Well its time to update this site and do a little refactoring. Got the blog software converted to Ruby today. But the rest of the site is gonna need a little more work. My simple content management system for the howto pages was written in Python which I haven't worked with in quite some time. So I'm gonna need to convert that to Ruby too. So if you see anything messed up on the site over the next few days, you'll know why.

Once the blog software is complete, I plan to post open source versions of the software on a separate web site. So in the coming days I plan to make some posts about the blogging software and why I wrote it. The software is essentially a simple file based scripting system like blosxom or something like that. But, instead of using some sort of custom text format, everything is done using XML standards. More posts on that to follow.

For those Mac OS/X users out there I wanted to give a quick shout out for a very nice terminal replacement tool: iterm for osx. For some time there have been a couple of things that bugged me about the OS/X terminal program. First, there is no tabbed interface, all the terminal windows are separate windows. Now its easy to move between these windows with the keyboard, but it is still a bit of pain to get things arranged properly. The other thing is there is no middle button paste like you get with Solaris or Linux. In those Unix implementations, you can highlight text in a terminal window, then use the middle mouse button or scroll wheel to paste that text.

iTerm gives you both of those features, its free and open source. Check it out if you have the chance.

I have been setting up a new Macbook (woo hoo!!!) and ran across a problem installing the Cyberduck ftp client. Apparently the developer has been running into bandwith issues and downloads are sometimes disabled. If you run into this problem, the latest version is available on Sourceforge. Just go to sourceforge.net at this link to download the program.