Monthly Archives: October 2005

D.A.D. concert

Posted by on October 30, 2005 No comments
D.A.D.

Yesterday, one of the biggest danish rockbands D.A.D. played in town and I promised to lend a hand. As usual, D.A.D. put up a great show and I had about the best view one can get for the first half of the concert, just behind the scene, halfway up the rows of seats. I thought I’d only have to do the simple task of guarding a fire exit and make sure noone gets in or out, unless in case of fire of course, and keep an eye out for “real” trouble so I could call security or medics over the radio, I was in for a surprise. Of course, all volunteers on evening duty lend a hand with breaking down the podium. Anyway, after the concert was over just after midnight, there were only a mere 4 hours left of carrying lights, instruments, loudspeakers, etc. in the waiting trucks and breaking down the stage and whatever else needed to be done. On rare occasions you have to love changing from summer- to wintertime. At least I got one hour more sleep.

New ports committer: Aaron Dalton

Posted by on October 20, 2005 No comments

Something strange happened today. Only one new committer was proposed yesterday and not the usual two at a time as the last times. Anton Berezin (tobez) is going to mentor Aaron Dalton, who has done a tremendous job on our many perl ports and has now received his usual punishment. Please give him a warm welcome.

Murphy and disks Murhpy and disks – part 2

Posted by on October 13, 2005 No comments

Yesterday, I started syncing the data beastie lost in its disk crash of last weekend. I have synced most of the data and just after I started a final full update, another disk died. Sigh. I’ll try to replace that disk in the morning and let’s hope for the best.

Unplanned service window

Posted by on October 13, 2005 No comments

It must be one of those weeks where every piece of hardware that can fail, will fail. While beastie is still synching its data after the last breakdown, my main server, koala, suddenly disappeared. I was already fearing that it had burned down yet another CPU fan, which would just be typical few days before leaving on holiday, but it turned out our electrician was working in the same rack as koala and had by accident pushed to the power cord which fell out.
On the bright side, I have just bought some extra RAM for koala and was planning on installing it after I returned from holiday, but now koala was down anyway it seemed like a good time to do it now. So far it looks like koala is very pleased with its extra RAM. And it all ends well in the end.

Murphy and disks

Posted by on October 12, 2005 No comments

It must be release time again and Murphy is shakes his ugly head. This weekend, beastie (running the danish half of ftp.freebsd.org) lost a disk. This shouldn’t be a problem in itself, and the hotspare disk took over, so about a day after all was well again. Yesterday, I changed the disk and marked the new disk as the new hotspare. So far so good.

Just after I left the office, beastie rebooted spontaneously. Now the new hotspare disk suddenly turned up as a separate disk and the RAID set was recognized under a new device name and thus could not be found at it’s original location and the boot bailed out. And now Murphy really does his trick. After rectifying this in the RAID BIOS so the new hotspare really was a hotspare and not a disk, beastie booted and all seemed well…until…the RAID set had lost its disklabel and filesystem. Now there’s not much else to do then sync 0.5Tb data.

50. Simonds Bitter

Posted by on October 9, 2005 No comments

5kg Muntons Maris Otter
1kg Amber malt(*)

Mash for 60 min @ 68°C

100g Fuggles 4.8% for 60 min.
25g East Kent Goldings 5.7% for 60 min.
20g East Kent Goldings dry hop

Fermentation:
WYeast 1768 English Special Bitter
23L
13.9 brix (1.056)
9.9 briex (1.022 measured)
53 IBU
Bottled: 30/10

*): 1kg of Weyermann pale malt on a plate about 1cm thick and put it in the oven with the fan on, to dry out the malt a bit quicker. I kept it at 110°C for 20 minutes and another 45 min. at 150°C

Malt roasting

Posted by on October 8, 2005 No comments

Today is the day to try something new. The only amber malt I have, is from the maltsters at Fawcett, which has a really strong taste. A recipy I found in “Old English Beers and How To Brew Them” uses 17% amber malt and 83% pale malt. The amber malt from Fawcett in that quantity is just going to block out any other taste, so I want to use something else. The same book has some guidelines on how to roast your own malt, so I gave it a spin. I put 1kg of Weyermann pale malt on a plate about 1cm thick and put it in the oven with the fan on, to dry out the malt a bit quicker. I kept it at 110°C for 20 minutes and another 45 min. at 150°C. See the difference. I should do this some more, if not only for the wonderfull smell that spreads thought the house

I’m also going to rack the pale ale I brewed last week. As I have about 6g of Amarillo hops left, I’m going to rack it into two containers and add the hops to one of them and see how much difference a bit of dry hopping with Amarillo will have on the final beer.

New port maintainance tools

Posted by on October 6, 2005 No comments

While the tree is in a slush for the 6.0 release, people start doing some spring cleaning. fenner got the portsurvey back up and worked out some of it’s bugs.
Together with linimon, he did a cleaning of bsd.sites.mk.
edwin created a version checker so maintainers have a simple webpage where their ports, that have a never version available, are listed.

Great tools for maintains to keep their ports up-to-date, so let’s all start using them!

49. Dogme #4

Posted by on October 3, 2005 No comments

5kg Fawcett Maris Otter
500g Fawcett crystal (130 EBC)

Mashfor 60 min @ 68°C and 10 min. @ 75°C

Amarillo 9% 34g for 60 min.
Amarillo 9% 30g for 15 min.
Amarillo 9% 30g for 5 min.

Fermentation:
S-04
OG: 12.8 brix (1.052)
FG: 1.012

Racked October 9th and split into to 10L batches, one with 6g Amarillo dry hopped and one without
Bottled: 15/10

Dogme 4: hops

Posted by on October 2, 2005 No comments

Homebrewers remember, this week is the week where the 4th dogme brew has to get brewed. The concept of the dogme brewing (danish) is that many people brew the same beer which only differs in one ingredient between brewers. Then by tasting eachothers beers, one can get a better idea of the different of ingredients when only one variable changes. The last 3 brews different yeasts were used, this time it’s the hops that gets changed in an English Pale Ale styled beer (danish). I’m going to use an american hop (so it’s not really an “english” pale ale) called Amarillo, and probably brew tomorrow.