Well, it's been a LONG time since my last post, and a lot has changed in the period of time.
I still plug away at the text editor [ aiming for the end of November to have a working product that will be useful to me at work, and then hopefully releasing in the new year ]. I have pattern recognition working decently now.
Also, I have a decent Ruby wrapper for the whole thing, and have developed a plug-in system to allow customization. Still have some basic loose ends to tie up, but it's coming along.
I have been wondering how much to worry about speed. There is some lag time between keystrokes and responses, but the correct result always eventually appears.
But it still remains fun. The editor has come a long way, and I have had to push through several rough spots. But it will be worth it in the end.
As well, I'm thinking about switching distros. Mandriva is a VERY high quality distro which manages to balance stability well with staying bleeding-edge. It's the first Linux distro that really got me interested, and I can still see why. Plus, it's not well known over hear, which suits my personality nicely :).
I also think it will be soon time to get my own machine...I've put a lot of research in, and I think a Dell XPS would go nicely with Mandriva, and there's something about it's particular take on style that appeals to me.

HP kicks ass!
[ It's even SUSE certified! ]

Just a quick note, since I haven't done one in a while, to say that the editor is coming together, but I still have quite a bit of design time ahead. Meta data generation works sweetly, and all of the components seem to be working well in the base cases. But I have a lot of thought work ahead now in terms of design : I plan to pour just as much thought and effort into designing the service interface and web interface as I did into creating the editor service. So it's gonna be another 3-4 months before it is production ready, but I have been actually looking forward to this moment for awhile. I love designing stuff!!

I have just finished getting some final details of the editor ironed out. It now appears to do all I had set out to make it do on this first iteration. No more features, no matter how small, shall be put into it. It is at this stage that I am reminded of the introduction of Lord of the Rings, which I recently read.
Tolkien wrote that after the long years it took to make it to the end, he had to start at the end and basically rewrite the story backwards to ensure consistency and improve the overall quality of the tale. I beleive software deserves the same sort of treatment. I have come up with basic tests to ensure the separate classes perform the basic functions decently. But now I feel I must go back, starting at the most high level classes, and refactor to make the code beatiful. That is, better comments explaining classes, better variable names, cleaner method names, and more well arranged methods (both in interface code and implementation code).
And thinking back to my University days, when writing essays I spent almost as much time editting the content as I did coming up with the initial content. And I am hoping that this will mean payoff when it comes to the next iteration of the code.
Lots of good progress, and still as exciting as when I started! By the end of summer, there should be something sweet to have to show for my work. Wicked!

After some (not so deep thinking), I decided to tackle implementing regular expressions on MudSkipper. It's been a bear, but I think I've finally gotten a solid understanding of how it works and how to proceed. It was a rather hairy time between whey I decided to try this and now. Regular expressions have always seemed a little mystical to me. But now that I'm this far, I know that it's just a matter of time before I get it working. And that will be a sweet day when I get there.
I'm aiming for end of summer for the first version of MudSkipper to be done. Should be sweet. Stay tuned.