(no subject)

And so my first part-time week draws to a close. I did a lot of good ICCB work on Wednesday, and yesterday and today I've actually been more productive on Volity. Meh. I'm not feeling terribly guilty because I managed to have at least one Perl script of my own authorship running the whole time (chomping over enormous data files, loading hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds into a database), which means I was working, right?

Feeling good about Volity because we all finally came to an agreement on a topic that's been a stone in my shoe for over a year. (This is the whole "seats" issue, for those following mailing-list jabber.) It took that long for me to finally become convinced that, OK, it's worth putting into the core protocol. It really ended with me finding (with daerr's help) some good reasons for it that nobody else had really put forward.

With that settled, it becomes a major task for me, as I flip into official Volity-mode, to ask how close we are to codifying v1.0 of the platform spec. daerr and I started working on Volity (née "MIGS") two years ago. We now have several brilliant people working on various implementations, and yet the protocol has still been defined as "whatever jmac pulls out of his ass and posts to the Wiki", with the understanding that I (or anyone, but usually I) might swoop in and change said Wiki at any moment.

This is not scalable. We need a spec. Fortunately, I think we're either ready to have one now, or almost ready. Taking inventory will be interesting.

Well, time to go filch my weekly beer from the partying biologists downstairs.