Erik Zaadi

Live Reload is an awesome Mac app and browser extension which reloads your browser automagically when editing a file. Needless to save, it’s a bliss, never to {CMD,ctrl} + R again.

For those of us who are Mac less, the App is of course not available. Ruby to the rescue!

Install the LiveReload browser extension, see long explanation.

Edit Gemfile and add the following two lines:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

source "http://rubygems.org"

group :development do
  ...
  gem 'guard'
  gem 'guard-livereload'
end

Create a Guardfile with the following content:

TL;DR: Grab the gist

Let’s say you have these classes in a python file:

And you want to write some simple unit tests for them, typically you’d do something like this:

running them with nosetests -v will get you the following result:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11

nosetests -v test_components_verbose
user@host:gist-3731389|‹master› ⇒  nosetests -v test_components_verbose.py
Test that initialized is set. ... ok
Test A class constructor set something. ... ok
Test that initialized is set. ... ok
Test B class constructor sets something. ... ok

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 4 tests in 0.001s

OK

Although that might seem ok, there’s some code duplication here that is really annnoying. If ClassA where to inherit ClassB this would seem even more over verbose..

A little more than a year ago, I started working at XIV (IBM).

The change was rather dramatic in terms of technologies that I work with. I went from being a .NET web developer to a python developer, dealing with a lot if IT and system.

Furthermore, I stopped working on a Mac (this is do miss), and have almost not touched windows for the entire year (which I haven’t missed at all).

I got inspired by this awesome article by Gabriel Weinberg to hack a bit on nginx.

It’s a great article which I highly recommend to read.

The part that specifically interested me was turning JSON into JSONP compatible calls, usable both for proxying remote / local apis that doesn’t supply JSONP functionality and for simple to padd local static JSON files.

What bothered me though was the fact that the name of the method to pad into the JSON response was hard coded.

If you use your unix mail spool/box with any type of fetchmail (ahem fetchnotes), on rare occasions, the mail box might be corrupted, typically missing a single starting character.

Thunderbird will fail miserably without any explanations, and Mutt will complain that the mailbox is invalid.

Open the mailbox (/var/mail/$USER usually) in your favorite editor (vim of course), and have a look at the beginning of the file:

It should start like this:

Writing unit tests with Python is a joy, especially with the excellent mock library.

You can tweak the language and mock almost anything to your will, making testing even the smallest of units very easy.

HOWEVER , mocking imports, when a class / module depends on imports which you might not have on your machine, such as windows modules (oei vei) when you are (and you should be) on a nix machine.

Created a solarized theme for octopress.

Inspired by Ethan Schoonover’s own homepage.

The source is as always on github.

To add this to your own Octopress instance :

1
2
3

cd /my/awesome/octopress/dir
git clone http://github.com/erikzaadi/solarized-octopress-theme .themes/solarized
rake install["solarized"]

zsh users : run

1

rake install\['solarized'\]

instead of the last command

Customize

To toggle between light and dark mode, edit sass/custom/_colors.scss and change $sol and ``$solarized`:

1
2

$sol : light; // light or dark -  Recommended: set $solarized  to the opposite of this
$solarized : dark; // code syntax highlighting theme

Screenshots

You should be using vundle

Vundle is a vim plugin manager, ala pathogen.

Vundle allows you to specify in your vimrc what vim plugins you wish to load, and it’ll automatically download (git clone if possible) and enable vim plugins.

Vundle can get a name of a plugin as it appears in the vim plugin directory, a github :user/:repo style string, and even a full git url.

1
2
3

Plugin 'Syntastic' "uber awesome syntax and errors highlighter
Plugin 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized' "T-H-E colorscheme
Plugin 'https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive' "So awesome, it should be illegal 

Vundle also updates your vim plugins with a simple command :

After migrating my blog from wp to octopress (see previous post), I started thinking that it might be a waste using a (shared) hosting account just to serve static files. Since I use Amazon Web Services a lot, I thought I might give Amazon S3 a shot.

There’s a zillion posts out there of how to make a static site in S3, including for octopress sites, so I won’t bother you with repeating the steps here (see the links in the end of the post).