Re-factoring Blog Entries.

As I started to write a blog entry about installing Tomcat with Luntbuild on Nexenta, I noticed that a few themes have started to repeat themselves from previous entries, i.e., the initial setup of a Solaris Zone and the installation of the JDK in a Zone. This presents me with an interesting dilemma: should I simply copy-paste-modify those lines from a previous blog entry, or should I re-factor from the specific to the general, give those their own space and change the original blog to reference the new, generic entry? This seems to raise a question about the nature of this blog: is it an organic journal of the specific steps taken on a journey toward some unknown end, or is each entry a constantly-evolving atom where the posted date represents only the inception of the kernel of the posted idea and not necessarily the finality of the written words?
For now, I have chosen the revisionist path with this restriction: I will try my darndest to ensure that no information is lost as entries are shifted and re-arranged and as the generic is extracted from the specific. As much as a day-to-day linear progression of thought would be personally valuable, in the end the repetition of similar items or the tracking of half-formed ideas interspersed across days could end up being a tedious and convoluted mess that I will ultimately be disinclined to maintain and that no one will want to read. Of course, constant referencing and de-referencing can be equally tedious and convoluted, so I will try as well to be politic in the sections I choose to re-factor.

Statement of Intent

This blog is not an advertisement for what I know, but an exploration of what I do not know. Admitting how much I do not know is the first step in overcoming my fear of looking foolish. I will make mistakes, but my intent is to learn from those mistakes and hopefully to uncover information useful to someone somewhere.
My first post is a laundry list of haphazard steps for bringing a clean computer from a Nexenta Alpha 6 install to a running build of Eclipse for solaris-gtk-x86. I am not a Unix or a Linux guy, but I am interested in the problem that Nexenta is trying to solve (i.e., combining the OpenSolaris kernel with the gnu utilities and the debian package manager). I am only slightly an Eclipse guy in that I have been developing an RCP application for the past 10 months. I am not involved with the Eclipse project.
Subsequent posts in the near future will probably be a reflection of the tips and tricks I encounter while doing Eclipse RCP development or Java development, but they may branch into areas of process (I recently accepted a position at an Agile company) or higher-level software engineering.
Hopefully these future posts will be shorter.