An­nounce­men­t:

Mar­ave (noth­ing, in guaraní) is a re­laxed text ed­i­tor. Its goal is to let you fo­cus in your writ­ing, free of vis­ual dis­trac­tions and clut­ter.

It is writ­ten us­ing PyQt, so it should work in all ma­jor plat­form­s, and it is li­censed un­der the GPLv2 so it is free soft­ware.

You can find the cur­rent SVN (no re­lease yet) at http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

Screen­shot­s:

Sta­tus:

It's not fin­ished yet, but it has the fol­low­ing fea­tures:

• You can ed­it text

• Min­i­­mal­is­tic, "van­ish­ing" us­er in­­ter­­face

• (Op­­tion­al) au­­dio feed­back for the key­board

• (Op­­tion­al) re­lax­ing mu­sic (re­quires in­­ter­net ac­cess)

• You can cus­­tom­ize the back­­­ground, font, colours, and sounds

• Live spell check­­ing (re­quires pyen­chan­t)

There are al­so some ma­jor miss­ing fea­tures:

• Search and Search/Re­­place is not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

• UI cus­­tomiza­­­tions are not stored

• UI has to be cleaned up a lot more

• It does­n't ask to save when clos­ing

• Au­­tosave not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

And at least one known bug:

• In win­­dows the wid­gets are not well placed Fixed in SVN

A litte his­to­ry:

A few days ago, I saw ommwrit­er men­tioned in a tweet or some­thing sim­i­lar.

I was think­ing "nice thing", but in the back of my mind I was al­so think­ing "that can't be too hard to do". Af­ter al­l, the hard part of cre­at­ing a pro­gram is mak­ing it do things, right?

Well, yes and no. I did man­age to cre­ate a some­what rea­son­able fac­sim­i­le in a day, but tweak­ing the looks of it is driv­ing me nuts :-)

Since yes­ter­day this blog is ten years old so, time for some his­to­ry.

It all start­ed in ad­voga­to where you could still read it to­day! (Please read it here in­stead ;-)

Then it moved to PyDS an ear­ly python desk­top blog plat­form with a web in­ter­face, and was host­ed in PyC­S, a free ser­vice.

Then PyCS kin­da died, and I start­ed gen­er­at­ing a stat­ic blog and host­ing it in my IS­P's free host­ing. That sucked bad.

Then I start­ed my own com­pa­ny, and I had my own server­s, so I start­ed host­ing it there (even to­day this blog is com­plete­ly stat­ic HTM­L!)

Then PyDS start­ed act­ing weird, so I wrote my own blog­ging soft­ware, which is a re­al mess, per­haps 25% fin­ished, but it does things ex­act­ly the way I like them.

Cur­rent­ly, this blog is syn­di­cat­ed in Plan­e­ta PyAr, Plan­et Python, Plan­et Qt, Plan­e­ta LUGLI, and a cou­ple oth­er places.

This year, I de­cid­ed to make the blog com­plete­ly bilin­gual (English and Span­ish), but I hate trans­lat­ing it.

Ac­cord­ing to the stats I have avail­able, the blog is in av­er­age more pop­u­lar now than ev­er (but yes, my most pop­u­lar posts were years ago ;-)

These are the most pop­u­lar pages in the last year:

• PyQt By Ex­am­­ple

  Each of the parts of this se­ries is in the top ten most vis­it­ed pages. So, I re­al­­ly need to write more in this area since it seems to be what brings peo­­ple to the site.

• Re­spond­ing to ran­­dom blog post­s.

  A post ex­­plain­ing how an­oth­er blog­ger is wrong. I think I make a good point, even if it's a bit cheap as a way to bring read­­er­s.

• Queue Man­age­­ment for Qmail

  Oldie but good­ie... not re­al­­ly use­­ful nowa­­days.

• How to make your own dis­­tro

  Yikes, peo­­ple, stop read­­ing this, it's just wrong :-(

• Python Keyring is se­ri­ous­­ly nice

  Fi­­nal­­ly some­thing re­­cen­t!

• What I do for a liv­ing

  An­oth­er new post, I like it a lot.

• The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

  A di­­dac­tic post. I think it's still the bet­ter ex­­pla­­na­­tion on the sub­­­ject I've seen around, if I may say so my­­self. For ex­­tra irony points, my cur­rent dis­­tro does­n't fol­low this.

• Cre­at­ing pre­sen­­ta­­tions us­ing re­struc­­tured text

  An­oth­er not-­­so-old post, I do this a lot :-)

• Cus­­tom wid­gets us­ing PyQt

  This is al­­most 6 years old, for a de­p­re­­cat­ed ver­­sion of PyQt, and is com­­plete­­ly bro­ken for cur­rent ver­­sion­s. Stop read­­ing this.

