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I got 99% of the horribly overdue stuff done at work, and then ran into a bug caused by incompatibilities in the version of MS SQL our customers use. So tomorrow I need to rummage around and find an alternative method, which is a pain in the arse. But at least it's close enough that people at work are no longer panicking, so that's good. It'd be nice to occasionally have something Just Work, but when does that ever happen?

Speaking of things not Just Working, I got interested in getting Mono and MonoDevelop working on my Kubuntu Hardy system, but I'm hamstrung by the eternal Ubuntu problem: that there's a small group of overworked geeks vetting all the software in the system. That means that packages that have been out for months or years are unavailable for Ubuntu because nobody's gotten around to making them official: so I'm using Firefox 3.0.11 when 3.5 has been out for weeks, Open Office 2.4 when 3.0 is already there, Mono 1.x when 2.6 has been released, and so on. The alternative is to override the package manager and install from source, but in the case of Mono that leads to pain, because apparently I'm the first person in history to think of doing it so there are no instructions other than vague hints on mailing lists and a couple of untested blog posts. Sigh.

(The irony of the above is that I can't upgrade to the latest Kubuntu because it uses KDE 4, which is in no way ready for public use and is in general a total disaster. So I'm stuck with a version that's more than a year old because I actually use my computer for more than just Frozen Bubble and vim. Bleagh.)