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• SSD awesomeness

• Psyched with the Intel SSD disk's performance: 238 MB/s on reads, 138 MB/s on writes. #wow

  

• around noon, Tuesday 3 May 2011
  Text | SSD awesomeness (Comment!)

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• at night, Thursday 21 April 2011
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• at night, Tuesday 19 April 2011
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• in the evening, Wednesday 13 April 2011
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• around noon, Monday 11 April 2011
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• in the evening, Sunday 10 April 2011
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• in the evening, Wednesday 6 April 2011
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• Flickr / notsogoodphotography

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• in the evening, Tuesday 22 March 2011
  Photo | Flickr / notsogoodphotography (Comment!)

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• Useful CPU Comparison Chart

• via

• in the morning, Tuesday 15 March 2011
  | Useful CPU Comparison Chart (Comment!)

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• Test-wrapped development: Develop from within your tests

• Here's something neat. Today I decided not to develop using the Django development server, but instead do that from inside my tests. This way I will work directly on my test database which runs with my test fixtures and when I'm ready, I'll just write the necessary assertions.

  Previously I talked about rendering the test client's responses in the browser to view the results of your tests live, before choosing the correct assertions. This time I'm wrapping the code in a while loop to iterate over my development workflow.

  This is something different than test-driven development. This way you don't run your tests for every development iteration, but rather you just "stuck" your test case until you like what you see in your code. Here's an example from a unit test:

  from transifex.txcommon.tests.utils import response_in_browser
  def test_homepage(self):
      while True:
          resp = self.client['anonymous'].get('/')
          response_in_browser(resp, halt=False)
  
          # Loop control:
          ch = raw_input("Halted. [r]eload, drop to [s]hell or any other key to continue: ")
          if ch == 'r': continue;
          elif ch == 's': from IPython.Shell import IPShellEmbed; IPShellEmbed()()
          else: break
  

  Now when I run the test, my browser opens up showing how my homepage looks like. I start tweaking the template, hit r and view the page in the browser again. When I'm satisfied with what I see, I copy-paste from the browser some of the test I want to assert against and hit 's' to drop in a shell.

  I write my assertions there, in-place, with the test data initialized and ready to be asserted against. When I'm happy with those assertions, I just copy-paste them in the test case and remove the while statement and loop control code.

  This type of testing & development works well for template testing. I'm not sure how this should be called. It's test-wrapped development or something.

  Also note that the following config variables will be needed:

  TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True
  CACHE_BACKEND = 'dummy://'
  

• in the afternoon, Friday 11 March 2011
  Text | Test-wrapped development: Develop from within your tests (Comment!)

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• in the evening, Thursday 10 March 2011
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• Video

• via

  An explorer adventures into an unknown world, yet it seems that he has been there before. A short animated film directed by Malcolm Sutherland in 2010.

  (Notice the guy tripping at 1:43. Ingenious.)

• in the evening, Saturday 5 March 2011
  Video | Video (Comment!)

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• in the evening, Monday 28 February 2011
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• at night, Sunday 27 February 2011
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• at night, Saturday 26 February 2011
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• Quote

• There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture.

  We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour we will control all that you see and hear.

  You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the deepest inner mind to the outer limits. Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I7vPbthvWo

  — The Outer Limits

• in the evening, Tuesday 22 February 2011
  | Quote (Comment!)

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• twitter.com

• For passionate and patient people it's never too little, and it's never too late.

  — Quim Gil

• in the evening, Tuesday 22 February 2011
  Quote | twitter.com (Comment!)

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• youtube.com

• Athens I The Little Great City

• in the evening, Monday 21 February 2011
  Video | youtube.com (Comment!)

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• Photo

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• at night, Sunday 20 February 2011
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• Rendering Django tests in your web browser

• There are a number of levels you can test your Django project. You can test any Python method, your models, your views and even your templates. In the latter case, you're actually testing the rendered response of a view with a specific context. Most of the times, this result is HTML.

  When I write my assertion, I often need to query for a particular string in the response's content. I end up opening ipython, print the result and try to find something in that mess.

  This takes a lot of time, because the command-line window isn't the best HTML renderer in the world. Here's a simple method to take the response content and render it in a browser:

  def response_in_browser(resp, halt=True):
      """Open a browser and render the response's content."""
  
      import tempfile, webbrowser, time
      with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as f:
          f.write(resp.content)
          f.flush()
          webbrowser.open(f.name)
          if halt:
              raw_input("Press a key to continue with your tests...")
          else:
              # Give the browser a chance to open the file
              time.sleep(1)
  

  And just call it from inside any test of yours:

  response = self.client.get(
      reverse('myUrlName', args=['foo'])
  from txcommon.tests.utils import response_in_browser
  response_in_browser(response)
  

  Your browser will open for you:

  

  One of the first issues you might face is seeing a style-less page. This happens becuase the test server isn't really a web server, and you're probably serving static files from something relative such as '/site_media'. The solution is simple: Run a separate Django server and tweak your development-only static URL to something like:

  STATIC_URL = 'http://localhost:8000/site_media/
  

  This will trick the temporary window to show the test's HTML with the static files served from the server. Voilà:

  

  You can then use your browser's browser's super tools such as 'View Source' and 'Inspect Element'.

  

• in the evening, Saturday 19 February 2011
  Text | Rendering Django tests in your web browser (Comment!)

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