so now it works. this is first run with a new perl interface, trying to automate the whole process. while i continued to work on this, bhs came in, asked if i wanted to meet some nice band chicks, and i say no, i'd rather play with perl and c++ and java and all that jazz. i said at least they do what you want them to do. but after thinking about it a second, i realized i was wrong. both programming languages and women are equally hard to first understand, and then use to their highest potential, and itstill could always crash on you. but hey, that's life.