A few weeks ago I went to Copenhagen. Even though I’m not a beer fan I like visiting breweries and learning about their story. Usually they have contributed to the history of the region.
I liked the Carlsberg museum more than the Guinness one, even though I enjoyed both. The Guinness brewery is more modern… and they have a nice bar with a nice view where everyone can enjoy their free Guinness.
Something that I didn’t expect got my attention in the Carlsberg museum. A patent related topic. I haven’t found much information on the Internet… but a copy-paste from http://www.carlsberggroup.com/Company/heritage/Pages/OldCarlsbergvsNewCarlsberg.aspx:
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[only] a few types of yeast (the pure yeast) are suitable for brewing, and he developed a technique to separate the pure yeast from the wild yeast cells. The problem had been solved, and the new Carlsberg yeast – Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis – was applied in the brewing process.
The propagating method revolutionised the brewing industry. Rather than to patent the process, Carlsberg published it with a detailed explanation so that anyone could build propagation equipment and use the method. Samples of the yeast – Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis – were sent to breweries around the world by request and young brewers came to Carlsberg to learn the skills.
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In the museum it says that about 90% of Lagers contain Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis.
So, Carlsberg shared the knowledge… it’s a bit like free software, open data… 🙂
Time to get more social. No, not jumping to Facebook. Or to Twitter. But I’ve been moving some code from my “private”, or a at least, not very public, Git repositories (http://git.pinux.info/) to my Github account (https://github.com/cpina?tab=repositories).
I’ve been using github as a collaborator for some projects and I thought that was time to move some other code.
I plan to add more things soon and to improve some of the things there (specially to make it more github friendly with the README.md and other Github conventions).
During the last year I’ve appreciated it when projects have been in Github. It makes it easier to collaborate or use them. I like an uncentralized Internet (I would not like absolutely everyone using GMail, or absolute everyone buying only from Amazon). But I think that it’s worth using Github (and one could easily setup that git to push to other servers as well).
I’m always a bit shy showing some code. Some code that I’ve pushed there is not “production ready” but just a quick way to do something. On the other hand, sometimes I’ve found that some “quick and dirty code” has been valuable for me.
We usually say “Good morning”, “good night”, “Happy New Year!”, or “have a nice weekend!”. We say this to wish a nice morning, night, year or weekend.
But I think that we are missing some other important time units: weeks and months.
I advocate that we should also say “good week” (on Mondays) and “good month!” (beginning of the month).
Why weeks and months, which ones plays an important role in our lifes, are not wished to be good? Just another language mystery.
On the last couple of entries I wrote about waiters. I remembered about something that I sometimes think… why some word is that word?
Why a “waiter” is called a waiter? My guess is that because they wait. They wait that someone orders something, they wait for the kitchen to finish something, etc.
And a “patient“? Well, to me it seems that it comes from patience. Because the patients needs patience to recover. Usually, as a patient, you find yourself waiting (waiting for the doctor’s visit, the result…).
Continue reading Waiter? To wait. Patient: to patience
I usually go everywhere with my backpack. Mainly everyday, since 2006, with the same backpack (a Targus one. Last year it got broken -my bad- and I bought the same model).
When, for some reason, I don’t carry the backpack, I always miss something that I have there (the bottle of water, USB Stick, a cereal bar, etc.).
Continue reading May I have your bag?
Some weeks ago I went to a French grill nice restaurant. Nice as good food, service, etc. In the City of London. It was a cold Sunday, 1pm, so the restaurant was empty. Later one it was quite full, and I guess that on the working days is completely full (lunch meetings and so on).
Well, we were nicely sitting and we ordered. Of course, the waiters helped us with the wine selection and so on. They were very attentive, smiley waiters.
Continue reading Is everything ok? (Restaurant)
One year ago I changed the server where Pintant is hosted. Previously it was hosted in a domestic ADSL server, now it’s in a Gandi VPS server.
The server handles Pintant, some other Webs for my family, email, etc. Nothing very exciting and the email bit is the important one.
Before it was in the domestic ADSL because a proper server (in a datacenter), 10 years ago, was very expensive. Nowadays, and thanks to new technologies like Xen and more powerful and cheaper hardware, it’s possible to find quite cheap servers.
Also electricity price is increasing. And years ago the only way to share big files between computers in the office was to have a server. Now there are network hard disks which can do it easily.
Continue reading Gandi VPS: good experience!
In Catalan we call “centpeus” (100 feet) to that animal that has many legs (similar to a caterpillar). On the Wikipedia I can see that it’s also called “one hundred legs” (not feet).
I like how it sounds in French: “mille-pattes” (pronunced as /milpat/). Means 1000 legs (hey, more than in Spanish or Catalan).
But in Turkish it’s called 80 legs. And in Greek… 40 legs! Even less than in Catalan (and much less than in French, 1000 legs!)
Different languages, different legs. Maybe I should plot a world map with the different legs per language.
In Catalonia we have one saying “eat stalk raisin” (“menja cues de pansa”). We say it when someone forgets something.
I know that in Alicante zone they say “tienes que comer más pescado” (“you must eat more fish”). And in Morocco they say “eat more liver” (see the Morocco entry, Mustapha is who said so).
I’m quite sure that the liver or fish sayings may have some scientific explanation. Not sure about the “stalk raisin”. I like to know what different countries say about the same topic. I should search for some other ones!
When I was younger (or… just young 🙂 ) I used to play with hardware. I liked to get old broken computers, fix them, improve them, upgrade them…
After a while I stopped liking hardware (and I prefer software, programming, etc.). My reasons are:
Continue reading I don’t like hardware
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