you that I’m going to divide this post into two parts. The first part will be reasons you should drink green that only affect your enjoyment of the beer. Only the second part will be about why drinking in this manner also saves the planet. I’ll let you know before the switch.
Okay, well let’s get on with it!
First of all, there are several things you should be doing to ensure that you’re drinking green. In no particular order, here are my top several:
- Drink from a glass.
- Drink local beer.
- Drink seasonal beer.
- Drink ales.
- Drink barley.
- Enjoy cellar temperature.
- Love yeast.
Some of those are going to need explaining. So, here are the reasons for each of them, in how they relate your your beer enjoyment.
Drink from a glass. If you’re drinking from a bottle, you’re severly limiting your ability to taste the beer. A large portion of a human’s taste sensation comes from smell. A glass allows your nose to get right down in the aroma.
Drink local beer. For all of its exploits, all around the world, beer is, at some level, a fragile, tempermental beverage. It needs to be stored in a dark place, at a proper temperature. Even then, it has a maximum shelf life of only a few months. Drinking locally means that you have the best chance of enjoying that beer before it has been subjected to terrible storage practices.
Drink seasonal beer. Same as above, beer has a maximal shelf life, and should be drunk as soon as it’s ready. Find out what’s in season and drink it in its prime.
Drink ales. The world of ales is vast. Pale, IPA, Brown, Strong, Stout, Porter, Wheat, Red – and that’s not even making a dent. If you’re looking for a particular flavor, there is an ale to match it.
Drink barley. If you’re a typical American, you get your daily fill of corn without even thinking about it. Demand that your beer supply you with something else. Barley has a complex flavor all its own, and nutrients to match. Seek the different roasts, and never be bored.
Enjoy cellar temperature. Ice-cold serving does one thing: numbs your taste buds. You’re drinking a fine beverage – why would you want to avoid its taste? Store and enjoy your beer at cellar temperature – you’ll find more flavor that way.
Love yeast. Yeast is a very simple organism that plays a very large role in beer’s flavor. Some beers (include real ale, unfiltered wheats, and bottle-fermented varieties) still have yeast (alive and/or dead) in the beer while you drink it. This adds yet another flavor for your tongue to ponder. Yeast is also a great source of vitamin B – so it’s good for more than just your tongue.
Alright, this is the point where I go all tree-hugger on you. Hopefully I’ve caught enough of your interest with the points above that you’d like to know why these things are important for more than just taste. If so, read on.
Drink from a glass. If you’re drinking from a glass, you most likely had your beer poured from a keg. That means no extra energy was wasted on making a bottle, cleaning a bottle, or transporting a bottle. Just make sure it’s a reusable glass.
Drink local beer. If your beer is made locally, much less energy has been used in getting it to you.
Drink seasonal beer. It takes extra energy to provide conditions in which to brew unseasonal beer out of season. Embrace the cycle.
Drink ales. Lagers must ferment (and be stored) at much lower temperatures than ales. If you know someone that still makes lagers by burying casks in caves, covering them with ice harvested from a lake in the winter, then good for you, and drink up. However, most lagers are brewed by refrigerating large warehouses, and delivered in refrigerated trucks.
Drink barley. Americans are practically made of corn. Barley is an excellent source of nutrition, and encouraging its growth means that our farms have other profitable crops to fall back on when weather ruins corn crops. It’s unhealthy for the planet to run farming monocultures.
Enjoy cellar temperature. Even if you’re not drinking a lager, if your ale is served ice-cold, it’s being refrigerated in a way that is completely unnecessary. Turn the thermostate up a few degrees, and save some watts.
Love yeast. Naturally-fermented beer requires no extra piping of CO2, no extra pump pressure to force beer through a filter, and no extra cooling. And, you get smaller bubbles (which make for thicker head) without bothering with a Guinness-style nitrogen “widget”.
So there you have it. Drinking green – good for both you and the Earth. If you’d like to read more about the benefits of drinking beer responsibly, I recommend Christopher Mark O’Brien’s Fermenting Revolution.
-Bryan
P.S. This post is part of Blog Action Day. Yes, I agree that actions speak louder than words, but I already act on the words I wrote above, so I figured adding the words couldn’t hurt.
P.P.S. I know it’s been a while since I posted here, and this post isn’t likely to be on the topic many of you were hoping. But, I assure you that there is BeerRiot development going on. I’ll be posting about it soon.
MySQL Death
Just a quick note this evening: BeerRiot was down from about 3:30am to 8am this morning. The MySQL server shut down. I restarted it as soon as I found it down.
Interesting: The MySQL server shut down, but the ErlyDB connection to it was still alive and waiting. As soon as the MySQL server came back up, ErlyDB automatically reconnected, and the site was live.
Sounds like as good of a reason as any to consider switching to Mnesia. I have to assume it’s easier to monitor that than to watch/restart MySQL.
Vimagi
If you hang around here for the tech instead of the beer, you may be interested to know that Yariv, the creator of ErlyWeb has released his own site, built with his creation.
It’s called Vimagi. It’s a way to share drawings with friends. You paint something, using his app, then show it off to people. They can watch a replay of your painting, comment, and rate your work.
Interesting to note that he’s also using some Flash and AJAX, proving ErlyWeb compatible with those technologies.
Check it out – you may even find my own [poor] artwork there, if you’re clever.
DevHouse Boston Wrapup
Just got back from DevHouse Boston. Thought I’d spill a few thoughts here for reference later.
The day was amazing. Where else would you expect to walk up to a random brick house in the middle of a city at 10 on a Sunday morning and expect to find ten 20-something guys hanging around discussing the finer points of locking in the Python VM? Yep, that’s the kind of day it was – lots of guys who are fairly knowledgable about a wide set of web tools, ready to sling some code at whatever comes their way.
I spent the day hacking with four other guys at an idea that started for me at a blog post I read last week, but mutated in many ways as the day progressed. The blog post I read lamented the lame way that RSS readers do nothing but provide a big list of links to follow (okay, maybe with a snipet or two, but still just a big list).
The idea that finally took us through the day was to use an external site’s popularity metrics (Digg for us, since that was easy), and layout news stories with summaries in a way reminiscent of newspapers. More popular stories got prime placement with larger headlines. Topics were grouped into distinct sections. We were only able to get to proof-of-concept stage, but everyone who saw the demo was interested in seeing it progress.
I’m not sure I’ll be the one doing the progressing, though. We did everything in Python/Django, and I’m just not sure I’m interested in delving deeper into it. Although, it would probably be a good springboard for doing so, since I already understand what the app is supposed to do. The code’s in a Google Project, but I’m going to make you search for it, because if you really want to try it out, the search is going to be the easiest thing you do. You think there’s time to write documentation at one of these things?!
Here’s a screen cap to prove I’m not making things up:
Anyway, as for the rest of the projects, visualization was a key theme. And, even more specific, simplification of visualization was big. A calendar that does nothing but let you write five lines of text on each day (no categorization, contacts, etc.). A wiki edits tracker that doesn’t bother with the specifics of edits, but only the fact that edits happened, and that they probably related to edits that happened on “nearby” pages. A way to just send REST requests and view their results, without having to get into lots of code. And that’s only covering half or less of the projects that presented – the rest were amazing too.
I have to say, the day made me miss college. There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you and a small group of people focus on some strange goal for a few intense hours. In the “real world”, I’ve tended to let “real world” things (like grocery shopping, car maintenance, a day job, etc.) get in the way of that. It’s good to get it back once in a while.
Anyway, a big thanks to Betahouse for the space, the sponsors for the food, and my team mates for keeping things going. I wish DevHouse Boston many more successful years.
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