Last evening's emotional storm (self-indulgent details omitted for Advogato's sake) was a great release, calming me down and letting me settle down at work and actually get something done. It's time to tackle the difficult task of rewriting our existing SQL database into the form of Python objects, so I started in on that, doing a simple transliteration of tables/columns to objects/attributes. I have no idea what the methods will have to be, but this is just a rough effort. Along the way I'm finding several bogosities in the SQL database schema: non-key columns duplicated among several related tables (for semantic reasons? to simplify queries? not clear...), interrelated tables whose relationships aren't apparent, endless copies of the primary key columns. Tomorrow we start having requirements meetings to thrash out the interface.

In the evening I sent off some thoughts on network installation of Python modules, added support for two minor functions to the curses module, and started thinking about how to support the ncurses mouse functions.

Book review: The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, ed. S.T. Joshi
The great danger of annotations is that they can become a distraction that breaks up the flow of the text while not contributing anything Given HPL's vocabulary and frequent historical references, roughly a third number of the footnotes here are of this annoying type. The remaining majority point out various interesting things: parallels between the 4 stories included here and HPL's other stories; echoes of passages by Machen and Dunsany; commentary on HPL's scientific and philosophical views; and a few symbolic or psychological interpretations. The book contains "The Rats in the Walls", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and "At the Mountains of Madness". Only "Mountains" was is disappointing, seeming endless and slow-moving on this re-reading, while "Colour out of Space" is still one of HPL's finest.