But you know what? The remaining testing is all to do with auto-trading, and now it's the weekend.

If the markets are moving at all on New Years Day, I'll test then. Otherwise it will be Tuesday.

This is v0.9.0 we're talking about. So testing on Monday or Tuesday, released on Wednesday.

Then let's say a week for other people to use v0.9.0 and tell me of any errors they come across.

That makes v1.0 out on 10th January. That's later than I said. But v0.9.0 is what we call the 'release candidate', and is going to be 99% as good as v1.0. So it's almost like I'm delivering early... ahem :-)

(Just don't read those posts from December '05 which have me finishing that Christmas).

Anyway, if you sign up when v0.9.0 is released, you get a solid application and free alerts until the end of June. Heck, you get that now - everyone race to the purchase page.

Ahem. v1.0 would have been released on Christmas Day, had the two days before that not been Saturday and Sunday. So, you should really blame the inventors of the Gregorian calendar rather than me :-)

I'd prefer to release late than release without testing. Especially v1.0. I know there are some people waiting for v1.0 before they hop aboard, and I would hate that their first try be a bad experience.

The reason for the delay: procrastination. I had left this one task right 'til the end precisely because I didn't want to do it. And now that it's the last thing to do, the feeling of not wanting to do it has not gone away. I make sporadic progress and then find something else to do.

The other thing is job interviews. I've been searching for a job. Probably if you're a prospective employer, reading about my procrastination is not what you want to see. On the other hand, it shows I'm honest. I could have made up some excuse about trying to knock off other things on my TODO list before I start a new job. Which I am doing, but only because I'm procrastinating. The thing is, there's no real difference between this task and any of the others. Kind of bizarre, really. If I had a manager, I would have raised the issue long ago.

But no managers for me right now, just customers. Angry, unforgiving customers, all of them :-) So, anyone who has subscribed already, I'll move your subscriptions forward from today until the day that v1.0 is actually put out. Today being the 21st of December, if v1.0 was put out on Christmas Day (which it won't), 4 days would be added to your subscriptions.

Anyone who subscribes from now until v1.0 is released, you get the same deal. And you're not exactly getting a bad product as it is at v0.8.7.

So what's the plan now?

v0.9.0 has a lot of changes. I mean *a lot*. Mostly small, but some with far-reaching implications. So I need a decent testing time.

I was keeping a couple of other things until v0.9.1, but given that it'll be a 3-day weekend soon, I might as well just get it all done in v0.9.0. And that version can become the release candidate.

I'll put that out between Christmas and New Years.

When I'm satisfied that there are no major bugs, I'll turn it into v1.0.

I would have liked to have said v1.0 will be out on New Years Day, but there won't be enough trading days between the release of v0.9.0 and New Years. Again with the Gregorian calendar.

You got that?

• v0.9.0 out between Christmas and New Years;
• It turns into v1.0 when I'm satisfied;
• To say I'm sorry, any subscriptions (new and existing) will be moved forward by the number of days between today and the release of v1.0. It will probably turn out to be about 14 days for free.

The thing is, see, that my new external hard-drive arrived. So... I kinda spent a lot of time loading all the historical text files, and gathering all my trading strategy ideas into one place ready for backtesting.

Then a guy asked if I could do some custom software development for him, and I spent a lot of time researching and typing out the world's longest email to him.

End result is v0.9.0 will very likely not be out this weekend. However, I do not foresee this affecting the Christmas Day release date of v1.0.

Apologies.