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A barley shortage caused by government promotion of corn based ethanol production is currently causing the price of malt to rise. The price of hops has also exploded after years of oversupply. An email from Weyerbacher Brewing Co. provides the perspective of an industry insider.

I've just written a little blurb about my first few hours with Leopard. Here's the link.

This isn't really news (which is why the story has not been submitted for front page consideration), but I've noticed that Google indexes my posts here nicely so I'm throwing up a link to a new site that's coming soon. Random Field. Don't bother following the link unless you're a bot. There's nothing there yet. If you're a human, sorry for wasting your time.

The Ethiopian Herald (link via allafrica) reports that a new coffee museum will be opened in Jimma with the goal of commemorating the region's history of being where Coffea arabica was first discovered and turning Jimma into a tourist hub by the millenium (is this a mis-reporting? Looking out to 2999-3000AD seems like an excessively long term project).

The museum is expected to cost 2.5 million Ethiopian birr. When I was in Ethiopia early in 2006, the exchange rate was about 8 birr to the U. S. dollar, so this comes to about $312,500, fairly cheap for a museum.

I visited Jimma briefly last year. I had hoped to visit a coffee research station while I was there, but my timing coincided with a holiday celebrating a battle in which the Ethiopians kicked out the Italians during World War 2.

Today Apple released a new security update for Mac OS X. This is an update to the last security update previously discussed on Slashdot. Many users of older Macs with the original AirPort card discovered that the previous version of this update caused wireless networking to fail when waking from sleep, an issue specifically addressed in the new version of this update.

Isn't this the sort of problem that should not happen when one company handles both the hardware and the operating system?