It's the hill climbing factor. It doesn't matter if you've just climbed the smallest mole hill next to Mount Rainier, if you've worked hard to get to the top of that hill, and you've struggled to get there, you experience the biggest high having achieved a local maximum when you get to the top.

I've often theorized that this is why the masses never have taken to the higher level langauges such as Smalltalk, Lisp, ML. Building and enumerating a doubly linked list in C is a challenge! Doing it in Smalltalk. Meh. You run out of easy hills to feel good about climbing.

Tonite, I'm feeling that kind of feeling. After banging my head, googling through obscure references, I've got to the point where I can do a one-click doit to download all of the Cairo, Zlib, Libpng sources and compile Zlib and Libpng, using Microsoft's freely available Express tools.

I'm simply amazed that Microsoft took over the world, so to speak, with such an operating system/environment, where automating anything is so difficult. The flip side, is that getting an automated download and configure/compile gives me a huge rush.

On the way, I'm having continued fun with Herl. I've further fleshed out some of it's OS interface parts for Windows now. Keeping in the tradition of "making it up as I go."