The hacking had to do with the fact that I wanted, per the request of some of the undergrads, to run a little twelf tutorial some time during finals. I figured, hey, maybe I should prepare a few slides to make things run nice and smoothly. But wait! I remember that I am living in this modern world where "slides" need not mean "TeX bullet-point mode in landscape format" but rather "arbitrary crazy fun Flash shit". And arbitrary crazy fun Flash shit includes the XMLSocket object, which, despite its name (much like javascript's XMLHttpRequest) has about jack shit to do with XML as a matter of principle. Really it means that you can do pretty much arbitrary standard socket communication to servers that live on the same host as the SWF file does. So the reason I'm still awake at 2:30 is I learned the unix socket API that smlnj provides enough to get a flash program to talk to twelf. SERVER OK makes a nice big green checkmark, and SERVER ABORT serves you up a menacing red X. Maybe I need some game-show RRRNK wrong-answer sort of noise, too. Clearly my judgment is somewhat impaired by the early-morning time.
Ridiculous machine-checked (and dynamically machine-recheckable as I type in e.g. examples proposed by the audience) presentations, here I come!
