In my recent article describing the system that powers this website, I discussed some "yard work". I use this term to refer to tasks that I accomplish using Ruby's Rake. Since I published that article, I've made several improvements to the Rakefile that powers most of my website's common operations. As such, I figured that I'd post a more in-depth description of the lovely scripting solution that I've come up with.

Though it has been publicly available for many months now, I'd like to take a moment and formally introduce my personal collection of open-source libraries of Objective-C/C code, CZKit. Although still fairly small, CZKit has an organized and distributed configuration that will let it grow quite nicely in the future. I use the name CZKit as an umbrella term to identify four different libraries of code (though that number is subject to change). The easiest way to describe the whole kit is to go through each component library individually.

In December of 2008, the first iteration of this website went online for the world to see. Available at the slightly-cheesy domain name "lifeofcarter.com" (courtesy of my friend Wil Nichols), it boasted a shiny theme on top of a brand-new installation of WordPress. My first post (still available in the archives of this site) was a short and emotional rant about the current state of my life. Since then I've moved domain names, and the theme of my site has changed many times. The articles that have been written since then range from geeky and intelligent to disturbing and thought-provoking, and finally to random and hilarious.

So you want to install the beta? Well, I have. Here are my suggestions (read them all the way through before starting):~

shapp |sh app|
noun
A colloquial conjugation of the words "shit" and "app", which refers to an application, most likely distributed via Apple Inc.'s App Store, that is poorly designed, implemented, or both. The man was quite frustrated due to the large number of shapps in the App Store.