Scott's Blog

Guinness Red?!?

For the past year or so Guinness have been producing different types of Guinness in what it calls the Brewhouse series, these have so far included the Toucan Brew and the North Star Brew. The most recent being the Red brew which was finally available in all UK branches of O'Neill's since about two weeks ago.

On Friday Mike and I both decided to sample one of these "lightly roasted barley" concoctions, the first impression I got from when it was poured is that it settled like a regular Guinness, it looked very promising to begin with. The colour was more maroon then red and it was even possibly to see through the drink.

Now taste, it simply wasn't a Guinness. It tasted rather bland and was simply not satisfying, in comparison it tasted more like Caffreys just not as nice. Suffice to say that Mike switched back to Guinness Extra Cold and I was too disheartened to continue and went straight to the Captain and Coke.

I do however suggest that anyone who regularly drinks Guinness try one even if it is for the novelty value.

MySQL Binaries

Recently MySQL stopped producing binaries for every community release, this has left it to other people to step forward and provide them on behalf of those who are unable to produce these.

I've decided to provide them on behalf of the Windows users of MySQL, this is mainly down to the fact that they lack the ability to compile binaries on their own. Visual C++ Express 2005 is available for free but unfortunately this doesn't compile MySQL 5.0, though it does work with MySQL 5.1. So when this goes into general availability I'll no longer need to provide them.

So until that point I'll be releasing them as they come out, there are two releases an installer and the noinstall version.

Since at work we use the RPM versions that were provided officially from MySQL AB, I'll need to compile them anyway, there isn't much point in keeping them to myself so they'll be getting released too.

All releases will be available at http://server.macvicar.net/downloads/

Along with the MySQL binaries I also recently submitted my first patch for Apache, unfortunately it was rejected / ignored so we'll just continue to use it internally for the moment or maybe I'll refactor it and make it more useful.