So you’re weighing out your ingredients. Perhaps you’re not in the US … or maybe you are in the US and have a degree in science … whichever, you may be weighing out your grains using the metric system. While the root unit of mass is the gram, the metric system of mass is calibrated to a known weight of 1 kilogram. More specifically to the weight of “a cylinder of platinum-iridium kept in a vault near Paris since 1889.”

The problem is, the kilogram is getting lighter… Discover magazine online published a recent article on this that I thought I’d share here. No, it doesn’t mean much for BrewSession. As long as we stick with the conversion of 1kg = 2.204622622 US pounds, I think we’ll be okay. If you read the article, you’ll find that the kg has only lessened in mass by about the weight of a grain of salt since 1889. Interesting nonetheless.

On another note, I’ve got 8 or so calculators ready to go…apart from the toggles having a slight issue that I’m working out. As soon as I’m finished there, we’ll be releasing them to beta testers. (I know, I know…we keep saying that…but honestly, they’re actually working!!!, I just need to get a few minor bugs ironed out before the beta release (we’re not getting paid for this, you know ;-)….and Dean’s been hounding me to get the design of the recipe formulation screen closer to final draft form as he has a generic Ruby on Rails + Ajax version almost ready to be styled up and and used. And I’m holding him back. Hmpf.)

I’ve also been looking into solutions for making BrewSession a desktop application as well as a web application. Most recently I’ve been really getting into Adobe’s AIR technology — going so far as to getting a calculator or two running as desktop apps using AIR technology. It’s really quite nice. The only catch is, you have to have the AIR runtime on your system in order for them to work (similar to having the Java runtime installed to run Java applications). But, AIR is a fairly small, painless download and install. Once you have it, each AIR application installs and runs with ease (though I think it’ll require some custom CSS to make BrewSession look really spiffy on the desktop). I wonder though….what does the general public, the home brewer, think of having to download the AIR runtime in order to run BrewSession?  I suppose we need to get a poll going… Feel free to post some opinions…