Some part of me is definitely a geek. I wound up working more than 14 hours straight today, mostly because I just couldn't stop working on the problem until it was solved, but the problem refused to solve itself.

What I've been doing is creating a trigger definition mechanism using Nevow's LivePage (Ajax) technology. The trigger definition is rather complex. A trigger is basically an event-routing rule, similar to what you see in your mail client's sorting rules.

In this first stage there's just one level of constraint definitions, but eventually the constraints will grow "or" and "and" clauses and allow for defining trees of constraints as a result. To make this work with in-page editing using Ajax, you wind up creating controller objects parameterised in such a way that they can all have unique ids and properly registered callbacks. Getting those to work reliably has been a bit of a pain, and I haven't even tried to run the scripts on IE yet :) .

The neat thing about the Ajax is that it's giving a very immediate feel. You choose a given state for a given trigger and can immediately see the statistics all modems in that state, you can type in a range for a measured value and see statistics for the modems in that range pretty much instantly.

Of course, thick-clients have had that since day one, but it does make one pause to consider how poor web interfaces really are. Anyway, my brain is fried, so I'll stop rambling now and try to get to sleep.