Update

Sorry about the broad title: I’m going to be talking about a whole lot of things.

First things first, I’m almost done with this iteration of the academic school year! Exciting.

The metal reprap is coming along: it’s coming along at a good clip, but man, if it makes it, it’s gonna be close. I have a week-ish left, while finals are going on. It is going to be interesting: unfortunately, I don’t have any money, and I can’t get belts or extruder parts. So, definitely can’t finish-finish, but I already knew that was going to happen… right?

I noticed, a few weeks ago, just how much the school’s library touch-screen kiosk sucked. So, I decided that I would whip up a new design for it, and it turns out that thinking about how to design for touch-screen interfaces is an interesting exercise. Plus, it’s fun to throw around huge buttons. We’ll see what happens with that: I doubt they can pay me to finish it up, especially since there’s people in place to maintain these sorts of things.

Working on that project, I’ve noticed that my design skills suck. I mean, look at the current design for EZLO: it really, really sucks. Which leads me to my next bit of news: some other guys have come up with a new way to do online-latex, latex-labs. Hell, there’s something called scribtex, too. The difference is, they (latex-labs) are basing their project off google docs, where a google docs style latex editor was one of my project objectives, and they have a much better interface. Hell, they don’t even consider monkeytex, much less EZLO, to be a true competitor. So, I might be done with EZLO: I just don’t have time for it (this last year, I’ve put oh-so-little time into it), and other people are starting to fill in the gaps. I’ve scratched my itch, and it got me through a couple years. So, what’ll I do? I’m not sure at this point in time: latex-labs might need another dev to help out, even if it’s sporadic and not always so-helpful help. Or, maybe I’ll rewrite EZLO, and try harder to offer a competitive alternative. Or, I’ll pull it from the server and let it die, and go work on other things. What to do, what to do…