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(A brump, in case you wonder, is a brain dump, a virtual vomiting of many disconnected thoughts and impressions all in one go. You probably won't have heard the word, since I just made it up. Although that's not 100% reliable, since I've made up a number of words over the years — I'm an incurable neologist — that other people have sworn blind they already knew. Parallel evolution? Perhaps.)

My nursing home simulator has been coming along slowly — more slowly than I or my boss would like, although I did have a week off doing other bug fixes, and there have been an assortment of complications. Right now it's happily prescribing and administering drugs to my simulated geriatrics, and I'm playing around with the dark nooks and crannies of the medication management software, finding things that my more experienced cow-orkers never knew, or had long forgotten, about how things work. My boss cheered me up mightily by saying out of the blue that he thought this was a valuable tool, because it was allowing us, the programmers, to see what looked like real live data, instead of the weeks- or months-old anonymised data dumps we usually had to rely on. Just looking at the Administrations page and seeing a live history of administered drugs, rather than the garish "overdue" alarm clock icons we get normally, was an odd but encouraging sign.

Meanwhile, I'm working on other stuff. Canon Lore is in a pretty good state now with teffania Canon at the helm, but I have a bunch of bug fixes I need to send to her. The LaTeX work for Mr Death looks like it won't be hard at all, if I knuckle down. And there are one or two other little projects, backburner tasks, that mainly exist to keep me from getting stuck on one problem for too long.

This Saturday is the Boy Wonder's ½th birthday. Six months — really? It seems like a week ago the loungeroom was crowded with a plastic wading pool and my son arrived, asleep and happy, as the city slept. And now he's too big for his bouncy hammock and eerily close to crawling by himself, which suggests that walking, talking and dropping out of college to become a bass guitarist can't be far away. He'll always be my baby boy, though, even when he's towering over me and asking for the keys to the hovercar.

Sunday, of course, is Mother's Day. Why does the SCA keep scheduling weekend events on Mother's Day? They're working on fixing some bugs in the laws at the mo'; I'll have to remember to suggest that they change the rules on May Crown Tourney so that people with real live families can have a slightly better chance of getting a weekend to themselves. The Queen will approve; her Mum is good value, and — ten years ago at least — was a bit of a spunk too, now I think of it. (And her dad was a colour blind psych lecturer who repainted their house by himself, and it showed; strange family, but nice.)

Oh, Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party. Must mention this to the Beloved. Hey, Beloved! Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party! There we go. Not sure if we can go along; depends on munchkins.

Ummm... that's all I can think of. Sorry, nothing to make schizophrenic Republicans froth at the mouth today; they'll just have to amuse themselves. Hey ho.

So our plans for Festival are proceeding (see previous f-locked entry) and ditto the plans for my birthday party next weekend.  I've been tidying today, and the house will probably be respectable in time for an invasion of chums and chumettes, provided the BatPup doesn't decide to disassemble the bookshelf at the last minute and the EDoD doesn't set fire to the cat.  On past experience, both of these are at worst only moderately likely.

My brother and sister-in-law suffered a computer virus recently, so I've been rebuilding their laptop.  I used an Ubuntu Live CD to thoroughly reformat the hard disk - I figure very few viruses can survive the forced change from NTFS to EXT3 (ie from the Windows disk layout to the completely different Linux one).  XP is reinstalled, taking up all but 10Gb of the hard disk.  I'll be installing Ubuntu (Kubuntu, actually, since it's what I have) on the remaining 10Gb, so that if anything goes haywire again it will be relatively easy to log in to the uninfected OS and slurp all the files onto a CD or external drive without running the risk of further infection.

I'd love to get them into Linux properly, but my brother enjoys his games and my sister in law is Chinese - are there any versions of Linux that can be relied upon to handle Chinese input methods and software without barfing?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?  kirmish?

In other news: didn't get much done on the instructions for installing Gratian, or on the changes to automate the configuration for new users.  Too many nights of getting the BatPup to bed too late, and I can't do it on the bus because Jottit requires a net connection to work.  But I'll get there; at least I know syridian and Benedict (does he have an LJ?) have plenty of other things to do with their time, so they're not twiddling their thumbs.

Me, I have thirty seconds of thumb twiddling booked for 8:47pm on Tuesday, 23 April 2047, but I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in...

I'm pleased with today. I achieved three things.

