April 2012
43 posts
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Are They The Same?
Suppose we have three roasts of a given coffee. Here are some graphs to look at. In each of these the darker blue line is bean temperature and the cyan line is air temperature.
Are these the same? Let’s take just the bean temperatures from these three batches and put them on the same graph.
Now those look really different from each other, but what we’re really interested in...
“Erroneous installation can cause damage to people, animals and things”
– Rancilio XCelsius system manual
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Coffee Education
So I was taking a look at the requirements for the roasters guild certification and what I already have that works toward that. This is one of those things where nobody in my company cares if I have this and nobody that I do consulting for has asked about this, but I’m likely to get it by accident. There are two published certification levels. First:
GE151 Basic Green Coffee Grading (done)
...
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Thermal expansion in coffee AND steel?
I’ve run into a similar problem in the past. Replaced both drum bearings at the same time and the drum shifted forward without my notice. No problems for over a week but then if I brought the temperature of the roaster up too quickly I started hearing metal on metal friction sounds. It would go away if I backed off on the gas, but 24 minutes is too long for one batch of coffee to stay in the...
General Update
I’m about to leave for the airport to go to Portland for the SCAA conference. I’ll be helping out with two of the classes there (RP120 Profile Roasting Practices and the Saturday RP112 Intro to Roasting Concepts class). I have my instructor pin packed and ready to go and I’m really looking forward to getting out there. I’ll be in Portland for several days so I should be...
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Qt, C++11, and CWEB
A common feature of text editors intended for people who write software is syntax coloring. The text editor will have some basic understanding of the different parts of a programming language so keywords might have one color, strings might have another color, numeric values might be a third color, and so on. The idea is that you can look at a piece of code and see what you’re working with....
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So This Happened
Other: Urgent! Need definitions to send these people ASAP.
Me: Okay, these are off the cuff, feel free to refine. (brief definitions with [possibly nested] parenthetical elaborations)
Other: Thanks, we'll also use those in a standards document we're working on.
>: >
So if you're reading reading about coffee roasting and see a distinction made between a line tangent to a point on a curve and a secant line, that's probably my fault (I don't think I've ever seen the term secant line used in technical writing about coffee but roasters calculate the slope of them all the time). Sorry.
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Roaster Vent Installation Illustrated
Some of you might remember a while back when I got a new coffee roaster. As I mentioned earlier, it’s taken entirely too long to find a company willing to take the vent installation job. The pipe needed isn’t something that it makes sense to keep in stock so they’d need to, you know, order the pipe. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that, but then, I don’t...
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Ubiquitous Navigation →
Looking at the stated capabilities of the chip, I can think of all sorts of things for which this would be useful. A shame the use case presented in the article summary is something that I can’t imagine anybody carrying the thing would want.
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Maintenance Task Logging in Typica
Filed under new feature development for Typica 2.0.
Today I was looking over the documentation for the database that Typica uses (which claims to have been generated on 7 November, 2009) because I remember designing the schema with maintenance task logging and scheduling in mind. I was able to find the table that I had initially intended to use for that purpose, but having a bit more experience...
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Thread Closed
Closing the Disqus thread on this article on connecting to a PostgreSQL database from an Android app. Tired of getting questions from people who can’t read, are too lazy to Google, or otherwise have failed to make a basic effort to understand the code before asking for help. If this negatively affects you, please consider getting out of programming and into something that you’re...
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Typica and Qt 5
So the Qt 5 alpha release came out today and I’ve been looking over the documentation for that with an eye toward seeing how my code might be affected by the change from Qt 4.8 to 5.0. Typica, in particular, since it uses so much of Qt can be tricky to move from one version to another. So far it looks like there isn’t much that would need to be changed. The framework is being split...
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“After 40 Terabytes, your fingers start to hurt.”
– David Miller
