Starting Again

Feb 2008

Here we go again. First I had a Flash website, then I started a MoinMoin wiki. Then I moved it to Instiki, then to Junebug. All these sites ran on my own computer, but after the power failures in South Africa because government forgot to build new power stations, I decided I'd have to move servers. And while moving, I might as well move to a platform better suited to what I was doing: a blog engine.

I signed up at Blogger, because that was the easiest, but I soon realised that the nifty HTML editing website widget was a hindrance to moving my articles across. The HTML mode helped but I still ended up spending way too long formatting by hand. And the only option for code syntax highlighting seemed to be highlighting it with Maruku and pasting the resulting HTML into the blog, which is really painful.

So I tried Wordpress which was just as bad, and BlogSpirit. Then I tried Hobix but it seems to be dead. And finally, here I am, using Webby. And look, Markdown! And syntax highlighting!

class Array
  # return this array with elements shuffled
  # 
  def shuffle
    source = self.clone
    out = []
    while !source.empty?
      out << source.delete_at(rand*source.length)
    end
    out
  end
  # drop random elements in the array to 
  # produce a smaller (ordered) array of size n
  #
  def reduce(n)
    out = self.clone
    while out.length>n
      out.delete_at(rand*out.length)
    end
    out
  end
end