And Now For Something Completely Different

For a couple of years, this blog has been totally focused on my adventures with Python, Qt, and PyQt as I developed a major-ish app, PPQT2.

Well, with the latest round of fixes (see two prior posts) I believe that PPQT2 is about as done as it can be. I will leave the distribution files up indefinitely. But I don't intend to add any function, and I don't believe it contains any bugs serious enough to prevent its productive use. A couple of people are using PPQT2, and I wish them well. I am not among them, because I no longer spend any of my own time editing books for Distributed Proofreaders. The first PPQT was done to meet my own requirements for a book editor. The second one was done, really, to do the job right from a software engineering standpoint, and to meet the evolving needs of the Distributed Proofreading community. It succeeded in the first goal, but, based on limited uptake, failed to meet the second. So it goes.

Back to Authorship

A decade ago I wrote a book. Well, I've written several books over the years, mostly software. But that latest book was not about software. It was in a way, an extended answer to a question my mother asked me a few months before she died. I wrote the book and self-published it.

You can read about the book at its home website. In fact, you can read the whole book online there if you wish. Or you can follow links from there to buy your very own hard-copy for a very reasonable fee.

Don't do that!

Well, you can read it if you really want to. But don't order a copy (not that you were likely to do so, but still).

Why? Because I've embarked on a major revision, is why.

Adam Osborne is famous for killing his company by pre-announcing a better model before it was ready to ship. Sales of the existing Osborne computer dried up, choking off the cash flow that he needed to finish development. I'm not afraid of killing sales for my existing book because mostly, it has none to kill.

But why am I doing a revision? What improvements do I mean to make? How am I going about it?

Such questions will be the focus of forthcoming posts in this blog. In the meantime, if you want to get an early look, go to the new publishing site, slide the "You Pay" slider all the way to the left, to a cost of $0.00, and "buy" a copy of the book as it stands. If you give leanpub your email in that process, you'll get a notification as new versions are published, which is about monthly as I add chapters.