Julia is running again, recompiled it myself.  I also now have Fisher scoring _working_ for the constant model.  I looked at what I had been doing in previous iterations of fisher scoring or newton raphson, and really, I was computing fisher information but it was as though it was for just a sample from a rician.  I needed to be using (d ell / d theta), but what I was doing was computing (d ell / d theta) in terms of ell and nu and v and theta, and then using fisher scoring on JUST the dll dnu.  I'm now running it correctly, and the results converge very very quickly.  Next up is thorough testing.