1. My Beloved thelancrewitch had her birthday, and with reference to the wish-list website I set up for us a while ago I found a complete set of presents that she actually wanted!  Given that she's even harder to shop for than I am, I think this is pretty noteworthy.  She now has a book on companion planting and another on organic gardens, a laundry trolley, and a large wodge of Swiss chocolate.  And I made her breakfast in bed, sorta-kinda (she had to remind me how to do scrambled eggs, cos it's a while since Mother's Day) and endeavoured to keep the Small People at bay so she could have a reasonably lazy day.  There was some annoyance at the Boy Wonder's inability to sleep for more than ten minutes at a stretch, but at least he sleeps pretty much all night, so that's something you can bear.
2. The new Canon Herald, Lady Teffania Tuckerton, got in touch via chat and I talked her through setting up Gratian.  She now has everything she needs to upload changes direct to Canon Lore, and even has the keys to the blog so she can talk about it in public.  I'm so glad she's on board: Bethan is, as ever, freakishly competent (if somewhat intimidating at times for that reason) but Tiff understands the heraldic mindset in a different way, making it easier to explain some of the site's particular weirdnesses to her.  For example, she had absolutely no difficulty with me deleting two awards that were given to a particular person against his express wishes (and which he later resigned).  Bethan would, I suspect, be dubious about the editing of the official record, but merely listing the awards as "resigned" would not be enough for this fellow, who has been completely consistent in his opposition to the award system ever since he joined.  So for him I added the "will refuse all awards" marker to the database, and he's its first beneficiary.  So Tiff is on the job, and I'll be updating the software to her specifications.  It helps that she really likes it, too.
3. In between all of the above, I also got the dining room and family room tidy.  That may sound like a small thing, but believe me: it was an ordeal.  The Boy Wonder leaves my Beloved with exactly 0 minutes and 0 seconds free each day, so housework is an impossibility.  I come home and generally need to spend every second until the BatPup goes to sleep (usually around 10ish) entertaining her and helping to keep the Daddy/Daughter bond going in light of the encroachment of the Boy Wonder on her formerly simple life.  And I try to give the Beloved some time off from the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM and the aforementioned pre-ambulatory poo factory.  So it's a red letter day if I get any washing up done, and the rest is right out.  Weekends, therefore, are for cleanage.  But now we have a lovely new floor that I just found, and the place no longer gives me a tension headache to look at.  So that's good.

Generally, not a bad day.  Now I just need to do some work on the Politarchopolis website, and I can maybe get to bed before midnight.  <weakly>Yay.</weakly>

Having just reached a successful milestone in a number of projects, I was pleased to see an article extolling the virtues of Pascal, or more specifically the Delphi dialect of Pascal. The author's quite right, and it's something I've felt for many years: Delphi hits the sweet spot between too much power (C, C++) and too much hand-holding and under-the-covers magic (Python, Java, everything else). It seems verbose, in that you use begin and end instead of { and } and so on, but it's not really. It works, and that's what I like about it.

Pity Borland can't manage to market it. They really need to sell it to someone with comparatively superior marketing skills. I think Rodney Adler is looking for a gig...

But I digress.

The most significant milestone is Gratian, the program I wrote for the Canon Lore database update. I've been off on a tangent adding a feature half-suggested by syridian, with the result that nothing worked properly because I'd had to rip the guts out to rebuild them. For the last week and a bit, I've been carefully excising the feature in question and trying to knit the guts back into something workable. Tonight I got the last of it behaving: Gratian can now upload changes in real time to the Canon Lore website. The new Canon Herald has a copy, so I have no doubt there will be changes coming soon to everyone's favourite red, blue and white elephant.

I still have bugs to fix, including some serious show-stoppers, but the thing is functional, and that's good news.

In my on-going efforts to divest myself of millstones, having dealt in a small way with one of them, I'm now moving on to the biggest and nastiest: the Canon Lore website. The Canon Herald will be crowned Queen this coming weekend, so she's passed the job on to a volunteer while she's off pointy-hatting with her large, lumpy consort. I rebuilt my computer a while back and haven't got it all behaving yet, especially the Windows portion of it, which now lives inside a virtual machine instead of on a separate partition on my hard disk. This presents challenges: I have a bunch of files I need to transfer from Manticore (my Linux laptop) to Seahawk (my Windows VM running on Manticore). But I can't figure out how. The VM doesn't seem to want to talk to the USB ports, so sticking it on a memory stick won't work. The old Shared Folders trick doesn't work in VMWare Server, but I can't figure out how to use network folders. So it's being a bit tricky. I shall pray to Google for guidance, I think, and try to get things going.

