The first sounding for variants in the Latin text of John the Deacon was a decided success. Now we have four variants for a single word, which seems to divide the witnesses quite nicely. There is another doubtful place a couple of lines below, to look into next.
I’ve downloaded around 30 manuscripts so far, and there are more that I can get at. I suspect there are around 200 manuscripts. It is unfortunate that only one of those in Milan is online, and none from Naples, because these two sources probably influenced the early editions.
In the middle of this busy activity, a week ago, I was struck down by a winter virus, and had to cancel all my engagements and lie on a sofa, day after day. No sniffles, just a headache and weakness. I started to recover last night, but it will be a day or two yet, I think.
Last night I came across a Latin idiom which I wanted to add into the help for QuickLatin. This I did and … the whole program refused to compile. Some mysterious problem with “mshtml.dll”. Nothing to do with my changes. Suspiciously the files referenced on disk were “updated” by a Windows update earlier yesterday. Fixing the problem involved two hours of googling and some rather hairy messing around. Had I not been a professional programmer, I would have been defeated. Even so I was frustrated that my development environment broke, for no reason. It did remind me of how poor is the quality of the development tools for Windows. Now that Bill Gates is no longer in charge, there is nobody at the top of the company who programs. It shows.
I’m looking forward to getting back to John soon!