2.14 release: good news and bad news

[Graham Percival]

Good news: we're down to 18 release-blocking items: 9 code, and 9
non-code.  I can't really estimate the time required to fix the code
regressions.  The other items are all 2-10 hours.  So 2.14 might
happen in Feb.  Granted, this doesn't include any new regressions that
we might discover when we announce a beta version and finally invite
users to try 2.13.

Bad news: I'm fairly appalled at the materials for my department's
"introduction to programming" course.  Apparently this course has a
horrible reputation -- even good students who instructors are trying
to recruit as PhD students end up almost failing the course, and only
scrape through by doing an exam resit.  The general consensus appears
to have been "oh, engineers can't do programming", and nobody cared
about it.  Well, *I* care about programming, and after teaching the
labs for one week, I can see why people don't do so well in this
class.  So I'm going to spend a lot of unpaid time totally rewriting
the course materials; as a teacher, I can't ignore the mess that these
poor kids would have to struggle through.

As a result, I'm reducing my lilypond time to 1 hour on weekdays and 2
hours on weekends+holidays.

Sorry,
- Graham