The Voidspace Techie Blog

Open Source Licensing and Contributions

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:59:00 GMT

There have been discussions on the issues of licensing and accepting contributions to open source projects on the Python-dev and the testing in Python mailing lists. This is an area that can be very confusing, and potentially problematic for open source projects. ... [376 words]

Exception handling and duck typing

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 17:50:43 GMT

Exceptions are one of the great features of high level languages that making coding less tedious. Instead of manually checking for possible errors and returning error codes we can use exceptions. ... [675 words]

Movable IDLE for Python 2.5 on Windows

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:38:27 GMT

Movable IDLE is a standalone version of the IDLE Python IDE. Movable IDLE is part of the Movable Python project and can be run (Windows only I'm afraid) from a USB memory stick and without installing Python. ... [114 words]

The Python Object Model Revisited (data descriptors)

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:08:08 GMT

A few weeks ago I demonstrated the complexity of the Python object model by fetching docstrings from objects. A while after posting it I thought of a bug - or at least a way in which it could return the wrong result when looking up an attribute on an object. ... [661 words]

discover: Test discovery for unittest backported to Python 2.4+

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:35:56 GMT

I kind of promised you no more entries on unittest for a while, but oh well. I've backported the test discovery in Python-trunk, what will become Python 2.7 & Python 3.2. ... [586 words]

Catching up: Pythonutils 0.4.0, akismet 0.2.0 and article updates

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:37:59 GMT

About two and a half years ago I started writing the book. During the next two years I received a steady trickle of feature requests, bug reports and patches for the various projects and articles I maintain (or pretend to maintain). ... [400 words]

Parametrized Tests and unittest

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:38:42 GMT

Yet another blog entry on unittest; this is the last one in my list so I'm not planning any more for a while. Something that both nose and py.test provide that unittest (the [1] Python standard library testing framework) doesn't is a builtin mechanism for writing parametrized tests. ... [1227 words]

Gadgets: Samsung SSD, Sharkoon SATA Adaptor, Mimo USB Monitor and Powermate USB Volume Knob(!)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:44:01 GMT

Over the last few months I've bought a few new gadgets, and they're well overdue a review; so here goes. Samsung PB22 2.5" 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive) As I'm sure you're aware Solid State Drives are hard drives using flash memory instead of mechanical disks; this eliminates the need for spin up, plus makes seek times and data rates potentially much faster and power consumption less. ... [1133 words]

Fuzzywuzzy Beard

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:24:57 GMT

In my last post I mentioned my fuzzywuzzy beard not once but twice. Here's a great picture of me and my fuzzywuzzy beard drawn by Scott Meyer, the creator of the Basic Instructions webcomic. ... [43 words]

Future adventures of unittest and a mini-rant

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:06:12 GMT

There is a general rule that innovation doesn't happen in the standard library. Instead modules or techniques that have already proven themselves in the Python community are adopted into the standard library. ... [1372 words]

New in unittest: Test Discovery and the load_tests protocol for Python 2.7 and 3.2

Mon, 1 Jun 2009 12:00:24 GMT

A feature that has long been missing from unittest, is automatic test discovery. This alone is a major reason why people move to alternative frameworks like nose and py.test. ... [663 words]