I really want to discuss Barzun’s book, but I need a little more time to digest it.  I only wish I had been taught history this way when I was at school.  As I recall, history at school was a little too compartmentalized.  Or perhaps I wasn’t mature enough to see the big picture by myself.

So, anyway I’ll report on something else that is pretty exciting.  Today I decided to finally collate all the marks for our Honours students that I am responsible for.  I have a lot of records, but they are a little disorganized.  I have tried in the past to hand-code a suitable web-based system to store the marks.  It is not very complicated, but very tedious.  Long ago I looked at Ruby on Rails, which I simply do not have the time to learn.  It looks complicated and unwieldy.  I also had a look at CakePHP, which does the same thing, but in a programming language that I know.  At that time CakePHP was still somewhat primitive.  But I had another look at it and it seems to be usable now.  I coded up the system today and it works beautifully.  Still a few kinks to iron out, but nothing major.  And it was nice to work with the old model-view-controller paradigm again.  Although there are significant differences, this was an important facet in the Oberon Gadgets system.  Oh, how many hours did I not spend on that!  Enjoyable hours, and I learned a lot, but I cannot help but feel that some of that time was wasted.  It is a great pity that Oberon did not make more of an impact.  It was a wonderful learning tool, but also a very sensible and usable system.  It used a tiny, tiny fraction of the resources that Windows or Linux consumes, had many novel ideas and a wonderful, intuitive interface.  Perhaps sometime in the future the world will be ready for it.  I still want to rescue my “ScreenPoints” screensaver code, but unfortunately it is near the bottom of a very long to-do list.