Friday 10/14/2022
Went for the walk in the morning. Then sat down in my chair and picked up my laptop and basically didn’t move the rest of the day. What was I doing? I was indulging in the delicious game of debugging my old app.
Back in about 2014-16 I wrote a very complex app with a sophisticated graphical user interface. Called PPQT, its purpose is to be a tool for the lengthy task of post-processing a completed book for project gutenberg proofreaders. When it was done I used it to process several books, and a couple of other people who did the same volunteer work used it. And then I set it aside and moved on to other activities, abandoning my 30,000 lines of superbly commented Python.
Then for the last couple of months I’ve been dusting it off just for fun. In the intervening years, the library it is based on, called Qt, has moved on a couple of versions so there were dozens of little API changes to accomodate. Today the work had reached the point where the app should be ready to run, and I spent the day running it, finding another bug, fixing it, running it again. Just totally absorbing fun. That’s all I did, except eat a couple meals and take one short nap.
That’s it in the usual mode, displaying the OCR’d text of a book on the left for editing, and the matching page scan image on the right. But there is lots more function under the tabs on the upper right. Almost all of which is tested and working again!
Who needs it? Nobody! With it off my mind maybe I can work on some other hobby.
Codgerville 