Does the introduction of voting means that the current SpreadX11 format will change? Will there be backwards compatibility (i.e. will older miner programs work) or will this be a hard fork on all levels?

(1440 votes per day).

I vaguely remember NXT using this number for confirmations before a block becomes permanently fixed; sorry to go a bit off-topic but what is the mathematical significance of this number?

 Let's get it going, today is a good day for testing 

Finally, here it is:
.........snip....
The general idea is that there is some additional information in each block that proofs that miner knows whole block and private key for spending coinbase transaction. That means that if you mine in a pool you can submit shares as usual and get reward for them but if you will actually find a valid block then you can send it directly to the network instead of the pool and get full reward for it. Pool may detect it and ban you but this is still may be advantageous for you. If your mining power gives you low probability of finding a block then if you will accidentally find a block it gives you more profit even if the pool will ban you for not sharing this block. If you have enough mining power to find blocks consistently then you can connect to a pool and submit shares for some time but steal the first found block, this way you can get both reward for your shares and actual block that you mined, this is like doubling your hashrate.
Given all this I don't expect that anyone will create a pool. But if someone will then I will modify whatever miner software will be used for it to implement the stealing described above, we may expect that most pool miners will then switch to this cheating version which will make this pool useless.

Also I made built-in GUI for the miner. Currently it is still the same CPU miner but in the future I want to make as interface to external miners. Other developers (and me) will be able to independently create CPU and GPU miners and fastest such miners will be distributed with the wallet and available from GUI.

I changed difficulty retarget to six hours. I don't want to set it to lower values because then it may become vulnerable to manipulation by setting improper block timestamps.

Existing GPU miner will become unusable after the fork point because of the modifications to the mining algorithm which are necessary to prevent pools.

Based on my calculations (highly unscientific) I have determined that Georgem operates in a different realm of existence and thus experiences extreme time dilation. For every hour we experience Georgem experiences less than a third of that. With this in mind, Georgem has been highly accurate with his time predications.

I have not yet figured out the cause of such time dilations. It is entirely possible that Georgem is not in fact from Switzerland and is instead a feral coder from Chernobyl. The long exposure to radiation has made him a master of decentralization but unfortunately has mixed up his time perception.

Will we get to see how it works after you're done?

Solo mining is the main focus.