specify namespace for min and max
fix string casting bug in bad character exception message
Merge branch 'development'
Merge branch 'development'
Merge branch 'development'
Merge branch 'development'

pull lifotver fix from dev
Merge branch 'development'
Merge branch 'development'
There was a terrible bug introduced into the column iterator a couple months ago.  The relevant changes are undone, and hopefully everything works again.
order on array index instead of start position so as to not thrash the hdf5 cache.
fix test for last insertion of sequence where extension was done before edge test
Merge branch 'development' of github.com:glennhickey/hal into development
Specify path conevntion for LOD files.  Relative paths of HAL files are assumed to be relative to the directory of the LOD file.  Absolute paths are unchanged.
paths with :/ are considered urls and therefore absolute
Update halLodBenchmark to be mroe consistend with halLodInterpolate
Use UDC in halLodManager if defined at compile
Add step to merge compatible adjacent blocks
Fix memory leak where segments in block removed via merge do not get deleted
sort blocks from biggest to smallest (in terms of their segment counts) before doing greedy extend)
Change extend heuristic
add steps option to bnechmark