Unit test your obvious code


Sometimes you don't write unit tests. Your reason for not doing so always falls into one of two categories. Complexity The code you just wrote would be so much easier to test using system-level testing. For example... The setup and teardown would be 10x the test code. There's too much interaction with multiple data stores … Continue reading Unit test your obvious code →

The one where I jumped the gun re: Rackspace


I talked with Erik Carlin of Rackspace about last week's Rackspace post. He explained that I experienced a bug in their dynamic image configuration. When you instantiate a VM, a number of things happen behind the scenes to the base server image. It's not as simple as copying a directory tree from A to B. … Continue reading The one where I jumped the gun re: Rackspace →

Screwed again by Rackspace changing a published image


Once again, Rackspace has changed the contents of an already-published server image without any notice to its users. 22 days ago, I provisioned a staging system with Ubuntu 11.10. In upgrading from 11.04, I had the typical difficulties — e.g., removing 11.04 package workarounds, and upgrading some software that we built from sources. When I finished, … Continue reading Screwed again by Rackspace changing a published image →

PyCon, day 3


Daylight Saving Time is a gimmick and a crock and flipping stupid and I hate it. Personality cults are odd. At a conference, I see this most often in the backchannels. Like on Twitter. If Fred tweets XYZ, it probably won't be RT'd; and if it is, it'll be RT'd at most twice. But if a community … Continue reading PyCon, day 3 →

PyCon, day 2


*Yawn*, I'm up. Great party last night. I met someone who lives and works in the Galápagos Islands for the Charles Darwin foundation! We had a nice chat. He has fascinating challenges doing data crunching and providing web services down there. "Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain" — Gah, shoot UTF-32 and UTF-16 … Continue reading PyCon, day 2 →

PyCon, day 1


The first day of the main conference! I'm anticipating syncing up with friends, like Andrew and Kirk. With tinges of loss and misery caused by Joe's and Ryan's absence... Great Keynote speeches. Morning is metaclasses, classes, and subclasses. Should one run away from metaclasses, or view them as just another tool?(Apologies to Edward Teller's estate.) The … Continue reading PyCon, day 1 →

PyCon tutorials, day 2


Yesterday was SQL and MongoDB. I plugged up some knowledge gaps. Goodness. Except for a Ming firehose onto which I held for dear life. Today is a "Python epiphanies" tutorial, and NLTK. More goodness.

PyCon tutorials, day 1


Up for day 1. A nice day in Santa Clara. A lime has no place in a breakfast fruit bowl. If I have anything cosmic to share, I'll do it here.