Lesson­s:

1. I need to write more about Qt and/or start flame­wars with clue­­less IT writ­ers

2. I need to search for an­­cient ma­te­ri­al and de­p­re­­cate it

3. Hav­ing your own host­ing and blog­ging soft­­ware is neat

4. 10 years is a lot of time: 860 posts (or 913, de­pend­ing on how you coun­t)

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years: pro­gram­ming shell scripts suck. They are ug­ly and er­ror prone. The on­ly rea­son why we still do it? There is no re­al re­place­men­t.

Or at least that was the case, un­til to­day I met iter­pipes at python.red­dit.­com

Iter­pipes is "A li­brary for run­ning shell pipe­lines us­ing shel­l-­like syn­tax" and guess what? It's bril­liant.

Here's an ex­am­ple from its PYPI page:

# Total lines in *.py files under /path/to/dir,
# use safe shell parameters formatting:

>>> total = cmd(
...     'find {} -name {} -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l | tail -1 | awk {}',
...     '/path/to/dir', '\*.py', '{print $1}')
>>> run(total | strip() | join | int)
315

Here's how that would look in shel­l:

find /path/to/dir -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'

You may say the shell ver­sion looks bet­ter. That's an il­lu­sion caused by the evil that is shell script­ing: the shell ver­sion is bug­gy.

Why is it buggy? Because if I control what's inside /path/to/dir I can make that neat little shell command fail [1], but at least in python I can handle errors!

Al­so, in most ver­sions you could at­tempt to write, this com­mand would be un­safe be­cause quot­ing and es­cap­ing in shell is in­sane!

The iter­pipes ver­sion us­es the equiv­a­lent of SQL pre­pared state­ments which are much safer.

It's near­ly im­pos­si­ble to do such a com­mand in pure shell and be sure it's safe.

Al­so, the shell ver­sion pro­duces a string in­stead of an in­te­ger, which sucks if you in­tend to do any­thing with it.

And the most im­por­tant ben­e­fit is, of course, not when you try to make python act like a shel­l, but when you can stop pre­tend­ing shell is a re­al pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

Consider this gem from Arch Linux's /etc/rc.shutdown script. Here, DAEMONS is a list of things that started on boot, and this script is trying to shut them down in reverse order, unless the daemon name starts with "!":

# Shutdown daemons in reverse order
let i=${#DAEMONS[@]}-1
while [ $i -ge 0 ]; do
        if [ "${DAEMONS[$i]:0:1}" != '!' ]; then
                ck_daemon ${DAEMONS[$i]#@} || stop_daemon ${DAEMONS[$i]#@}
        fi
        let i=i-1
done

Nice uh?

Now, how would that look in python (I may have in­vert­ed the mean­ing of ck­_­dae­mon)?

# Shutdown daemons in reverse order
for daemon in reversed(DAEMONS):
    if daemon[0]=='!':
        continue
    if ck_daemon(daemon):
        stop_daemon(daemon)

Where stop_­dae­mon used to be this:

stop_daemon() {
    /etc/rc.d/$1 stop
}

And will now be this:

def stop_daemon(daemon):
    run(cmd('/etc/rc.d/{} stop',daemon))

So, come on, peo­ple, we are in the 21st cen­tu­ry, and shell script­ing sucked in the 20th al­ready.

So, what do you do for a liv­ing?

—Hard­est ques­tion ev­er

When­ev­er I am speak­ing with peo­ple who don't know me [1] that's the ques­tion I dread.

If some­one asks my wife what she does, all she has to do is say "I'm a lawyer". If some­one asks my moth­er, she'd say "I am a re­tired teacher". Ev­ery­one un­der­stands what a lawyer does, or what a re­tired teach­er did.

If some­one asks me... oh, boy, that's hard. I usu­al­ly weasel out by say­ing "I work with com­put­er­s" but that has sev­er­al prob­lem­s:

• They as­­sume I re­­pair PCs

• They start telling me how their win­­dows box was slow un­til they in­­stalled some kropotk­i­­na which su­per­­gar­bled their frob­noz­­zles [4], then ask me my opin­ion on frob­noz­­zle gar­bling. For or again­st?

It's re­al­ly hard to ex­plain that yes, I work with com­put­ers ev­ery day, but I al­most nev­er open one (in fac­t, I have a pol­i­cy of not touch­ing my cus­tomers com­put­er­s), and I have no idea what a frob­noz­zle is.

