Articles in the Programming category

1. Two Column for Loop in bash

   Posted on April 18, 2016 in programming

   I had this interesting question the other day. Someone had a file with two columns of data in it. They wanted to assign each column to a different variable and then take action using those two variables. Here's the example I wrote for them:

   IFS=$'\n';
   for LINE in $(cat …

2. [Python] Interleave Two Lists of Variable Length

   Posted on March 18, 2016 in Programming

   I was recently asked to take two lists and interleave them. Although I can not think of a scenario off the top of my head where this might be useful, it doesn't strike me as a completely silly thing to do. StackOverflow's top answer for this problem uses itertools.chain …

3. [Python] Socket Timeouts in urllib2

   Posted on March 04, 2016 in Programming

   Things have changed quite a lot since this post was originally written in 2016. Currently, I would recommend switching over to making asynchronous calls via aiohttp.

   One of my scripts that makes an API call has been failing silently lately. It appears that the connection is timing out, but I …

4. Working Around EVE-KILL + Cloudflare Block

   Posted on December 21, 2015 in Programming

   I've got some code that generates loss reports for EVE Online. It uses the EVE-KILL API and Python's urllib2 library. Near the end of October 2015, I noticed that my calls to the API were returning a 403: Forbidden error from the server. I didn't realize it at the time …

5. UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

   Posted on December 14, 2015 in Programming

   Although I was getting this output in relation to one of my Jinja2 templates, it really isn't a Jinja2 problem.

   UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 69: ordinal not in range(128)
   

   The bit of code here should be doing nothing more than printing a float …

6. [Python] Empty String?

   Posted on December 01, 2015 in Programming

   I've mentioned before that empty strings in Python are false. This leads to a common if not string paradigm. Unfortunately, this can be problematic. Check out this snippet:

   >>> string = ""
   >>> if not string:
   ...  print("empty")
   ... 
   empty
   

   That pretty much worked out just as we imagined. The empty string returned False and …

7. Custom One-Line Log Output for Git and Mercurial

   Posted on November 25, 2015 in Programming

   The default history view in Git and Mercurial is optimized for completeness, not scanning. A compact one-line log is a better daily tool: short ID, subject, relative date, author, and branch or bookmark context. It does not replace a full graph; it makes the first pass fast enough that you …

8. [Pelican] Don't Let Me Publish Without Committing

   Posted on November 02, 2015 in Programming

   Although I use Git all day long, I actually prefer to use Mercurial for my personal stuff. When I started working on this project to maintain slaptijack.com with Pelican rather than continuing to use Wordpress, one of the things that really interested me was the ability to keep Markdown …

9. Pelican: Insert Article Summaries into WordPress

   Posted on October 26, 2015 in Programming

   This is was my next project.

   Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

   • Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
   • It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

10. Using Pelican's article.summary

    Posted on October 23, 2015 in Programming

    I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

11. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

    Posted on September 21, 2015 in Programming

    Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

    Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
    

    This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

12. UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'

    Posted on May 22, 2015 in Programming

    Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/Users …

13. [Python] urllib2 with gzip or deflate encoding

    Posted on April 16, 2015 in Programming

    The other night I was working on some Python code that interacts with the zKillboard API. The API call returns kill information via JSON for EVE Online. While making the request, I was getting an error that I was using "non-acceptable encoding." It turns out that the zKillboard guys require …

14. MySQL Multiple-Column Indexes: Order Matters

    Posted on May 18, 2011 in Programming

    This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number …

15. If Your Post Doesn't Start With An Image, Display an Ad Instead

    Posted on March 08, 2011 in Programming

    I usually start my posts off with an image that is relevant to the post. I think it adds a bit of drama to what I'm writing about, and it also gives me a nice place to anchor a link to a WordPress tag about the subject. I had this …