Here's another one I'd like to bounce off you.

I'm packing child windows into a larger window (MDI fashion).
Imagine a bulletin board covered by a bunch of overlapping items.

I want to find a "reasonable" way to position the smaller windows.

Ideally part of each one would be exposed. For real-world values,
that would be impossible, since the total area of the small windows
would far exceed the total area of the large one.

I'll probably display them in reverse order, so that the ones at the
beginning of the list go on top, and the others are buried.

A truly smart algorithm, of course, would ignore the bottom of the
list and display only the top N items for efficiency. But then I
have to worry about finding N.

This, of course, relates to Tycho, now in a whopping version 0.0.0.6 --
see http://tycho.rubyforge.org/

Any thoughts appreciated.

I'll be away for 36 hours or so. Will read when I get back.

Cheers,
Hal