Signed the contract and started the big work. Have almost everything organized and laid out, but since it’s a big book I’ve been cycling over it and refining things.

Another thing I’ve done is created a new project (soon to be published) called Idiopidae after the trapdoor spider. What this little tool does is allow me to inject parts of actual source code accurately into my LyX document using GNU source-highlight LaTeX translation. It can do whole files or sections partioned by comments.

Yes I know about “noweb” and friends, but their syntax blows and they have the fatal flaw of requiring me to hack my code inside their disgusting syntax. Instead, Idiopidae keeps my prose in one file and my code (fully runnable) in a separate file, then it does the job of putting it all together at the end.

This tool is saving me a ton of work, and for fun I decided to rewrite it in Factor from the hack job I did in Ruby. Once it’s working I’m gonna release it for everyone to play with and hopefully it’ll help other people trying to writ technical books.