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2020

06 Feb » Favourite TV Shows of the 2010s

Legion

Eligibility: Only shows that have aired more than one season can qualify, and at least one season must have aired in the 2010s

  1. Legion (2017-2019)
  2. BoJack Horseman (2014-2020)
  3. Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)
  4. Mr Robot (2015-2019)
  5. The Magicians (2015- )
  6. Rick and Morty (2013- )
  7. The Expanse (2015- )
  8. The Good Place (2016-2020 …

2013

28 Apr » Pelican Code Block CSS Classes

Pelican provides support for generating content from two markup languages - [reStructuredText] (the default) and Markdown (if installed). For the most part both markup languages generate similar output, except when using Pygments to generate code blocks with syntax highlighting.

Code blocks generated from reStructuredText will use the CSS class highlight to …

07 Apr » DRY in Apache HTTP & HTTPS VirtualHosts

On a number of occasions I have needed to make a site available via both HTTP and HTTPS which can result in creating two almost identical VirtualHost stanzas. The HTTPS stanza usually ends up being a copy & paste of the HTTP stanza with the SSL certificate stuff tacked on to …

22 Mar » wsgi-liveserver

Following on from my last post, I have now split the LiveServerTestCase out into its own Python package to make it easier to reuse in other projects. I have called it wsgi-liveserver and it is the first Python package that I have released. The package can be downloaded from PyPI …

17 Mar » Testing Bottle Applications with Selenium

Selenium is a really nice framework for testing web application front-ends by automating actions through a web browser, but it also requires a web server to be running so that the browser can interact with the web application. Most other tests usually interact with the code directly, so this requirement …

11 Mar » Testing Exception Messages

The Python unittest module provides support for testing that an exception is raised using the assertRaises() method, but sometime we need to also test that the exception message is what is expected. Python v2.7 introduced the assertRaisesRegexp() method which can be used to test exception messages using regular expressions …

03 Mar » Dict Diff and Test Driven Development

I recently wrote a short function called dict_diff() that would take two dicts, compare them, and return another two dicts that contain only the differences between the original dicts (the code is available as a gist). It works something like:

dict_diff(
    {'a': {'ab': 12}, 'b': {'ba': 21, 'bb': 22}, 'c …

24 Feb » New Blog

I have finally set up my new blog after many months of thinking about doing it.

Ever since I first heard about using static site generators for blogs the idea appealed to me. By their nature the content of blogs do not need to be generated dynamically so using static …

2012

03 Dec » Environment Variables of a Running Process

When creating init scripts or trying to debug services on Linux it can be handy to know what the environment variables are for a running process. It turns out that you can retrieve these variables from /proc (along with lots of other rather useful information). The environment variables are located …