Say hello to Semiramis

So, Xenobia started acting up shortly before finals week. Her harddrive requires running DiskRepair, which requires booting from the Apple CD, which I can't seem to locate at the moment. She boots up fine, but some Finder config files are corrupted so I have to reconfigure the Dock and Finder prefs on every login. Very annoying. Her wireless has been on the fritz for a while too, but other than these two things she's holding up fine after three years. Hoping to keep my life simple and not have to deal with an inopportune hardware failure, I broke down and got a new MacBook Pro. I introduce y'all to Semiramis. Unfortunately Sem came loaded with Leopard instead of Snow Leopard, but I'll prolly shell out for the upgrade soon enough.

One of the nice things about getting a new computer is that fresh feeling you get when you transfer only the necessary files and can leave all the cruft behind. These moments are also prime time for offloading files to the archives, paring down config files, and sundry other spring cleaning. Over the last week I've been doing just that. I've dropped a lot of dead weight and picked up a couple new tools in the process. A few things have broken along the way, but not too many.

It's been ages since I've maintained my website and I've decided it's time to get back to it. I really need to consolidate my web presence and make my site decently professional enough for conveying my grad work and suchlike. I've always been an advocate of transparency and sharing the knowledge of geekdom, but I've never been too good about posting and discussing my various dotfiles or my personal work environment. So, over the next couple weeks as I do renovation, I'll make them public to the internet instead of just my local networks, and I'll write a few posts about what's in them and why.

(One of the things I haven't fixed yet is installing XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT, so this post will make it to lj before making it to my main site.)