Another Lurker

[Kerry Hanson]

I'm a class three lurker; I've been playing with Swarm for about a year and
have been building a business competition model for one of the businesses of
the company (Texas Instruments).  The good news is that I've come up a tall
learning curve (and am still coming up) from having started essentially at
zero.  The bad news is that that particular business was just sold
eliminating the need for the simulation.  The joys of working in the private
sector.  There's no shortage of opportunity, however.  This gives me the
chance to start a new problem with a better base software design rather than
continue to patch bad code, and Lord knows, nobody has ever accused me of
writing good code.  

At swarmfest I'm interested in good design practices that are swarm specific
in the applications.  I've gone through tutorial-1.0.1, hello-world, etc and
those are great help; concepts over and above this level would be nice.
Easier user interfaces for those of us who don't dream of objective sheep
would be a good offline discussion topic as well.  The GP discussion will
also be interesting; has anybody who is interested read either of Koza's
books?  FYI, for those who don't want to read another book between now and
Saturday, Melanie Mitchell's book has a nice brief description of GP.  

I've installed swarm on a laptop with slackware and tcl7.6/tk4.2 and have
been runing it for a while.  Haven't found any problems, it seems to work
fine. The raster problem is caused by blt_ZoomStack (I think) and if Barry
has a solution, great.  I'll be bringing the laptop out to swarmfest with
all of the user contribs installed so this offers another chance to mess
with the applications in real time.  

Looking forward to seeing y'all out there.

Kerry Hanson