Plan of attack is this: first, follow and update the instructions I wrote syridian a while back, to install Apache, MySQL and assorted other tools onto Seahawk. Also, install Delphi -- that part is easy, since I've done it a few times and have a CD and an excellent set of instructions from jeff_duntemann. Get Gratian running, and fix the bugs and commented-out bits that were stopping it uploading its changes to the website. Then, get the acting Canon up and running so she can put changes through. Dedicate a little time -- probably have to be two hours twice a week, but more initially -- to maintaining the software.

As usual, the official SCAdians in question are not happy, although they're diplomatic about it. And as usual, there's nobody else to volunteer for the job. Most good programmers, I suspect, are smart enough to realise that doing something right ends up being a lot less fun than it seems at the start. A valuable lesson I have now learned in spades!

So I'll keep at it, and provided my Small People don't keep staying up until 10pm Every. Fracking. Night, I shall achieve something.

But first, Google. Always Google.

An old boss of mine used to have a quote on her wall, something to the effect of: Nobody on their deathbed ever regrets not having spent more time at the office. It's pretty much how I feel too. I don't go home every Friday afternoon wishing I could come in to work tomorrow too. (Come to think of it, I wish I didn't have to come in every day, and this is a job I enjoy!) For me, work is something I do to avoid being evicted; my real life is my family.

This is the real reason Canon Lore became such a low priority for me: I just don't care about SCA stuff as much as I used to, either. Given the choice between writing exciting software or playing with my Elder Daughter and my BatPup, I will choose the latter every possible time. Of course I know I have to get my commitments out of the way, but it's a chore every single time.

Nevertheless, I handed Gratian version 0.7 over to the new Canon Herald tonight, with the able assistance of syridian through the magic of Skype. It's not finished yet. In fact, a feature that he suggested some months ago has required some hefty rewriting of the underpinnings, so it's now less complete than it was, but it's usable -- I hope! -- and the new Canon can now take the job on.

I have a finite set of tasks remaining on my Fifty Ninth Street Bridge Song list (being the ones I must complete before I can sing that line honestly. This is them:

Canon Lore/Gratian

uploading of changes to the master database

storing Fix Me emails on the database

bug fixes

extra minor features (resigning awards, "irrelevant people" marker, extra cross-links

Politarchopolis website

photo meta-gallery

calendar view

gentry list

Mr Death (paid work!)

XML-to-PDF-via-PHP library

some fixes to an older job

bill him for the last lot of work! and buy a dishwasher! whee!

Stuff for Dee's Comic Shop, maybe?

Websites

flurf.net

batpup.com

mirroring our LiveJournals and uploading old blog entries

Manticore (my laptop)

fix a couple of outstanding bugs in the new Ubuntu 7.04

get Apache and PHP working

change all my passwords on every system and website

Just heard from Sveinn, my minionbeta-tester; he's been plowing through the Fix Mes and also taking good copious notes on what I need to fix in Gratian.

512 / 836 (61.2%)

I'm busy cleaning up for a "do" this evening, and I have family things to do tomorrow, so I expect I'll be relying on Sveinn to do the plowing through of further Fix Mes, if he so desires. But hey; it's progress, and that's what we need!

Through the magic of Skype and FileZilla, Gratian has begun its long march to conquer the world: Sveinn is now set up with his own copy, and just a few minutes ago he uploaded his first change into the system. Woot! He's planning to play around, do some of the easier Fix Mes and get familiar with the software. I've warned him about the more egregious bugs and gotchas, and he's going to keep notes on what desperately needs fixing, but basically the end is in sight!

467 / 834 (56.0%)

Not many Fix Mes done lately, but a lot of important new features. I can delete people! I can merge multiple copies of royalty without messing their reigns up! The inexplicable bug that was refusing to remember the kingdom of the Middle is now explicable and solved!

