Blogs

I've been working with Splunk Enterprise a lot lately (and it's very powerful and easy to use!). In many situations, it is useful to show some metric compared to the same metric a month ago (or some other time period).

One way to accomplish this is with the community-supported Splunk app, Timewrap. I couldn't get Timewrap to output the data as I wanted, so instead here's the approach that I used.

I needed to send an ICAP request to a Symantec Antivirus server. Because ICAP is HTTP-like, but not quite HTTP, I could not use the wonderful requests library. So, here's what I did instead:

Let's say you need to update lots of keys in Amazon S3. If you have many objects in your S3 bucket, this can be quite slow. Of course, as a Python developer, you're using the nifty boto library. We can make update all of your keys much, much faster using multiple threads!

Background:

I was setting up a development copy of a client website on my computer the other day, and after I had cloned the repo, set up the database, and pip installed Django and all of the other python packages needed for the website, I faced a strange Exception coming from deep inside of one of my dependencies. After an embarrasingly long period of troubleshooting, I realized that when I specified my python dependencies, I neglected to include the version requirements for each package.

Problem:

I wanted to provide a super simple example of using Ned Batchelder's coverage.py for testing my Python unittest coverage. The thing that tripped me up at first is that I needed to call coverage.py in such a way to exercise Python's unittest framework. For example:

coverage run -m unittest discover;
coverage report -m;

Mocking dates is a well-known PITA with Python. But here's a quick explanation of how I worked around this deficiency.

Step 1: Add the date as a property to the production class. I had to refactor my code, and I suspect you will too. Before mocking this date, I was calling date.today() from the build_widget method.

from datetime import date

class WidgetWorker(object):
    date = date.today()
    def build_widget(self):
        return {'date_created': self.date}

If your list of wireless networks looks like this:

I'll show you how to fix it.

When unit testing Python, how can one assert that exceptions are raised or handled? Here's how we do it:

First, here is the code we want to test:

def division_raises():
    print(10/0)


def division_doesnt_raise():
    try:
        print(10/0)
    except ZeroDivisionError:
        return None

And here is how we test the code above:

As a Software Developer now, I suppose I'll start blogging about my crafty programming exploits. I work mainly with .NET at this point.

OH CRAP! This is another "Welcome to my blog" posts! fuuuuu

$a = new-object net.webclient;

$a.DownloadString("http://www.whattimeisit.com/")

Bam!