Ingredients

• 4 cans of cider (Scrumpy recommended)
• Spices: 6 cloves, 3 star anise, ¼ nutmeg (finely grated), 1 cinnamon stick, 1 vanilla pod (halved, or ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract)
• Juices: 1 orange, 2 clementines, 1 pomegranate (with seeds)
• To taste: 4 or 5 tablespoons of caster sugar

Method

Add the cider to a large pan. Heat it on low heat for 3 minutes.

Add the spices and the juice of each fruit.

Then crank up the heat to boiling. Once boiling turn the heat down and simmer for 6 minutes.

Grab a spoon and take a taste of your wonderful concoction. It probably needs sugar. Add two tablespoons of sugar at a time until you get a good balance of sweet and spicy.

Once the sugar is mixed you can enjoy your creation immediately. Grab a ladle and put it into a mug or glass.

Result! Have a very merry Christmas!

This recipe is based on a Jamie Oliver recipe.

The event itself was exceptionally well run, timing was like clockwork and you didn’t see anyone running around trying to find the right video adapter for their laptop. It’s incredible that such a well run event can also be free. The only minor problem was the lack of air conditioning, which meant enduring a tropical climate for popular sessions.

Personally I haven’t had to code for .NET for anything serious since 2007, so I’m not overly keen on attending sessions on ASP.NET or about the latest library being reproduced for c# programmers. This has proved tricky at previous DDD conferences I’ve attended where you have no choice but to attend a .NET based session. Thankfully this conference proved to accommodate with sessions where the programming language wasn’t important.

I started the day off at an open discussion event hosted by Craig Nicol on “Professional Development”. There were only a few of us at the session but it was a wonderful way to wake up at 9am while discussing what we all considered traits of a professional developer. Craig guided the session by using a mind map already containing the BCS definition of professional development. Colouful anecdotes were retold by the session attendees and it was good to hear about the working environments of others.

Feeling inspired, I then headed along to Gary Short’s presentation on “Asymptotics and Algorithms”. Gary himself was part of an ongoing Twitter drive-by that ended up with a satirical twitter profile being created in his honour. Not that I want to feed inflated egos’ but this session was brilliantly done. Gary clearly knew his stuff and had that knack of taking something complicated and making it simple to understand.

After lunch I attend the BDD with F# session. I was under the impression that F# was similar to Clojure, but I couldn’t of been more wrong; there wasn’t a single piece of parenthesis in the entire talk!

The final session for me was Chris McDermott’s introduction to Kanban development. In the session Chris went over the important parts of Kanban and then discussed how he could have used the methodologies practices in his past. The idea of evolutionary change over time, rather than using a change everything approach is very compelling. I’ll keep this talk in mind next time I have to introduce an agile change in an organisation.

I met up with Chris, Rob Lally and a few others at Thai Lemon Grass for a post conference meal. The meal like the conference was excellent. I can’t thank the Scottish Developer community enough for making this day happen.

There’s 6 tracks on this year which were voted on in a free vote, and there’s still a strong .NET theme. Here’s the sessions I’m planning on attending.

09:30 – 10:30 :: Colin Gemmell
From .NET to Rails, A Developer’s Story

10:40 – 11:40 :: Gary Short
Asymptotics and Algorithms – What You’ve Forgotten Since University

12:00 – 13:00 :: Phillip Trelford
Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) with F#

14:30 – 15:30 :: Nathan Gloyn
Is your code S.O.L.I.D ?

15:40 – 16:40 :: Chris McDermott
Introduction to Kanban

I should of prepared a grok talk myself. But I’ve just started a new business, which will be the subject of one of my next blog posts!

The talk covered an eclectic mix of topics ranging from the mathematical reasons for Puff Daddy becoming P Diddy to pre-electronic calculators designed to be used in rally cars.

I’m going to talk about the three parts of his talk that I found most interesting.

Tallying systems

Tally marks are a form of numeral used for counting. They allow updating written intermediate results without erasing or discarding anything written down. The system Europeans are used to seeing is the 4 single 1s with a strike to represent a 5.