I have tried say­ing "I work on serv­er side things, like mail servers and such. I in­stall them, sup­port them and al­so con­sult­ing work, ex­plain­ing com­pa­nies what the best ways to im­prove their ser­vices are.".

That one usu­al­ly gets glassy eyes and a gen­er­al "what?" look.

I could lie and say I pro­gram for a liv­ing, but that's not true. While I pro­gram a lot, it's usu­al­ly not for mon­ey, and what lit­tle I do for mon­ey is just us­ing pro­gram­ming as a sysad­min tool.

I could say "I'm a sysad­min" but most peo­ple have no idea what that is. It does tend to end con­ver­sa­tion­s, though, so it has one thing go­ing for it.

Nowa­days I could say "I have a com­pa­ny", which is true (we are awe­some, you should hire us to do what­ev­er it is we do, more de­tails at http://www.net­man­ager­s.­com.ar )

So, I usu­al­ly man­age to work around this ques­tion, but I have a prob­lem: I'm not telling the truth, or if I am, I am not telling the truth in spir­it be­cause I am not con­vey­ing what my work is, but on­ly what I do.

So, this post is about try­ing to ex­plain what the hell I do for a liv­ing, in an­oth­er way, which is more ... in­ter­nal­ly true, so to speak. This is re­al­ly hard to do, so I am try­ing to just let the writ­ing flow, maybe you can un­der­stand what I do even if it's not clear­ly ex­plained.

I work with com­put­er­s. I make them do what I want them to do. When­ev­er a reg­u­lar us­er sits be­fore his key­board, he tries to make his com­put­er fol­low his or­der­s, which vari­able rates of suc­cess. I al­ways suc­ceed.

Some­times, I am logged in­to a com­put­er that man­ages da­ta for thou­sands of peo­ple. They all are on my care. No, it's not their lives at stake, but a lit­tle part of their fun, or work is un­der my care. I help them. I care about them, and I want their fun, their work to be smooth and pleas­an­t.

Of­ten the com­put­er will not do what they need. I will try with my craft to make it hap­pen. I will write lit­tle pro­gram­s, search for oth­ers on the In­ter­net, care­ful­ly piece to­geth­er a puz­zle and make their needs be ful­filled.

I will write or in­stall and con­fig­ure those pro­grams and do it well, be­cause I am skilled, I have lit­er­al­ly decades of train­ing and ex­pe­ri­ence, but I will most­ly do it be­cause I like or­der and func­tion. I like when things flow unim­ped­ed, I like when serendip­i­tous ac­ci­dents make things just click to­geth­er.

I do those things for a liv­ing, yes, be­cause I need to make a liv­ing. And lat­er, when I'm off the clock and my boy is asleep and I have my own time, you know what I do? I do the same things be­cause they are fun. And I will both­er writ­ing a 1300 word post about how I mi­grat­ed my blog's com­ments from one site to an­oth­er be­cause it was fun.

Yes, I know, to most peo­ple that would not be fun at al­l, it would be a bor­ing job, and they would hate do­ing it. And that's one of the many rea­sons I am a lucky man [5]: I have fun do­ing un­usu­al things. That's re­al­ly luck­y, be­cause if my idea of fun was watch­ing "Gos­sip Girl" I would nev­er have found any­one to pay me to do that!

But go­ing back to what I do for a liv­ing, I cre­ate things. I don't cre­ate large, im­pres­sive things, I am not a bridge builder, an ar­chi­tec­t, I cre­ate smal­l, use­ful things and try to do it with a cer­tain taste or el­e­gance. I am more like a sil­ver­smith do­ing cut­lery. Sure, I'll try to make it nice to look at, but it must cut a chunk of beef first.

Yes, I work with com­put­er­s, but how does that con­vey what I feel when af­ter a sol­id day of work I can see that what was a lot of stupid com­put­ers and ca­bles are now a work­ing ma­chine that can make 50000 phone calls a day?

How can I make any­one see the beau­ty in 3 hard lines of code that do noth­ing but print a bunch of num­ber­s?

How can some­one who makes a liv­ing any oth­er way un­der­stand that I think things and they be­come re­al? No, not re­al as in a puff of smoke and there they are, but they be­come re­al through work and ef­fort and think­ing and curs­ing, which is what makes them re­al­ly re­al.

I know most of this will sound like mys­ti­cis­m, but it's not, it's my hon­est truth, I re­al­ly feel all these things as I work, all these things are my work. Some­times when I crack a hard prob­lem I want to fuck­ing sing [7] that's how awe­some it feel­s.

So, that's what I do for a liv­ing. I work with com­put­er­s.