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+It is with extreme...
+
+...hm...
+
+I would like to digress a bit and tell a story. A week ago, I put on my
+running shoes for the first time in my new hometown. I had already seen
+out a suitable route on Google Maps, committing the more important street
+names to memory. It was a cloud-free day, and the sun stood as high in
+the sky as it ever will in January in Sweden. Out I went.
+
+Before half an hour had passed, I was completely lost. I didn't see any
+of the streets I had memorized, nor did I run into any of the big roads
+I knew I would run into if I ran too far.
+
+Gradually, I found myself out on the countryside. That wasn't part of
+the plan at all. Fields stretched out in all directions. Airplanes
+criscrossed the sky, their exhaust trails leaving nice patterns behind,
+reminiscent of some CS books about graph theory.
+
+I started down the country road in the direction back to town, only to
+have the road slowly curve back in the other direction. It was like one
+of those text adventure games where you exit one location to the north
+but end up entering the next location from the northwest! Not conducive
+to getting somewhere at all.
+
+The the sun went down. At this point, I had been running for over an
+hour, and was wondering whether I would sleep in a bed that night. I
+was getting cold and a little bit miserable. The battery of my mp3
+player died.
+
+Things got gradually better, though. I found a bigger road, and a sign
+pointed back to my city, saying it was only five kilometers away. My
+speed had dropped a bit due to hopelessness, but now it picked up again.
+I passed a suburb, a mall, a school, a number of unfamiliar blocks, some
+familiar blocks, and then I was home again. Exhausted. But grateful.
+
+The take-home message is, I hope, crystal clear. A refactor, just like
+a run, is a process whereby you hope to end up in the same place as you
+started. Oh, and sunsets can be very pretty.
+
+Anyway.
+
+It is with an exhausted but satisfied feeling that I announce on behalf
+of the Yapsi development team the February 2011 release of Yapsi, a Perl
+6 compiler written in Perl 6.
+
+You can download it here:
+
+ <http://github.com/downloads/masak/yapsi/yapsi-2011.02.tar.gz>
+
+Yapsi is implemented in Perl 6. It thus requires a Perl 6 implementation to
+build and run. This release of Yapsi has been confirmed to work on all
+releases of Rakudo Star to date. The test files only work flawlessly on Rakudo
+Star 2011.01, though, due to s/done_testing/done/.
+
+Yapsi is an "official and complete" implementation of Perl 6. This has been
+confirmed, documented, jokingly referred to, and lamented in a number of
+places online and offline.
+
+This month's release is a bit late, for which I'm either terribly sorry,
+or hereby announce that from as of this release, Yapsi will release on the
+first Saturday of every month. Haven't decided yet.
+
+This month's release could be called a "developer release", but let's not
+go that far. Suffice it to say that Yapsi behaves the same as last month,
+but the internals are now much more hackable than last month, so if you've
+secretly been thinking of becoming a contributor, now's an excellent time
+to pick some low-hanging fruit. For example, the daughter project
+'sigmund', mentioned at the bottom of every Yapsi release announcement,
+is now feasible; it wasn't really before.
+
+Also, Yapsi has the cutest AST output of all the Perl 6 implementations:
+
+$ bin/yapsi --target=FUTURE -e 'my $a; { $a = 42 }; say $a'
+Block -- B0 [$a]
+  Var -- $a
+  Block -- B2
+    Assign
+      Var -- $a
+      Val -- 42
+  Call -- &say
+    Var -- $a
+
+It's so cute, it almost looks like Ruby!
+
+For a complete list of changes, see doc/ChangeLog.
+
+Yapsi consists of a compiler and a runtime. The compiler processes a piece
+of source code, turns it into an annotated tree structure known as FUTURE,
+and then serializes this tree into a sort of assembler code for a virtual
+machine. (The virtual machine, being virtual, doesn't really exist. Which,
+all things considered, is probably a good thing.) The SIC is then...
+consumed... by the runtime which does its thing and executes it.
+
+With each new release of Yapsi, the old SIC format is thrown out the door,
+and a new one, sometimes very similar, sometimes identical to the old one,
+is employed instead. This process is codified for the purpose of keeping
+people on edge. FUTURE, however, abides by a sofisticated deprecation
+policy, which in short declares that the format never changes, except in
+very rare cases when it does.
+
+An overarching goal for making a Perl 6 compiler-and-runtime is to use it as
+a server for various other projects, which hook in at different steps:
+
+* A time-traveling debugger (tardis), which hooks into the runtime.
+  Already underway, see <http://github.com/masak/tardis>
+* A coverage tool (lid), which will also hook into the runtime.
+* A syntax checker (sigmund), which will use output from the parser.
+
+Another overarching goal is to optimize for fun while learning about parsers,
+compilers, and runtimes.
+
+Have the appropriate amount of fun! \o/