Just today, I was moved to quote Housman’s “Queen of Air and Darkness” in the office, although I confused it with Keats’ “Belle Dame Sans Merci.” All of these sentiments are tangled up with the shallow imitators of Newton who wanted to “disenchant” the world, and with the various Romantics, Swedenborgians, and Plotinist/Platonists who struggled in the mix. A key problem is that I would need to frequently update and back up data on these interconnected personages.

A relational database is an obvious alternative. However, managing a relational database is not always straightforward. Some kind of Java app might be used to contain relationally organized data. Come to think of it, I bet that NetBeans has all kinds of little things to manage this kind of task.

My little EEE PC is a natural platform for this kind of task, but I haven’t tested NetBeans on it. Certainly it cannot handle Eclipse well: it might be able to handle NetBeans.