This system is pretty simple and often used:

However, in South America they use a system where you build a box:

And in China they use the 5 lines that make up the parts of their number 5:

I’m going to switch to using the the South American system!

Japanese Abacus counting system

Alex also showed a video of some Japanese kids who excel at adding numbers together. They are using an abacus system in their mind which makes counting a visual rather than an arithmetic problem.

In this video the participants are playing a game called “Flash Anzan” where they have to add up numbers that are being momentarily displayed on a screen without the use of paper.

As if that wasn’t scary enough, the abacus system doesn’t use the part of the brain which we traditionally use for counting, meaning that we are free to use it to perform word games.

In this video the 10 year old girls are counting the numbers displayed to them while simultaneously performing a word game where you have to start a word with the last syllable used by the previous word.

Chimpanzee Math

During the 1980s (in Japan again) they trained a few Chimpanzees to be able to recognise the numbers 1 to 9 and be able to answer questions about which one is higher and lower.

Then they decided to see if the chimps could remember sequences shown to them for a short period of time and then use a touch screen to select the numbers in order after they have disappeared. The scientists were suprised to see find that the chimps could perform to the same levels as humans in a control group.

Then they thought it would be interesting to reduce the time the numbers are shown from 0.6 seconds to 0.4. The human group only managed a 50% success ratio when shown the test. The chimps still managed 100%. Amazingly, they were able to reduce the time to 0.09 seconds and the chimps still have a 100% success rate.

Alex has a book about his discoveries if you would like to know more called “Alex’s adventures in Numberland”

Here are the events for which I’ve bought tickets so far…

• 6th March: Alex’s Adventures in Numberland
• 8th March: The Future of Capitalism
• 9th March: Who Are We – and Should it Matter in the 21st Century?
• 10th March: Civilization: The West and the Rest

I’d recommend anyone who will be in Scotland to check out their listings as there’s something for everyone.

To have a rewarding Whisky tasting you should line up 3 or more different drams that allow you to experience the differences between them.

Equipment

It’s important to have a correctly shaped glass to taste the Whisky, don’t go in for the crystal tumble numbers you see in films, go for something Tulip shaped like a Champagne glass. These allow you to take in the aromas of Whisky a lot better.

Good!

Bad!

Serve a single shot (dram) of each Whisky in a room temperature glass.

The Process

My process for tasting Whisky is:

• Selecting Whisky
• Eyeing the Whisky
• Smelling the Whisky
• Tasting the Whisky

Selecting Whisky

To get the most out of a Whisky tasting you should try to have a number of differing styles available to try. You can do this by region or by selecting based off tasting notes.

Try to have one Whisky from Sherry casks, a smoky Islay and two lighter Whiskies. Maybe even a sweet one. You can consult my guide to help you here.

Eyeing the Whisky

Start off by having a look at the colour of the drams you have. You will be able to see a difference in colour which reflects the sort of oak barrel the Whisky was aged in.

Whisky is matured in previously used barrels from American or Spain. The American barrels tend to be from Bourbon so they add a light colour to the Whisky. The Spanish barrels have had Sherry in them which creates a darker, reddish colour. If the Whisky is reddish in colour you can expect a medium-sweet fruity Whisky.

Smelling the Whisky

Cover your hand over the glass and swirl the Whisky around a bit. Open up part of your hand and take a sniff of the Whisky. Don’t try to smell it like Wine as the alcohol will burn your nose. Move the glass towards and away from your nose to get used to the smell of the first Whisky.

Don’t taste the Whisky yet! Pick up a second Whisky and do the same. Notice the differences between the two, then go back to the first glass. There are many different aromas present in Whisky but they tend to fall within a few major styles.

Try to notice if the Whisky seems Sherried, floral or peated. You might be able to detect traces of honey, spice, nuts or fruity notes. The more you do this, the better you will be at detecting the subtleties between drams.

Tasting the Whisky

Finally, you are ready to taste the Whisky. Take a small drink and hold it in your mouth for as many seconds as the Whisky has spent years in the barrel. Move the Whisky around your mouth and draw in a little air to enhance the flavour.

