numerous changes that piled up locally

i finally gave up after many frustrating tries with the old fork, and now trying to save my changes from the old fork over to a new one. maybe some changes are missing here, but at least here are some of the changes i committed in the last couple of weeks. i guess i have a better workflow now (and will write a blog entry about it, so if you like you can validate it), and will try to always properly rebase and submit pull requests in topic branches.