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!