[conspire] BALE

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bruce Coston (jane_ikari at yahoo.com):

> When will the " hardware upgrade " that allows BALE to
> advance from October finish ?

Actually, you're conflating two issues (and making the false assumption
that hardware issues preclude BALE being up to date).  I'm going to
answer both implied questions, because you have (in effect) asked them
-- even though it's equally likely that your _intende_ meaning is "I
miss having BALE be up to date."

1  The existing hardware can more than adequately support BALE in either
of two ways:  I can either manually edit every single entry as flat HTML
in a text editor, or Deirdre can assist me in replacing or repairing her
broken Python script whose absence prevents BALE from populating events
from its database templates.  Deirdre has a replacement Ruby script that 
she says _ought_ to work, but is untested.

2.  The replacement server, with reasonable disk space for a change
and 1.5 GB total RAM instead of 256 MB, got its hardware bugs shaken out
(you may remember), and now just needs to get its various network
daemons and other software facilities fully configured to take the
current box's place, and have the data contents cut over.  This will
require a dedicated effort over N hours, for values of N somewhere
between four and twenty (guesstimated), during which I may not be
interrupted for reasons other than someone I care about bleeding out or
dying.  (Not getting thus interrupted is a luxury seldom alloted to me.)