Well, we did some testing for the InTEL project today. The good news is that it is a lot more easy going than it has been in the past. The bad news is that there are quite a lot of bugs and a handful of aggravating UI glitches. Whenever we change something under the hood, we’re usually able to iron it out so that it works smoothly on the surface, but today a few nasty issues reared their heads. We’re deploying the tested exercises next week, so there isn’t much time to fix everything, but we will try our best.

Java XML persistence remains difficult and puzzling. I am finally beginning to wrap my head around the twisted internal logic that governs it. I still spend much of my time confused, but the situation is improving. We should be able to have things both save and load in a couple of weeks.

In the meanwhile, Janet gave a lecture at the PhD colloquium yesterday on how to write a book. She had some very useful advice. I’m going to write it up and put it online when I get the chance.

Finally, because I have some sort of dementia, I am working on a small independent project to visualize the parameter spaces for strange attractors. It was something that I was wanting to work on a long time ago, but now I know much much more about UI and application development than I ever dreamed was knowable. So, the project is actually not all that much work, at least not at this stage.

Is it odd that when you are used to programming most of the time, you can come to acknowledge the different types and dimensions of programming, and it eventually can become a leisure activity under certain circumstances?