The software is still aggravating to use. There are a lot of cosmetic things that I can live without but that will drive my successor mad. Fortunately, I have a guinea pig to help me get the last of them sorted (Hi Sveinn!) so some time when his ethernet card isn't letting its magic smoke escape, I'll send him the Beta version and see what he thinks. He lives right near the new Canon Herald, so once he's familiar with the software he can set her up with it. Excellent!

Now I hear my bed calling.

417 / 816 (51.1%)

Was just about to post that I'd done 50% of the Fix Mes, when Fergus sent through a Fix Me from his misty, conflagration-prone home atop the Blue Mountains. Fixed now. Half way through! Time to stop and have a rest, and maybe go pick up the monkeychickens from their Grand Moogi's place.

272 / 814 (33.6%)

Skived off work today due to extreme knackeredtude. Spent this morning hunting a stupid bug, but Fix Mes are still fading like newts in supernovas. Supernovae? Whatever.

215 / 814 (26.4%)

Into the home stretch now. I added a feature tonight that I thought of in the shower this morning: an extra window that connects to the Fix Me mailbox and lets me view Fix Me messages without needing to fiddle around with a separate program. As an added bonus, it contains just enough smarts that if it recognises a person's ID number, it jumps the main program to that person's file, saving me a few seconds of searching each time. It adds up!

Bed now. Tired. Brain hurts.

Coming along, coming along...

110 / 808 (13.6%)

(Aside: I hate how I have to hand-edit the code for that progress meter each time because the cretins at "Zokutou" can't be bothered to learn enough HTML to produce a simple graphic. How dumb do you have to be to get that wrong? Don't get me started on the use of tables for layout. What is this - 1997? Morons. People who use tables for layout any time after 2002 should be castrated. But I digress.)

Though it doesn't look like much from the meter, I made great strides with Gratian today. I got a bunch of outstanding bugs fixed and features implemented, like the ability to search across all the data internally and actually save a whole bunch of changes (previously you could edit them but not save the edits, because I hadn't gotten around to implementing that little detail). I also fixed a lot of bugs in the data, including one harmless but irritating bug caused by my earlier efforts to work around the bugs introduced by The Boss during his abortive attempt to edit the database via a tragically flawed web form. And auntyyolly has her Duchy at last! Only six months late; some people have been waiting years! (Whinger!)

Ah, and there's a very important new member of the Mouse Guard finally listed where she belongs. She watched as I entered the data, and was suitably pleased.

In other news... the Beloved and I went to seagoon's berfday partay this evening, after leaving the munchickens with their Grand Da and Grand Moogi. Lovely evening; Jon the Prevert's boof stoo was a particular hit. The Lemming Meringue Pie I made was a little flat due to following the recipe too closely (should have used three eggs for a pie dish that size - given that the recipe and the dish both came from my mother, you'd think she'd've said!) but never mind; it got et swiftly enough. Will make another tomorrow so the small people don't miss out, cos it was quite nice.

Will now go to bed. More Fix Mes to do tomorrow, and also a couple of other showstopper bugs. Gods willing I'll still be ready to begin training the new Canon Herald by Monday as planned, and then - bliss! - I'll really be able to sing "I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep"...

Gratian is coming along. I feel like I'm making real progress every time I sit down. My usual method is: 1. Find a Fix Me message from among the 700-odd in the mailbox. 2. Attempt to do what it asks. 3. Hack about with the program to make it possible to do what it asks. 4. Rinse, repeat.

So far I've got the merge working (except that it isn't giving me enough control over which awards to merge over) and the add-a-person code (except that it's saving them with the wrong ID number). Also lots and lots of other little features. Tonight I even fixed the list of reigns, so there are no longer any missing kings and queens from the big three kingdoms (Lochac, West and Caid). But I'm encountering the age-old problem: when you eat your own dogfood you keep wanting to change little things, user-interfacy things, when really you should be fixing the big stuff. It's a constant temptation to tweak and twiddle.

Never mind. My successor as Canon Herald now has a local copy of the database and website, courtesy of my fellow herald-geek Sveinn. Come Monday or so, I hope Gratian will be stable and feature-complete enough for her to have that as well, after which the pressure will be largely off me (and on to her).

Right now, I need some sleep.

Hmmm... I should put one of those running-total thingies here, like I've seen other LJs using. The total number of Fix Me messages in my mailbox, and the total number I've done so far. Let's see... yep, found via thebluefairy:

The "Fix Me" Tally

84 / 803 (10.5%)

I forgot to mention that I'd renamed the Canon Lore software. Here's the story.

