Friday, January 16, 2015

Delays and distractions but continuing to add to PC software for new keypunch interface


My bag wasn't delivered until 2:30AM, with a full day at the client afterwards. I didn't get to the project at all Wednesday, but did work on the code a bit during the flight home Thursday morning. My father in law, who was gravely ill, passed away while I was flying and I spent the day with my wife and daughter, not the 1130. Friday had quite a few calls that were deferred from when I was on my trip, but I did get back to work for some time later in the day.

NEW KEYPUNCH INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT

I worked way at understanding and implementing the GUI elements to give me a scrolling window showing the card images, status information along the bottom, plus the behavior I needed. Some of the requirements or functions were a bit obscure, needing experimentation and reference to sample usage by others.

I was able to get the card file for punching to display in the window and some scrolling behavior, but it has some issues remaining. It is displaying the card images of a BCD or EBCDIC encoded file when I open the file, but the spacing is off. Worse, I can end up with artifacts as parts of the image are not erased as they should be before I update the screen. These are relatively minor issues that will just take a bit of time to clear up.

I discovered along the way that my Python implementation already had an older version of wxPython installed - which was the default when I did an import of the module - since that version was lacking the improved scrolling window class I was referencing. I learned how to override my code to pull the newer version of wxPython.

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