Tag: oldblog

Reading this morning’s New York Times, it looks like Israeal and Lebanon/Hezbollah are going to continue fighting. This is too bad. I do not understand the dynamics of the situation very well. Why does Lebanon allow Hezbollah to fight Israel from their Southern border?

When I was in Turkey in 1993 and 1994 I tried to go to Beirut. But I could not find a way to get there. My understanding of it is that Beirut was a very beautiful city at one time where many European tourists came for vacation, and it was more or less destroyed during the Lebanese civil war.

I wrote a script to parse out my old MT posts and pull them in to here. Some of the links may be broken, and the text formatting probably isn’t quite correct. They can be found under the old_blog category at the top of the sidebar.

The weather in Iowa is absolutely perfect today. We finally were able to open our windows. It is supposed to be in the low 80’s today. It feels pretty good after being in SouthEast Texas last week, and also the heat wave that went through the midwest over the last week. It would be nice if it stayed this way for a few weeks.

Hopefully tomorrow I will have time to pull the css stylesheet, and all of my old posts out the moveable type blog. It is going to be tough, because I have a lot of crap to catch up on, and I also have to go in to work for a few minutes.

I am not sure what is up with comments on this blog. Chad Fowler has them on his, but he must have added the feature himself and not commited it into the CVS tree. If you have any comments on posts, for now, you know how to get in touch with me if you are reading this, at least probably.

I am sitting in Bush Airport in Houston, Tx. There is no free wireless here of course, but I can still write this post because I just need to drop it in a directory on my other machine to post it. That is something you can not do with any other blog, at least to my knowledge.

I had a pretty good week down here. I was able to work with some guys from BSE this week. As I mentioned in a previous post last year, BSE is a German Steelmaking and consulting company, and they are some of the most professional steelmakers in the world. It is always a privilege to be able to work with them. Additionaly, it sounds like I will be participating in a 2 week seminar in Germany that will be hosted by BSE. It has been 10 years since I was in Germany last. Before I go, I really want to get my books out and try to brush up on my Deutsch. I have forgotten so much of it.

Back home finally. Both flights pretty much sucked. On the first I had a window seat, but the prick in the seat next to me decided that since he got there first that he could take the window. I told him he was in the wrong seat, and to just stay there. It was too hot to deal with it. The plane in Houston was an oven until we got off of the ground. We got took off about 20 minutes late. On the way to Houston, some prick did the same thing with the window seat. What is with these guys? On the flight from Memphis I got sandwiched between some lady and her kids.

Flying has really sucked this summer. Just about every flight that I have been on has been one of these little Embraer’s, and they are completely full. Not a single empty seat. Tons of people flying with kids. Tons of older people that are not really mobile are out flying. The airports are very crowded. I will be glad when summer is over. It should make flying easier. Although, the airlines will continue to fly these tiny planes to keep their fuel costs down. I assume at this point that they will not bring the big planes back out even if fuel costs ever do come back down.

Going home tonight. Not looking forward to trying to make it through Houston/Bush airport. It is another example of an airport that is not big enough for the amount of people that are being pushed through it.

The last time I was there, I had a few hours to kill. I was doing some work and this guy sat next to me with one of the bluetooth phones on. This clown sat there talking about his life with someone like there was nobody around. Creepy.

Rublog is a very simple, lightweight blog software written in Ruby. I have been looking for new blog software for quite a while now. I wanted something lightweight, open source and hackable. Rublog certainly fits these requirements.

I have been using Moveable Type for the last year. I found it to be ok, especially for people that are not very technical. But, it is also bloated and encumbered by comercial licensing, ie. not hackable.

I tried to get tdiary set up, but was not very succsesful. I think that Rublog is a better fit for what I have been looking for. I had considered writing my own, but I am very glad that I didn’t get that far.

For the techie types that might be reading this (Hi Chad), Rublog is very interesting. It can operate from a hierarchical directory of files written in text, html, rdoc and other markups, or alternatively it can be pointed to a cvs repository. At first I couldn’t figure out the significance of the cvs integration, but later figured out that this is a great idea for sharing a blog among a group of developers that are familiar with markup and cvs. This allows cvs to handle all of the synchronization, merging, updating etc. of the blog. A very clever idea.

I use the Vim text editor as much as possible. I am very happy to be able to use Vim to write my blog posts.

I think that rublog is going to work out great. Hopefully I can contribute to it in some way.