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Slowly, slowly...
Oct. 27th, 2012 08:08 pmThis morning was one of those mornings just made to sleep in. I awoke during the night because I was cold. Thumper (who insists on sleeping at my feet, a practice to which I do not object) had apparently gathered most of the blanket around himself, leaving me with pretty much nothing. I unceremoniously rearranged the bedclothes (no quibbles from canine quarters), and that was that.
I might have considered airing out the place with outside air, but then it would have been too cold inside. It's that cold. (And of course, "that" cold might be considered absolutely tropical in Pagosa around this time of year. I am told it's routinely in the 30s in the mornings there now.)
I stayed away from the computer for most of the day. Somewhere in the late afternoon, I started fooling around with a program called Booksorber, which is intended to address the process of turning a book into an ebook (a PDF) by photographing its pages. I have a number of old books that I would be happy to consign to attic storage if I could access the contents of said books on a computer. A case in point is my copy of Francis Bacon's essays, published by the Riverside Press and apparently once the property of the New York City Board of Education (the volume contains a property stamp dated 1923).
The program is still in its alpha phase (my assessment), but my trial run using the first dozen or so photos of the beginning pages went well (at least, for alpha software).
I also continued in my dissection of a PHP script that searches text files for strings. The subject of my dissection was a statement involving a regular expression that I initially could not make head or tail of. After some Googling, I've actually figured out (or think I've figured out) both how the old expression did what it did (what it did was obvious), and how to cast a new regular expression to do what I want it to do. Various difficulties associated with multibyte characters (i.e., Cyrillic) are in the future, since I want to be able to search using both Latin and Cyrillic characters.
After three days of relative inactivity at the keyboard, tomorrow looks like it will be a work day. I think I'm ready.
Cheers...
I might have considered airing out the place with outside air, but then it would have been too cold inside. It's that cold. (And of course, "that" cold might be considered absolutely tropical in Pagosa around this time of year. I am told it's routinely in the 30s in the mornings there now.)
I stayed away from the computer for most of the day. Somewhere in the late afternoon, I started fooling around with a program called Booksorber, which is intended to address the process of turning a book into an ebook (a PDF) by photographing its pages. I have a number of old books that I would be happy to consign to attic storage if I could access the contents of said books on a computer. A case in point is my copy of Francis Bacon's essays, published by the Riverside Press and apparently once the property of the New York City Board of Education (the volume contains a property stamp dated 1923).
The program is still in its alpha phase (my assessment), but my trial run using the first dozen or so photos of the beginning pages went well (at least, for alpha software).
I also continued in my dissection of a PHP script that searches text files for strings. The subject of my dissection was a statement involving a regular expression that I initially could not make head or tail of. After some Googling, I've actually figured out (or think I've figured out) both how the old expression did what it did (what it did was obvious), and how to cast a new regular expression to do what I want it to do. Various difficulties associated with multibyte characters (i.e., Cyrillic) are in the future, since I want to be able to search using both Latin and Cyrillic characters.
After three days of relative inactivity at the keyboard, tomorrow looks like it will be a work day. I think I'm ready.
Cheers...
