Patform now buildable from scratch

Eliminated some dependencies and corrected things such that it is actually possible to build on a clean machine.  Note: we're still dependent on a version of Kafka which was never published, mostly because the Kafka project is extremely fail and has never published _anything_.  To get around this, I have created a tarball of the files needed.  This tarball, along with the full build instructions, is linked in the readme.