Blogs

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!

If you live in the unfortunate world of IIS6, or perhaps you're just masochistic, you're going to use ADSI in PowerShell to work with IIS. A friend of mine showed me a handy way to delete log files older than a certain date using an ADSI query in PowerShell.

Running Server 2008 R2, IIS 7.5, if you get this error in the Application event log:

The Module DLL C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\logcust.dll failed to load.  The data is the error.

It's kind of an obscure situation. IIS is saying it could not load the logcust module, which is the Custom Logging feature. In my case, I was setting up a development server farm, and had installed this feature on one server. The shared configuration caused IIS to try loading this module on the other server.

I was on the phone with VMware the other day and asked if there was some way to get a list of all the snapshots I have across all of my virtual machines. The VMware rep said no, you have to click on each VM one by one. However, I figured that it could be done. Here's how I did it.
Update: more concise output