Originally, when I first took on the job of Canon, I tried writing a pretty Windows program to edit it, but I failed. Probably I just didn't know the data well enough. So instead I invented the Canon Herald Email-Enabled Semantic Elucidator, or CHEESE, a sort of programming language for expressing changes to the database. The idea was that I or my minions would convert all the Fix Me messages to CHEESE, and run them through a program to update the database.

Unfortunately, the CHEESE went off. Badly. There was too much about it that was too complicated, both for users to use and for me to program.

So I shelved it and tried writing the Windows editor again. This time it seemed to work better, so I named the program Feta - a greek cheese, in honour of CHEESE and the fact that I was writing in the Delphi programming language.

Feta came along nicely, and in fact is neeeeeearly done. But as I removed all the smelly remains of CHEESE, I realised that the original name now meant very little. So I looked up canon lawyers in Wikipedia, and found Gratian, a twelfth century canon lawyer.

And of course, if you remove the second-last letter, what do you get?

Thus, nature balances itself.

Short note on Casino Royale: this is the best Bond movie I've seen. The people who set up the "Daniel Craig Is A Crap James Bond" website must be feeling a bit like those sad wankers who couldn't handle a Starbuck with ovaries (well, one ovary, apparently, but never mind the details) and are thus outcast whenever SF/TV fans get together to rave. CR had all the stuff I loved about Bond -- the locations, the twisty-turny betrayal-filled plot, the explosions, the incredible coolth -- and none of the stuff I hated, like the way James could never possibly lose because he's too indestructible. This one really worked. And for the record: no, I didn't predict the final plot-twist, even with my sister stage-whispering that it was the only possibility. She's more of a Bond fan than me, evidently.

Canon Lore software coming along nicely. Still on track to get it to the new Canon Herald by the end of the week, although how I'll do that long-distance I'm not too sure, since she's not hugely geeky so just saying "set up MySQL and get back to me" is unlikely to be the best way...

Now: to bed.

Five minutes to go. The Beloved is already asleep, having followed the BatPup's example in that regard earlier this evening. I have finally finished the Do What I Mean option to fix several hundred errors in the Canon Lore database. The rest of the software is now working pretty well, and I hope to have it ready to give to my successor as Canon Herald by next weekend. All the big work is done, now it's just lots of little features and bug fixes. And well over 700 "Fix Me" messages.

New Year's Resolutions? Don't believe in 'em. But I'll try this:

1. Finish Canon Lore.
2. Keep my job.
3. Fix flurf.net.
4. Be a better Dad to my kids.
5. Expand the range-of-effect of #4.

That'll do, Bat, that'll do. Good night, all. Happy New Year!

Nearly got the merge function working in Feta. It works like this:

Suppose your SCA name is Frederick von Flintschtone, but you used to be called Fred of Bedrock, and you've got some awards under each name. Or perhaps a previous Canon Herald was lacking a bit in literacy skills, so you have some awards under the name Froderick von Flantschtein. We need to merge these records together. We have to handle your former names (the "of Bedrock" one is listed, but the other one is just a typo so we can ignore it); we have to ensure your branch and mundane name are correct; and we have to make sure all your awards are listed with no double-ups. And then -- this is the painful bit -- if you've ever been a King or Prince, we need to make sure all the references to you under your old name are moved over to your new name.

It's tricky, and painful, but I've nearly got it working. The user interface is pretty straightforward; all that's left to do is the updating of the actual database on disk, since it's doing everything in memory to start with. I'm a bit knackered now, so I'll finish tomorrow night.

In other news: the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM and I went to the tourney, which was on despite the hail (!) of this morning ("sunny early-spring" - ha!). She played with the available kidlets, and had enough fun that she didn't want to go home for ages. I got to chat with chums and generally have a good time, although I'm annoyed that I didn't get to chat more with japester. At least anthraxia and I have our plans for the bardic circle fireplace at next Festival more or less sorted.

I came home and slept for an hour, and then had a lovely dinner and lots of daughter cuddles. All in all, not a bad Father's Day. Most pleased.

Now to bed.

