I’m very excited to announce that there’s now a native iOS app for Piranhas and it’s available on the App Store for free! It has all the features of the web version plus barcode scanning.

Features:

• Scan ISBN barcodes from books
• Supports Split View and Slide Over on iOS 9 iPads
• Supports iOS 9’s new in-app browser
• Shipping charge estimates
• Automatic currency conversions

Supported stores:

• Amazon.com (United States)
• Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom)
• Amazon.ca (Canada)
• Amazon.de (Germany)
• Amazon.es (Spain)
• Amazon.fr (France)
• Book Depository
• Wordery

Version 1.1.0 of Beer Styles just hit the iOS App Store. The biggest new feature is that the BJCP 2015 Style Guidelines are now included!

The 2015 and 2008 beer, cider, and mead style guidelines from the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP).

The style guidelines describe what each style of beer, cider, and mead should taste, look, and smell like.

The guidelines include vital stats such as OG (original gravity), FG (final gravity), IBU (bitterness), SRM (colour), and ABV readings as well as descriptions for aroma, appearance, flavour, and mouth feel.

In Beer Styles all the vital stats have been given a visual representation to make it easier to fathom how differences in styles.

Bad Tidings is a beer made from a bunch of leftover malts I had accumulated. I decided to try for a Belgian style beer largely because the Belgians seem to have a pretty relaxed attitude about what adjuncts they use, plus it gave me a chance to try out the Fermentis T-58 yeast.

I chose the name Bad Tidings because I wanted to invoke a certain sense of dread or foreboding with the name (as it was unsure whether the beer would turn out to be any good at all).

For this label I went with a bit of a literary theme because Bad Tidings sounds like the title of an 18^th or 19^th century novel in my head. The sole typeface is Adobe Caslon Pro, chosen mostly of how it looks but also because Caslon seemed to be historically accurate for the 18^th century.

“Practically all American and English printing from 1735 to 1800 was done using the Caslon font.” (source)

As for the beer itself, the small sample I tasted while bottling seemed pretty good but I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for it to bottle condition before rendering a final verdict.

The Summoning Dark is my first Black IPA, it’s named after a character in Thud!, a book by Terry Pratchett (if you can call a pan-dimensional creature and spirit of vengeance a character).

For the main graphic of the label I used the mine sign rune for the Summoning Dark (described in the book as “a floating eyeball with a curly tail”). The beer name itself is in a rune-like typeface. The labels are stamped with my brewery stamp.

The beer itself came out quite well, though on the brew day I worried about the colour coming out too light, but that turned out to be a false alarm in the end.

As an attempt to minimise the “roasty” flavours from the Carafa Special II, instead of mashing it with the rest of the grains, I cold steeped it overnight in about two litres of water. I filtered out the malt from the water and added it to the wort before beginning my boil.

In the end I think the beer got approximately the right about of the roasted flavours, but I it could have been more heavily hopped (especially in terms of aroma).

For the last couple of years we’ve mostly used Devise’s extremely simple email address regex to validate email addresses. After all, the real proof of whether an address is correct is if the confirmation email gets through to the end user…

# Email regex used to validate email formats. It simply asserts that
# one (and only one) @ exists in the given string. This is mainly
# to give user feedback and not to assert the e-mail validity.
config.email_regexp = /\A[^@]+@[^@]+\z/

If you haven’t read it already, you should read David Celis’s Stop Validating Email Addresses With Regex blog post for a more detailed explanation of why you shouldn’t validate email addresses with regexes.

The downside of this regex is that it can and will let through email addresses that raise Mail::Field::ParseError exceptions once Mail actually tries to parse them.

→ Read more…

My latest beer making toy was delivered today: a Milwaukee MA871 digital refractometer.

I briefly tested it on a couple of samples of water and sugar water and the experience was definitely nicer than trying to peer at the scale through my (admitedly cheap) optical refractometer.

While perhaps not exactly a necessity over hydrometers or optical refractometers, I’m still really excited to get to use this in anger.

At Kisko some of our projects have production environments with IP restrictions, meaning that we can access the servers from our office but not from any random IP address.

