We are largely taking over operations of a small hosting company, Thelix Internet. It was already a customer oriented internet hosting company, and their needs and our skills and capabilities meshed well. Although I'm not at liberty to discuss details, it's an exciting time for our company.

Updated all of the websites I keep on nearlyfreespeech.net. WordPress is such a cool program, and updating is a snap. Three wordpress sites, 20 minutes. Yes, I was taking my time. I love wordpress, but I was surprised to see, recently, that a friend had been sold a new website. Besides the fact that the business certainly would have been welcome with my company, I had no problem with it, it was a pretty decent looking site. Kinda familiar though, and then it dawned on me: his site was written in wordpress. I don't know how much he paid, but it's an interesting idea. Frame up the site in wp, and just come up with a theme. Probably 6-10 hours work. Pretty easy to make a profit that way. (I wonder if he knows he's running wp?) Oh well, there are worse websites. Much worse.

Busy time. Many people take the time between Christmas and New Year's Day off. I find that time too valuable to take off. It's a great time to update your servers, get all those new shiny updates installed while there aren't very many users to be inconvenienced. You should certainly do security updates more than once a year, but if you want to do something more ambitious, like finally update that server to mysql 5.0 or php 5, you won't get a better chance.

I'm fairly excited. Our new product, docuble, has just gone beta. It's the result of months of hard work and planning. If you are looking for someway of handling large numbers of mostly boilerplate documents that need to be kept in a rigid structure, then try it out, we might just have what you are looking for.

Sometimes you love your text editor so much you have to share. If you use Vim, the modal text editor, you may notice that the blasted ESCAPE key is way up there to the left. That's a long reach for me, and I don't have small hands. There is another key combo that will drop you out of normal mode, CTRL-[ , but I've always felt that to be too much of a stretch for a key you want to use so often. I want something quick that doesn't make me leave home row with my hands. What I use is this:

:map! jk <ESC>

When I type 'j' and 'k' in quick succession, it functions as an escape key. I love this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's very easy to type. If you use Vim, 'j' and 'k' are already very easy to use. Secondly, if you are already in Normal mode, 'jk' just makes the cursor move down one line and then up, causing the cursor to 'flicker'. The only problem I can see is that I find my email peppered with jk's if I'm going fast, because I don't use Vim to write email!