mn8: O God, I'm running so late, like never before. I barely think or do anything else, yet still progress is so slow. The real problem is that designing an OO interpreter is not so trivial. All the time I have to come back to revise some design flows. I think that is called refactoring ;). At least I do it!

Spent the whole weekend working like a crazy to refactor a few things instead of adding functionality, which means four more days of delay. But I had to do it, it was just not looking and functioning right. This was also the first time (I remember anyway) of hating Java. I just don't understand why they did the static behave the way it does during inheritance. At the end had to use the Singleton pattern, it works but I'm still not very happy. I will leave it as it is anyway, can't afford and don't think there is other solution.

Being so late and still having to work on it, always makes me think if I'm not like the cowboy programmer in the project management examples. But mn8 is (some thing which never stops amaze me) working as it was planned, more ready and more complete every day. But as I look around me, I don't really see people doing as radical and as much refactoring as me, and this worries me. Is that possible that the design was right from the first time, I don't think so, there is no such thing. I'm afraid that the others rather patch things instead of doing refactoring.

This time being late had some benefits too. DataStore got a alpha but released Avalon (finally we are not going to release it with a CVS version of Avalon), lot's of bug fixes, and a brand new SEP interpreter plus a more stabilized XML-RPC server, and a full blown PHP/XML-RPC example. Yep it works great. Crow is working on some small Java tools to let us transforms mails from mbox format in XML and then to feed them to DataStore. Will need them latter anyway, plus that is a good way of testing DataStore.

Atech did the BEEP handler so now you can open an URLConnection to a beep://xxx URL and it will work, still you have to know what to talk over the connection, but at least will allow mn8 to open url's transparently. Now he works on the XML-RPC handler. Let's see how that works out.

A, not to forget about HyperPad. It got a pair of skin handlers so you can have skins in it (doesn't really work well, but don't think is our fault). It amazes me how well the new Linux Java works. It has better font rendering than the IBM one, and definitely is faster than under Windows 2000. It wasn't always like that. Linux rulez!

Thank's to neurogato for pointing out that: Alan's code crew text is actually lyrics to the tune of Motorhead's "(We Are) The Road Crew", yes indeed fits beautifully. BTW, if we are at the SmoothWall chapter it just happent last week to replace an old router based on LRP to a firewall running SmoothWall, it took us about two hours but only because, we went for the installation first and then to read the manuals, just like any (in)sane person would do. Great piece of software!