Despite this, it is handy and perhaps even necessary that we can deploy and access the servers when working remotely or if an emergency crops up when we’re away from the office. Using a VPN or SOCKS proxy is one option, but luckily it is also pretty easy to configure Capistrano 3 to deploy via a bastion or gateway host.

Set-up Capistrano as your normally would, then add this to your deploy.rb:

if ENV['VIA_BASTION']
  require 'net/ssh/proxy/command'

  # Use a default host for the bastion, but allow it to be overridden
  bastion_host = ENV['BASTION_HOST'] || 'bastion.example.com'

  # Use the local username by default
  bastion_user = ENV['BASTION_USER'] || ENV['USER']

  # Configure Capistrano to use the bastion host as a proxy
  ssh_command = "ssh #{bastion_user}@#{bastion_host} -W %h:%p"
  set :ssh_options, proxy: Net::SSH::Proxy::Command.new(ssh_command)
end

Note: Remember to replace the bastion hostname with your own…

Now when your not deploying from your regular IP address, you can simply set the VIA_BASTION environment variable to deploy via the bastion host. For example:

VIA_BASTION=1 cap production deploy

And that’s it!

I designed and bought a stamp for my home “brewery” (known as Baltic Sea Brewing).

Why? Mostly because I could and wanted to…

It’s been a bit over a year since I started brewing beer and Ilves IPA was the very first beer I ever brewed (brewed on December 14th 2013, bottled January 4th 2014).

I’m afraid time has not been kind to this beer, possibly at least due to my suboptimal storage conditions (I don’t have a cool place to store beer for long periods).

The beer has ended up a bit overcarbed and the flavour profile frankly isn’t great. Luckily this was the last bottle of this gyle of Ilves IPA, so no one will have to have another glass of it ever again.

If you like brewing, you should check out Beer Styles, a free iPhone and iPad app I built for browsing the 2008 BJCP style guidelines.

Since I did this sort of thing last year, I figured I might as well make this a tradition of sorts.

Favourites of the year

Picking out favourites turned out to be a bit difficult this year (it seems that I read a bunch of good books in 2014), but here’s a few that stuck out.

Going Clear

I haven’t quite finished this book yet but having read a bit more than half of it I can already tell that this is going to be one of my favourites for the year.

Written by Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the book details the history of the Scientology movement and the life of it’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

HBO is currently adapting the book into a documentary (slated to air in 2015).

What If?

As a long time time fan of xkcd and occasional reader of [What If?] (the online version), this book was most welcome…

The book is both hilarious and informative. I’m pertty sure there wasn’t a single chapter where I didn’t giggle at least a little bit…

Command and Control

Warning: this book is extremely scary and will make you wonder who we (we being humanity) have managed to avoid accidentally blowing ourselves up with nukes.

Surface Detail

Since all my other picks where non-fiction, I thought I should include at least one book that isn’t depressing and based on true facts…

Surface Details turned out to be one of my favourite books from the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. In fact, I ended up reading it twice.

The full(ish) list

The (almost) full list of books I read this year. Some books that I had previously read don’t show up on my Goodreads list. Plus there might be a few others missing because of my sloppy Goodreads habits…

• Going Clear by Lawrence Wright
• Flat Earth News by Nick Davies
• The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
• A Wild Life: Adventures of an Accidental Conservationist in Africa by Dick Pitman
• The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
• The Little World of Liz Climo by Liz Climo
• But He Was Good to His Mother by Robert A. Rockaway
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats. by Jim Benton
• One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
• The Long Mars by Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett
• Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
• The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
• The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
• The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ronald Pattinson
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
• Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
• Going Solo by Roald Dahl
• Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl
• Matter by Iain M. Banks
• Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
• America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t by Stephen Colbert
• Unnatural Creatures by Neil Gaiman
• Inversions by Iain M. Banks
• Will We Ever Speak Dolphin? by New Scientist
• American Sour Beer by Michael Tonsmeire
• iWoz by Steve Wozniak
• Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Full disclosure: All book links in this article lead to Piranhas, my book price comparison service.