selectors and default commands, release 1.0

Spent the day in the hospital. Rupali had her eye operation--an apparent success, though it will take 2 days for her vision to clear.

Worked on the COODBMS documentation while at the hospital. I also worked up a todo list of things that need to be done before we can call COODBMS done.

Rupali and I were dead tired on our return, but I did manage to enhance the Browse user interface. Now for example if you enter the databases command, it numbers the list of databases. If then you enter the number of one of those databases, the database command is executed with that selection.

Why spend time on browse? Isn't it just a learning tool? Well, I was thinking about that today too. We're going to need a configuration tool and there is no reason why browse can't be extended to handle that. So a minor enhancement to the user interface (it was just too awkward as it was) is well justified to make it more usable.

My concern here is that for COODBMS to be a success, we will need to get folk using it. Having good tools is helpful, but we need those samples just as much. Hmm. That is one road to success at least. Another possibility is putting a great wiki on top of it. But I'm not known for writing great GUIs. Success then, one way or another, means building up a team of dedicated developers. But for that we need a really good value proposition. COODBMS is just too different to be adopted quickly or easily. It is a long path. But it always is when you're talking about radically new technology. And programmers are always a hard sell. Sigh!