Life: had a drink with a couple of old friends, Rupert and Dan Poon, on Friday night. I worked for their Dad, Peter, alongside Rupert, Dan and their younger brother Andy from 85 to 90. Back then the company was called ITR, now it's Romaxtech. It was fun to hear about developments at Romaxtech. Since 85 the front end development language has changed from Fortran to C to C++ to Smalltalk. The analytics are still in Fortran though. From what Rupert and Dan said, many of the issues they face are the same as 12 years ago. Plus ca change...

Hacking: managed a productive hour this morning before the kids got up. Worked on a small part of levitt: how to address "standard geometries" with Xpath like syntax. Standard geometries are an idea borrowed from scientific visualisation. A StdGeom is a medium to large bundle of data composed from atomics, lists and dictionaries. There are rules for how they may be composed together, and addressed. The payoff from StdGeoms comes in eliminating dumb data bearing classes. These classes tend to embed tightly coupled data members, with lots of accessor methods, but little significant behaviour. They also tend to increase the coupling between sub systems. Using StdGeoms as the main parameter type to methods encapsulating significant behaviour makes that behaviour much more reusable.