Once the time has elapsed; swallow and take in some air. This will finish you off with a warm and slightly burning sensation.

In between trying Whiskies be sure to cleanse your palate with some water or an oat biscuit. Enjoy!

I was approached by Adrian Mowatt and Rob Lally from AgileScotland about the prospect of getting involved with a whole day coding event in Glasgow. I eagerly joined these two pioneers and we are happy to announce the first Coding Retreat in the UK.

We will be getting 20 keen software developers together in a room, putting them in pairs and seeing what they can achieve in 40 minutes. Every 40 minutes the pairs change and we start again.

We have selected the Ruby programming language to be used by pairs on the day.

It’s happening on Saturday the 21st November 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University from 9am to 5pm. Tickets are completely free and available from EventBrite.

We’ll be providing breakfast and lunch as well as drinks throughout the day. After 5pm we full intend to retire to a nearby watering hole.

We are limited to 20 people. So please sign up quickly as we won’t be able to increase the amount of tickets!

One killer feature on the Mac that I desperately craved on Windows was the Spotlight feature. If you press Apple+Space it gives you an option to type some text. This text is then used to search through all the applications and files you have. It searches your email, music, dictionaries, basically everything on your machine. I use it as the primary way of opening applications and files on my MacBook.

I still use a Windows XP machine at my work, which means I have to manually search through the Start Menu for whatever application I need. You can use the quick launch bar but that tends to get filled up fairly… well… quickly. Launchy solves this problem.

Launchy starts up when you log into Windows and offers you an on-demand dialog from a key combination. This dialog allows you to launch any application on you machine.

You simply hit Windows+Space (default is Alt+Space) to see a dialog, type ‘f’. and press return to load Firefox.

It remembers your previous choices and quickly becomes optimised for the way you think.

Windows Vista has a similar feature but it only works on whole words, which makes it pretty unusable. Luckily Launchy works on XP, Vista and Linux.

If you work in a job which requires you to use the Start Menu to launch applications, you can become much more productive (and happy) by using Launchy.

Other tools you need to use

• Twitter
• Delicious
• Google Reader

Twitter is an opt-in version of IRC. Think about that for a second. Now imagine the IRC chat room has people you respect (for me Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry and Martin Fowler), and you can hear their thoughts. If there’s anything we have learnt about the Internet over the last 2 years it’s that stalking is at an all time high. It’s also becoming mainstream.

I was very sceptical about Twitter. Seeing it as a way for people I sort of know spamming me with fascinating anecdotes about getting pished with their mates the other night. But it’s quite simple, just keep it professional and only listen to people you know and/or respect. If your life is all about High School Musical then you can listen to the ramblings of the stars from the show. If you are deeply into software development, then all of your heroes are already on board.

I think to get the most out of Twitter you need to either have the iPhone/Android/Blackberry application, or not have it unblocked at your work. But it really is a genuinely interesting new source of information I check multiple times a day along with my SMS, email and rss feeds. I feel more connected and as the circulation figures for gossip magazines will tell you, people love being a little too intimate.

Feel free to follow me!

This week has been a great week for hearing about new tech. On Tuesday I did a presentation at work about Hudson and Sonar. Hudson is a CI server and Sonar is a great way to track metrics on your codebase.

On Wednesday I went along to the Java User Group Scotland and checked out a great talk done by Selcuk Bozdag on Flex development. Flex allows you to make pretty cool Flash based applications which can talk to remote services. It isn’t tied to Java like I originally thought. There’s an awful lot of out of the box charting and video tools which seem useful.

On Saturday I went along to the Microsoft sponsored Developer Day event. They had 4 different tracts offering mainly .NET and MS SQL Server talks. I enjoyed listening to the Virtulisation and Ruby on .NET talks especially. I then managed to find some Perl/Flex developers I could talk loudly about the evil that is IE6 to restore the balance.

While at the conference I was approached by some guys from the disposable memory project who were at my talk the previous week at the Glasgow Techmeetup. They handed me a modded film based camera with instructions to hand it to someone else after a single usage and after all the exposures were used the last person would hand it back to someone else. Hopefully I’ll get to see what this led to!