Scattered progress

Wednesday was my day to catalog items at the Computer History Museum off-site storage warehouse in Milpitas. This time we finally began work on the "Moffatt stuff", material that came from the Boston Computer Museum in the 1980s and sat in a dusty warehouse at Moffatt field in Mountain View until in 2008 it was moved to the then-new, climate-controlled warehouse in Milpitas. Only now is the museum finally getting around to a proper job of cataloging it.

We were working on pieces of Whirlwind. When that pioneering one-off machine was decommissioned, it was taken apart and hundreds of pieces were donated to the BCM. Here is a typical piece like what we were cataloging and photographing:

I have to say that this picture was taken in the prior, 2008-era cataloging effort. We are doing a better job now. The object would be squared-up to the camera, the object id tag would not be visible (lower left), and the extraneous junk like the little yellow pill boxes of numbers would not be shown. And the light would be better.

Just the same, that is a typical hunk of Whirlwind. Panels like this, with a couple rows of octal tubes, were the main logic elements. This might be a pair of flip-flops or a pulse generator.

So no work on my own projects that day, and Thursday there were other errands, and three hours watching the AT&T guy Rick install our new U-verse internet. From DSL that could barely make 4Mbs to a service that measures out to exactly the advertised 12Mbs.

But in my spare moments both days I was working on the PPQT help file, and documenting all the things it does caused me to discover some things it doesn't do right. One in particular. The Find panel, when the Regex switch is on, expects the string in the Find text field to be a regex. When it changes, keystroke by keystroke, it is checked for validity, and if it isn't a valid regex, the background of the field turns pink, and the search buttons First/Next/Prior/Last are disabled.

But it was not checking the syntax of the Replace fields. I was trying out some different PCRE-type replace strings and discovered that it is possible to have a syntax error in the replace string, and when you do, the regex module throws an exception. Naturally the Replace action wasn't in a try/except block.

What this means is I need to guard the Replace fields (there are three of them) with the same error checking logic and pink-background decoration as the Find field. Fortunately most of the code for this exists.

But the bigger news would be some success with pyqtdeploy. I'd been stymied by a crazy error from qmake, as described in the last post. Wellllll.... come to find out, the cause of the problem was the the qmake I was invoking was from /usr/local/bin, which was (apparently) the qmake installed by Qt4.6. When I invoked the current qmake from 5.4, the creation of static versions of Python, Sip and PyQt went smoothly. I have high hopes that tomorrow I might get a complete build of Cobro.