Split Attention

If anyone has a solution, please tell me.

I have some tasks. The one that's almost off my front burner is a conversion job. There's a gob of files that exist in the worst possible XML format, which is there's one entry in the XML, which is a huge compressed BLOB (binary large object) of unknown format. The files have a name that say what kind of job created it and what day, but if you don't know which project went through which day, it gives you no help. We can export as (a more real) XML, which gives us the sample information we need. Thing is, there are over 1500 samples to be converted, which really cannot be a by-hand operation.

So, I'm working with Sikuli again, this time on Windows not Ubuntu. I've done the best I can, but this is a program written in Jython (a Java [not my favorite] implementation of Python[not my favorite]) running in Sikuli (taking over the keyboard and mouse) going over Samba to grab the configuration and data files, running in 32-bit Windows 7 on a VirtualBox instance. There's lots and lots of not-necessarily-stable involved here, which means I have to keep checking on it to ensure it keeps running. Which means, while it is going, I can't really throw my mind at any task that really takes my attention, which, basically, means any task I need to do at work, which makes me feel terribly unproductive, even as I know that it's much more productive than if I was doing all that crud by hand.

So, until I can code up a way that's much more repeatable and stable, or at least until I get well past the 10% completion this project is at about now, I can't really focus elsewhere.