Gosh, there are lots of different kinds of hops out there. For my brewing so far this year, I’ve been using pelleted forms of two varieties, Target and Styrian Golding (with plenty left of each) but even if I get to the point where I have a reasonable handle on their characteristics, there are enough others for several lifetimes worth of brewing!

I recently discovered a website called [http://www.hopslist.com/](Hopslist), which is a well presented reference to many varieties. To be honest, it has far more information than I know what to do with but I’ve made a note of it when I get a bit further through my existing stocks.

England doesn’t feel as wet as it did a few weeks ago. We have had several outbreaks of what I believe is called sunshine and both old rivers and new lakes (the latter formerly known as roads, fields and allotments) are not so high any more. We can breathe a sigh of relief and have another cup of tea.

However, as described in a recent New Scientist article, the UK must abandon or adapt in face of floods. While we are probably past the worst floods for this winter and there is no certainty that similar conditions will return next year it does appear highly likely that areas that were submerged will face the same again in future. While there will be other pressing issues on the authorities, I hope they have the wisdom to do what is necessary to ensure that, given a similar level of rain, we have engineered our occupation of the landscape to reduce the misery that has been caused.

This is a book for a relatively small niche. Most users of the social web (Twitter, Facebook, etc) won’t have the programming expertise to follow the technical details and most programmers won’t be interested in the data which come from the social web. I’m still on the fringes of target audience set, with a long history of involvement in the social web and a decent grasp of Python. I have also recently been wanting to learn how to programmatically extract some data from Twitter; not full-scale mining but certainly a desire to dig below the surface.

I haven’t tried and tested every snippet of information in the book. However, for the material where I did dig deeper (Twitter) it provided the keys I needed to unlock some of the barriers that had previously obstructed me. It is worth skimming through the whole book to soak in the wider concepts but, if you are interested in one or more of...

A fundamental principle of the British legal system is “innocent until proven guilty”. It doesn’t always seem obvious though when you read about the legal process through the lens of the press.

I was prompted to start pondering this when the case involving Dave Lee Travis was in the news last week. Since then, we have seen Ken Roach unanimously cleared of all the charges against him. No smoke without fire? Or perhaps we should be glad that innocence has been proven, giving some hope for those falsely accused of other crimes?

I do wonder what the implication is for those who made the accusations? If Roach is innocent, does that mean they are guilty of perjury? As Roach is reported as saying, nobody wins unequivocally in a case like this. Perhaps what we need is a major shake up of the press to improve their standards. Oh, wait, didn’t we have one of those?

So, I’m ticking along nicely with WordPress. After several years I have got to the point where I have fairly good systems in place to make operations run smoothly. For example, because my live installs are now covered by Git, I can use the automatic updating facilities but track all the changes that are made and easily feed them back into my local master copies. My blogging needs are better covered than ever before.

This morning, via a tweet, I discovered Svbtle. This is a minimalistic approach to the idea of blogging that has only just been opened up to general access. Do I need that? I am wondering if it might serve as a pre-blogging platform. My initial impression is that provides a clean and rather beautiful framework for throwing down ideas and working them up into fuller posts which can then be copied to my WordPress blog. Having a duplicate copy of the post appear on the Svbtle...