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The Banana Peel
Freeciv 2.0.0 Beta 6 
Thursday, January 6, 2005, 5:48 PM
Here we are in 2005, and a sixth beta for Freeciv 2.0.0. The game client still indicates a release date of December, however, which is obviously out of date.

In any case, here is my package for it. Mac OS X Panther is required. Enjoy!
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Upgrade 
Monday, January 3, 2005, 11:00 AM
The version of Simple PHP Blog I had been using had some significant problems, the worst of which is that it doesn't want to recognize entries since January of 2005.

I was glad to see, however, that the author had released a fix to the problem very quickly, so I've upgraded. One unfortunate side-effect to the upgrade is that all comments are lost. For now, I've kept an archived copy of the blog here.
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Multi-grain Bread 
Sunday, January 2, 2005, 10:11 AM
One of the few things I like for breakfast is bread. So much so that I started making my own breads using a bread machine years ago.

I was recently encouraged to eat more healthily, so I've begun to make multi-grain breads. Here's a recipe that I like.

Ingredients
10 oz. of warm water
4 tbsp. of sugar
4 tbsp. of olive oil
1 tsp. of salt
2 cups of white bread flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 cup of multi-grain (or ten-grain) cereal
3 tsp. of gluten
3 tsp. of yeast

Add ingredients to the machine in the order I've laid up above. Put the machine in a two-pound cycle.

You might need to experiment and adjust the quantities of the ingredients to get the desired results.
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Hybrid Power 
Friday, December 24, 2004, 8:48 PM
After eight months of waiting, I finally got the phone call. There is a Prius due to arrive at a local dealership in town, the lady on the phone said, and my name floated to the top of the list.

From the research I did, a lot of people seem to go for the highest end option. For me, this will be a Monday through Friday, get me to and from work car. So things like DVD navigation, voice recognition, etc., are not important to me. As cool as these features may be, I am just not willing to fork out the extra money for them. The important things to me are comfort, safety, and fuel economy.

The car that will be mine has the middle-of-the-road package featuring the smart keyless entry, which is the one cool, convenient, and practical feature that I want. There is no anti-theft system, but the dealer will add one for me, at a cost. I wonder if it integrates well with the smart keyless entry system such that it won't be a nusance, or worse yet, negate the convenience of the smart keyless entry system. Perhaps more research is warranted.

If you know something about what I am talking about, feel free to enlighten me with a comment.
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vi, jEdit, and Smultron 
Friday, December 24, 2004, 6:13 AM
Since my college days, my favorite default text editor has been vi. I even have a version of vi installed on my Windows machines because ... well, it's so much better than Notepad.

After I installed Mac OS X, I also began to use vi (vim) a lot. However, vi on Mac OS X is restricted to the confines of a Terminal session, and the default installation doens't have the two features on my most wanted list: syntax highlighting and ftp.

These days syntax highlighting really helps reading the code easier, and with everything so connected in the 21st century, I often find myself needing to edit files stored on remote servers.

So, I found jEdit a couple of years ago, and have been using it whenever vi doesn't quite fit the bill. In addition to syntax highlighting, jEdit also sports some cool features such as tag completion for markup languages and the ability to edit files on remote servers via its FTP plug-in.

However, being a Java application, it can be a bit quirky, and it runs at a barely acceptable level on my Mac. On top of that, I find that jEdit runs very snappy on my Windows machines. Apple needs to do something about this....

In any case, I recently discovered Smultron. In the developer's own words:
Smultron is an open-source text editor written in Cocoa for Mac OS X Panther with many of the features that you might need. It features easy selection of the opened documents, line numbers, support for syntax colouring for many different languages, support for text encodings, code snippets, a toolbar, a status bar, HTML preview, multi-document find and replace with regular expressions, possibility to show invisible characters, authenticated saves, command-line utility, .Mac synchronisation of preferences and many more features.

I have been trying it out, and am liking it thus far. In fact, I used it to compose my last entry about compiling Freeciv. Smultron has syntax highlighting support and runs fast (relative to jEdit). While tag completion would be nice, the only thing I really want at the moment is built-in FTP support. If and when that feature is added, I will have to see about deprecating jEdit in favor of Smultron.

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