Other articles

1. Watch out for Mock(spec)

   Despite mocks being a bit of a smell, they are handy and I do find myself using them from time to time. As a cheap way to get some extra checks, I try to always make use of autospec=True in my mock.patch() calls.

   Sometimes instead of patch I …

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2. Git blame for better diffs

   When reviewing a pull request against nameko today there was a chunk of code moved from a function into a method, though oterwise mostly unchanged. Unfortunately, it also moved around in the file, and so even git diff -w (abbreviation for git diff --ignore-all-space), ignoring all whitespace showed everything as …

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3. Strace to the rescue

   Recently I was debugging a strange error when using the eventlet support in the new the new coverage 4.0 alpha. The issue manifested itself as a network connection problem: Name or service not known. This was confusing, since the host it was trying to connect to was localhost. How …

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4. Show git branches with recent changes

   As I work on various projects, I tend to end up with a bunch of git branches lying around in my repo. Every once in a while, I run a git branch --merged on master to see what can be trivially trimmed, but sometimes the list of unmerged branches grows …

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5. Dummy memcached server

   Today I found myself requiring a dummy memcached server. It just needed to accept writes and never return any values. It turns out that netcat makes a good one.

   $ nc -lk 11211
   

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6. Custom redirects in the django admin

   On one of my sites i have a bunch of different models for various content resources, e.g. articles, videos and podcasts. For admins I wanted to add an "edit this item" link to the menu when browsing the site. Pretty easy: check permissions and add a link to the …

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7. There's no such thing as a trivial change

   Often when developing it's easy to let "trivial" edits just slip in without having to jump through all the hoops we put "more serious" patches through. Be this a code-review, running the test suite or any other means of checking over our code: nothing is too small to matter.

   A …

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8. Dynamically creating django models for m2m relationships

   Occasionally when using a django ManyToManyField I find myself wanting to query the join table directly. Consider for example the models below:

   class Category(models.Model):
       name = models.TextField()
   
   class Entry(models.Model):
       data = models.TextField()
       categories = models.ManyToManyField(Category)
   

   Suppose I have an entry, and want to find entries …

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9. Puppet requirement chains and partially satisfied conditions

   At work we use (among other things) puppet to manage our server configurations. For those uninitiated, puppet provides a dsl for specifying server configurations. I won't go into details here, there are plenty of resources elsewhere.

   Puppet works by specifying Resources, describing the desired state of the system. The provisioning …

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10. Changing keyboard shortcuts in osx

    I use iterm2 as my terminal, and to navigate between tabs, I use cmd-shift-{ and }. Not infrequently, I mistap and hit cmd-shift-p instead, which launches the page setup dialog (and in doing so, freezes for a second or so). Now, I rarely (never?) actually need this functionality, and to my …

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11. Automating save-build-refresh on os x

    This blog is powered by Pelican. When I first started out, I was composing in vim, switching over to a terminal to build, and finally to my browser to preview the result. Clearly this becomes tedious pretty quickly.

    I was already familiar with tools to watch folders for changes and …

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12. Introspecting django urls for fun and profit

    One of the projects I work on has a fairly large and old code base, and is unfortunately somewhat lacking in the test suite department. We are working to improve this, but in the medium term we are stuck with a fair amount of manual testing.

    As part of some …

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13. Git case gotcha on os x

    Found myself caught by a gotcha using git on os x today. The issue is the way os x (hfs+) handles letter case in file names. File names are case insensitive, which means that File and file are considered to be the same file.

    To see this in action, create …

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14. Remove "tweet" from os x context menu

    I rarely (read: never) want to tweet when I right click to bring up a context menu. Actually, most of the time, I'm just looking for "Inspect Element" in Chrome. I was happily surprised to find I could remove the option entirely:

    1. Open System Preferences
    2. Choose "Keyboard"
    3. Choose the "Keyboard …

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15. Show number of queries in runserver output

    Sometimes I'd like to know how many database queries were used to generate a particular view, but can't be bothered with the full weight of the (otherwise excellent) django-debug-toolbar.

    The toolbar does a lot of logging and slows down rendering. Also, by default I want 'INTERCEPT_REDIRECTS': False, but then I …

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16. Time to start blogging?

    Have been thinking about starting to blog for a while. I think the vague plan is to write about code. Mostly notes-to-self a la "How did I get that thing to work again?", but if any of this could be useful to others, all the better. We'll see where this …

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