Mark Staples

Yesterday I bottled my Chilli and Lime Lager. Bottling is always a laborious and lengthy process of washing, sterilizing, filling, capping, and then cleaning up. But there’s a feeling of satisfaction when it’s over and you’ve created a few cases of beer. In a few months they might be drinkable.

I tasted the brew before bottling it, and I think it’ll be fairly different to my earlier Chilli Draft. Firstly it’s a lot less hot. This time I used mild chillis, but even though I used a dozen they didn’t stack up to the heat of the one hot chilli I used last time. Secondly there’s the Kaffir lime taste, which seems to have made the beer somewhat sour. You might expect sourness in a Porter, but it’s a bit of a surprise in a Lager. Well, only time will tell how these and other characteristics develop in the bottle.

I remember talking with Michael last year about how I thought reversible XSLT was an important but unsolved problem. I was particularly interested in the scenario where you have a complex XML document, you transform it to a simpler or more readable form (XML, HTML, CSV, or whatever), edit it, and then you want to have it automatically transformed back to update the original XML document in a “similar” way.

Given my interest in configuration management, I had thought of attacking the problem from the perspective of “merging” the changes back to the source document. (I should at this point mention a great summary article about software merging by Tom Mens.) I doodled around a bit, but never really got my teeth into the problem.

Anyway, today I searched again, and found two great related projects, neither of which I’d found in my earlier searches.

The first project is XSugar. You define grammars in parallel for both the source and target forms, and xsugar unifies these to give you bi-directional parsing and pretty-printing (and also throws in static XML validity checks for free too!). Neat - and it definitely covers “reversible XSLT”. But it doesn’t cover the scenario I was thinking about, because the source and target sentences need to contain the same information. I wanted to be able to throw stuff away in the initial transformation and have it automagically recovered on the way back.

The second project seems to pretty much solve my original scenario, which is apaprently called the “View Update Problem”. (Now I know that name I’m sure I could find a whole world of relevant literature.) It’s the Harmony Project (not this Harmony Project!). I’ve only just started reading the details, and I’ll have to follow it up more later on, When I Have Time.

I’ve finally collected enough empty bottles to let me do a batch of homebrew. So last weekend I put one on - my first since I moved to Sydney. It’s a Cascade Lager kit, with a Coopers Brew Enhancer Type 2 instead of my usual cane sugar.

I’m aiming to repeat an earlier successful brew (Chilli Draft - ho ho), except that instead of just adding chillis, I’m also adding some Kaffir lime leaves. So with any luck I’ll end up with a drinkable chilli and lime lager. My earlier chilli beer had a vaguely Mexican inspiration, but that’s now been twised by a strange mix of two other ideas: classic Thai tastes and classic English Lager and Lime.