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.

First a short ex­pla­na­tion:

24-hour apps are smal­l, self­-­con­tained projects where I in­tend to cre­ate a de­cen­t, use­ful ap­pli­ca­tion in 24 hours. The con­cept is that:

1. I will think about this app a lot for a while

2. I will de­sign it in my head or in writ­ten notes

3. I will code, from scratch, for 24 hours.

4. That's not one day, re­al­­ly, but 24 hours of work. I can't work 24 hours straight any­­more.

The last time around this did­n't quite work as I in­tend­ed, but it was fun and ed­u­ca­tion­al (for me at least ;-) and the re­sult­ing app is re­al­ly not bad!

So, what's fo­ley go­ing to be? A note-­tak­ing app aimed at stu­dents and con­fer­ence pub­lic.

In your last geeky con­fer­ence, did you no­tice ev­ery­one is us­ing a com­put­er?

And what are they tak­ing notes on? Vi? Kwrite? OpenOf­fice? What­ev­er it is they use, it's not meant to be used for this pur­pose.

So, what will fo­ley do dif­fer­en­t? I don't quite know yet, but I have some ideas:

1. A strong time­­line ori­en­­ta­­tion. Ev­ery para­­graph will be dat­ed.

2. Twit­ter/I­­den­ti­­ca sup­­port. Want to live­blog your notes? Just click.

3. Mul­ti­me­­dia in­­­cor­po­rat­ed in the time­­line.

   • We­b­­­cam/Au­­­dio record­ing synced to your notes?

   • Im­ages im­­­port­ed and added in the time­­­line?

   • At­­­tach files to the time­­­line? (Use­­­ful for slides?)

4. If pro­vid­ed with a PDF of slides, at­­tach each slide to the right mo­­ment in the time­­line

5. Easy web pub­­lish­ing: find a way to put this on a we­b­­page easy and quick (s­in­­gle-click pub­­lish­ing is the goal)

I have on­ly thought about this for about 10 min­utes, but I see po­ten­tial here.

The bad news is... I have a ton of pay­ing work to do. So this will prob­a­bly on­ly hap­pen in Jan­u­ary. How­ev­er, I want­ed to post it so I can take in­put while in this plan­ning phase.

So, any ideas?

How to write a tiny python app (less than 50 lines) that re­acts to events on the DBUS bus­es. For ex­am­ple, dis­play­ing a no­ti­fi­ca­tion when you press one of your key­board­s' spe­cial keys.

Read all about it

No, this is not a post an­nounc­ing I just wrote my first pub­lic python code. This is a post about my first pub­lic python code... from 1996!

In 1996, the soon-­to-be-here year of the Lin­ux desk­top was fu­eled by one of the mar­quee open source ap­pli­ca­tions of the time: LyX.

LyX was (is) a sort of word pro­ces­sor where you wrote and gen­er­at­ed La­TeX which then pro­duced what­ev­er you used to print. But I am di­gress­ing: LyX was cool be­cause it used one of the first good free graph­i­cal toolk­it­s: XForm­s.

Ok, it was not re­al­ly free, be­cause you could­n't dis­trib­ute patch­es.

And it was not all that good ei­ther, but we were com­par­ing it with Mo­tif, so it was much more free and much bet­ter than that mon­stros­i­ty.

BTW: The lat­est re­lease of XForms is from au­gust of 2009.

At the time, a 25-year-old me was in love with Python 1.3. Here's how I de­scribed it:

Python 1.3

It's a beau­ti­ful ,free, lan­guage. Get it from ft­p://ft­p.python.org http://www.python.org

Yes, Python 1.3. So, I want­ed to use this C GUI tool­kit used in this cool ap­p, and this neat lan­guage I was learn­ing and use them at the same time.

I ran (not walked) to my faith­ful Slack­ware 3.0 ELF in my 486DX2 PC and start­ed hack­ing. In a week­end or so I had a work­ing bind­ing.

I even start­ed writ­ing the holy grail of desk­top ap­pli­ca­tion­s, a GUI ver­sion of Pine, us­ing python and its IMAP mod­ule (python mail­er, or PyM):

I re­leased ver­sion 0.1 al­pha in 1996, May 13 ... and a few months lat­er Matthias Et­trich start­ed KDE and I found Qt and nev­er thought about XForms again.

Un­til this month.

For rea­sons that don't mat­ter, I men­tioned PyM in the PyAr mail­ing list the oth­er day, and ... well, would pyx­forms still work?

Why, pret­ty much, yeah!

I got the pyx­form­s-0.1-al­pha sources from some­where in the in­ter­net, in­stalled XForms 1.0.92sp2 (yes, the lat­est re­lease, from three months ago), of course I al­ready had python 2.6.4 in­stalled, added a set­up.py, edit­ed 10 lines of code and...

Yes, it work­s. You can get this 0.2 ver­sion (co­de­name "C­thul­hu was here") here just 13 years af­ter 0.1.

No, I don't un­der­stand the weird round­ed cor­ner­s, or why the cur­sor looks weird and old when it's in­side the win­dow.

It's a RE­AL­LY small and fast toolk­it, though.

Hon­est­ly, is it use­ful for ay­one? Al­most cer­tain­ly not. Am I amazed some­thing I wrote in 1996 still work­s? Oh, yeah I am.