Hello my adoring public. (Whom I could probably fit in a small conference room.) I haven't disappeared completely off of the face of the Earth. I have been side tracked with a little drama in the not-so-fun side of software development for the past few weeks.

Some may say "oh you mean the bugs and stuff?". No, that's actually fun in a perverse way. This is the "trying to keep the tools I use up to date while not exposing myself to bugs from other developers" sort of stuff. Namely, helping the Tcl community recover from losing one of our more active partners, ActiveState. Now ActiveState is still a player and all, and they are still offering ActiveTcl. But they don't do any kind of active development work and testing like they did when ActiveTcl was a commercial product of theirs.

As a result, I seem to be the finder of the "oh we didn't think of that" when it comes to new Tcl core development. And the only remedy seems to be to start my own Tcl binary distribution. Not because I want to sell Tcl software. Just so I can have a stable foundation to build my stuff on. And that foundation is also a way to show the core developers "hey, when you change this header it breaks all of theses old extensions." In the process I have also discovered that if I want many of the issues actually fixes with these extensions I'm going to have to fix them myself.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I am struggling to etch out time to hammer out story lines and setting for the Iliad. But I'm getting there. Slowly. Case in point, I have a system together now to generate all of the characters: See Building the Cast of the Iliad - d20 style