Went to the Baronial Changeover tonight. (I think that became the official name of the event; better than "Invest/Devest", but still ugly. There must be something better.) It was odd: good bits, bad bits. The lighting was disappointing, mainly because it was a hyooooooj hall with a ceiling half way to Ceres, and consequently dreadfully dark. And the food? Get this: it was a Politachopolis feast, filled with visiting dignitaries from all over Lochac, and there wasn't enough food. People were hungry. Not so much that you were deafened by complaints, but by the usual standards of the barony whose motto is Ede! Ede! Nimis Macer Es!, it was a disappointment. But there were lovely people there, and even the ones who ordinarily give me the great steaming irrits were only mildly pompous/patronising/stupid. I did the investiture court because Siggie's voice went away (I'm a herald, occasionally, though not as much as I used to be), and I managed to avoid being a twit but I think I kept it going where it needed to be kept going, apart from one or two fluffed bits and clumsy ad-libs.

The new B&B will need a smidgen of voice training just to get their volume going, but they stayed on topic with no trouble, and were willing to read off the page when their memories went (as they always do). I think they gave an impression of efficiency and sincerity. Every B&B adds a different flavour to a group, and it's entertaining to watch. It's a bit like when Doctor Who regenerates, really; Stephen and Mathilde were Tom Baker, Francois and Aelfthrythe were William Hartnell, and Edmund and Leta were Peter Davison. Alessandro and Isobel will be interesting; I detect a touch of Christopher Ecclestone and a fair smidgen of Paul McGann. Thankfully we've never had Sylvester McCoy.

There were a pile of visitors. I really do like Draco and Asa -- especially Asa, who is a babe and who has always reminded me of an old girlfriend of mine. I caught up briefly with Yolande, and found out where her secret stash of online rants is kept; I'm reading through them now, occasionally going "ah! so that's what that was all about" and enjoying the way her voice comes out perfectly strongly in her writing. She keeps reminding me of John Clarke crossed with Paté Biscuit, which is a disgusting image but strangely morish.

Oh, and evildrakey smelt oddly of vanilla. Not sure why.

Tourneys are on tomorrow. Kind of tempted to go, just to see old friends and natter more, but it will have to be without the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM who was being terribly annoyed by my inability to take three steps without falling into another conversation. Used to irritate me about my Dad too; I've inherited it from him.

But tomorrow is also Father's Day, only my fourth as an actual Daddy, and I rather like the idea of spending the day with my family. We'll see what we can work out.

Meanwhile, I got Feta to acknowledge the concept of "modified", so that now it asks you if you want to save changes. Next trick is merging duplicate records together, and a bit more of the editing, and it'll be largely done. Late, but not too late.

Time out to boast, slightly. Feta, the Canon Lore editor, now includes a feature I hadn't thought I'd be able to manage. When you start up, it synchronises with the master database, downloading any changes if necessary and locking it for the duration -- that prevents two people using the program at the same time, but that's tolerable given that we're unlikely ever to be drowning in volunteers. Then, after you've made changes and saved them locally, you can click the new "Upload" button, and it does all of the following:

• Update the table containing the Order of Precedence;
• Generate the sparklines;
• Generate "platonic spellings" for the search engine;
• Check your local copy of the heraldic Ordinary and Armorial;
• Fill in the table of devices and badges by comparing names against the O&A (not yet);
• Read the "Fix Me" mailbox to see how many messages are in there;
• Saves the "Fix Me" count and the current date in a file that gets used by the website in various places;
• Backup the local database, just in case anything goes wrong;
• Upload the changed files (settings and sparklines);
• Backup the master database, just in case anything goes wrong; and
• Replace the entire master database with the local one, thus uploading all changes.

It's overkill in a couple of ways -- uploading an entire suite of tables when only one or two rows are changed -- but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that I have reduced the apostrophe lag: the time it takes to fix little fiddly typos like extraneous apostrophes (sorry - apostrophe's) and the like. It's now easy, really easy, like iPod easy -- to make changes. And so I will.

The rest of Feta is still a Work In Progress. In particular, right now I'm teaching it to handle the concept of "modified" (as in: please don't discard all my edits when I click the red X by accident). Once that's done, I'll be past the need to dedicate large wodges of time to it; I'll be able to sit down, hack for twenty minutes, and knock items off the To Do list. This is good, since life at the moment is not conducive to Rob Cox's Law ("Every computer program is only two thirty-hour debugging sessions away from perfect").