Several exciting things are going on at the moment. The biggest change is that we will be moving some things around in the shop and go back to selling brewing equipment. We are bringing in a high end home espresso maker and an electric vacuum brewer. We are keeping one of each of these as a demonstration model, so you can look forward to seeing these very cool looking machines in operation. We will also bring back burr grinders. A burr grinder is essential for making good espresso and it would be difficult to sell a $500 espresso machine and then say, "Good luck hunting around Chicago for a grinder."
Another change is that I have been put in charge of developing new signs for the coffees. We've let this slide for a while. I've been taking signs down as the information on them becomes outdated, but other things have bothered me about the current signage. The new signs are wider and shorter. I decided to have these signs cover the entire width of shelf space used by a pound and half pound of coffee. I decreased the height so that there is less chance of knocking off signs while restocking coffees. Each sign will have the name of the coffee, the price for pounds and half pounds of the coffee, a description of the coffee, and something else. The something else will be different with each sign. The first new sign is for Viking Blend Espresso and it features a picture of a double espresso. This sign is already up and can be seen in our shop, but if you can't wait, you can see it here (pdf).
Some of you may have taken a look at that PDF file and checked the document information to see what I used to make it only to find the rather cryptic line, "Libpdf for Scribus 1.1.7". This deserves some explaination, so I will go through the various tools I used to create this sign.
The sign was made on a laptop running Gentoo Linux. Every program down to the operating system itself was compiled on this computer specifically for this computer. This is a little different from how computer software normally works. Normally, you pick up a CD containing a copy of the software and an installation program. The software needs to run under several versions of an operating system and on a wide variety of hardware. Often, this means that the software installed does not take advantage of optimizations available with newer hardware and operating systems are bogged down with a lot of extra baggage. With Gentoo Linux, the installation program goes out to the Internet, downloads the source code (cryptic but human readable instructions that the computer can translate into something the processor can deal with) for the most recent version of the software I want, and compiles (does the aforementioned translation) that according to my specifications. It took a couple days to get everything set up as I want it, but the resulting system is quite a bit faster than my old Mandrake Linux setup and faster still than if I were running Microsoft Windows.
The picture of the espresso was taken on my digital camera and I edited out the background with The GNU Image Manipulation Program.
I then used Scribus to put together the sign as a whole. Scribus is something like a free equivalent of Publisher, but I find Scribus easier to use and it has a handy button to save the document as a PDF file.
I use free software for a lot of things these days. This Web site, for example, was edited primarily in KWrite, but to make it easier to maintain I use GNU m4 and GNU make. This allows me to take markup that is repeated with only minor variations within and among pages and consolidate it in one file. If it needs to be changed across the entire site, I can make the change in one place, type "make" and I have a new set of files ready to upload. It also saves typing while putting together a new page. To take an extreme example, I was using these tools to repair a different site. One set of pages originally contained over 200 lines of markup and content per page and it was very dense stuff generated by Microsoft Frontpage. It was not uncommon to see lines wrap around my screen seven times (and that's on a 19 inch monitor). The files I uploaded were less than 100 lines, all on the short side and including some empty lines. The source files I used to generate those ran seven lines long. In other words, I typed up fewer than 100 lines of markup that was mostly the same among these pages once and then seven lines for each page describing what belongs there. The final site turned out much cleaner and with greater design integrity than I started with. If any of you are planning to make a Web site, please take the time to pick up a reference text on HTML and CSS (Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference 2nd Edition by Danny Goodman is pretty good) and look into the basics of m4 and make (there are Windows versions of these and I'd imagine they would also run on MacOS X). You'll open the door to the better results possible with hand crafted markup and updates, including total site redesigns, are a breeze. Supposedly the learning curve for doing things this way is much steeper than picking up a graphical page editor, but I've never used one of those long enough to figure out how to get acceptable results (I've dabbled with this sort of thing since before there were such things) and any time I've fixed someone else's site it was a site originally made with one of these graphical tools, so perhaps they only have the deceptive look of ease and user friendliness.
I have a binder full of roast profiles and blend recipes. These are spreadsheets made with OpenOffice.org (The .org is part of the application name. It doesn't have all of the features of Microsoft Office, but it does have all of the features that I use.).
Our newsletter is made with LATEX mainly because I don't run Windows at home (Two machines are running Gentoo Linux and a third is running an old Mandrake distribution, heavily modified. The hardware is all custom-built stuff) and don't have the patience at work to play with text boxes drawn on a computer monitor to get things just right. The TEX linebreak algorithm usually produces a more beautiful result than Publisher would without a lot of hand tweaking (I could manually adjust the kerning and such everywhere, but that would be more maddening than playing with text boxes) so this means I get a more beautiful newsletter in less time using free software.
Most recently I've been working on a new system for keeping track of the mountain of records involved in roasting coffee. As far as I know, there is no computer recordkeeping solution specifically tailored to the needs of a coffee roaster so most roasters come up with some system of paper records, keep dozens of computer files, or stop keeping detailed records. This sort of system, while workable, typically requires considerable effort when any statistical analysis is needed. I've been working on some better tools so I can spend less time shuffling papers and more time making great coffee. While I could do this without open source software, it wouldn't be as much fun.