---
author: ''
category: ''
date: 2010/06/18 15:42
description: ''
link: ''
priority: ''
slug: BB891
tags: marave, open source, programming, python, qt
title: Free software is good for me.
type: text
updated: 2010/06/18 15:42
url_type: ''
---
I make a living working with free software (BTW, if you need sysadmins that know what they do, contact us: http://www.netmanagers.com.ar)

But that's not that big a deal, I *could* make a living doing something else. I am sure I would be competent at *something* else, even if I have no idea what that would be right now.

It does, however give me freedom to play, which is much more important. Therefore, this post is sort of a status update on things I play with. Not games, those are not really my thing, but things that I do for fun.

Yes, some of these may mean I am a very strange person.

I'll limit myself to the last couple of weeks or so.

There's been sort of a bump in interest in `Marave <http://marave.googlecode.com>`_, my distraction free editor and it's because it has been reviewed in Linux Journal! 

I have read the article (sadly I can't link to it) and it was a super positive review, here are some choice quotes:

   "marave makes the dull world of text editing romantic and immersive with beautiful minimalism"

   "... it doesn't just have minimalism and simplicity, it has minimalism and simplicity combined with beauty and a palpable design ethic. marave has soul, and I love that."

So thanks for the kind words to the author, and something I noticed: you ran into a big bug in marave and didn't notice :-)

The "cricket bat" icon (it's a screwdriver ;-) should show you the config dialog. However, it seems in Ubuntu (and maybe in other distros, I don't know) the config is not visible,and all you see is the text move around a bit. This is what he should have seen:

.. raw:: html

   <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralsina/4363736097/" title="marave15 by ralsina_2000, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4014/4363736097_40d3fbd2a5_b.jpg" alt="marave15" /></a>

I have never been able to reproduce it, but I am going to install a Ubuntu VM just for this, so maybe soon.

On related news, marave was also reviewed in a german magazine a couple of months ago, and I have not been able to get a copy of the article. (BTW, isn't it reasonable to send a copy of these to the author of the program you are reviewing? Neither magazine even mentioned it to me!)

In any case, if anyone has this magazine and can tell me what the article about distraction-free editors say, you will make my day:

Here's the article `teaser <http://www.linux-community.de/Internal/Artikel/Print-Artikel/LinuxUser/2010/05/Vollkommen-ungestoert>`_

And this seems to be the `magazine issue <https://shop.linuxnewmedia.de/store/eh01/EH10165/de>`_:

.. image:: https://shop.linuxnewmedia.de/store/eh01/EH10165/de/product_image/variant/bounding_product

On new projects (yes, I always have new projects), I ran into this awesome blog post by Roger Alsing about `approaching Mona Lisa with just 50 polygons <http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/
>` and being a nerd and having awesome programming tools at my command... I wrote a framework to test that kind of algorithms.

I called it evoluto and it's at http://evoluto.googlecode.com.

I only did a very simple algorithm, based on transluscent triangles, but it did work... for some definition of work!

.. raw:: html

   <object><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cEh5cLqxgpA&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cEh5cLqxgpA&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="960" height="745"></embed></object>

You can even **see** the local minimum that doesn't let her right eye form right :-)

Evoluto has a library of algorithms (currently empty) and you can edit and reapply on-the-fly the one you want, and see the generations change on-screen.

It would take some work to make it a polished program, but it does work.

I folled around a bit with creating a nice PDF presentation player but it's still very early:

.. raw:: html

   <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralsina/4712095620/" title="109301062 by ralsina_2000, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4049/4712095620_3d4c18ea7a_b.jpg" alt="109301062" /></a>


In what's perhaps my most established project, rst2pdf. I have fixed a bunch of bugs, and a release is a bit overdue:

Issue 186: Text not wrapping around images when specified
    I fixed this by adding a new CLI option, so behaviour was not changed, but now you can have images with text flowing beside it. It will not look **great** but it works.

Issue 307: Replace directive doesn't replace text in header/footer in some cases
    This was an interesting problem! It was very entertaining.

Made it work with Sphinx 1.*
    There is a piece broken still, but what I fixed was not terribly hard.

Unbroken bookrest
    I need to work much more with this, but at least what worked before works again. If you don't know what bookrest is, it's a rst2pdf graphical frontend / word processor, here's a taste:

.. raw:: html

   <object><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gXE3vNlyQKs&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gXE3vNlyQKs&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="960" height="745"></embed></object>
  
I also made several releases for `my AUR packages <http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&K=ralsina>`_

**Plus** I worked, and some other stuff. All in all, not a bad stretch.