Articles in the programming category

1. Git Remote Moved?

   Posted on February 16, 2023 in programming

   There are lots of reasons why your Git repository remotes might move. I recently dealt with a migration to GitHub. You can always just clone the repository again and go about your business, but I had several local branches I wanted to keep working on.

   There's lots of ways to …

2. [Git] Per Repo SSH Identity

   Posted on February 13, 2023 in programming

   For work, I need a personal GitHub account in addition to my Enterprise Managed User (EMU) account. After updating my SSH keys the other day, I realized I had inadvertently locked myself out of using my personal account on my work laptop.

   Here's what that looked like:

   $ git pull
   ERROR …

3. Quick Codemods with sed

   Posted on January 03, 2023 in programming

   I had a few different changes last week (in two different repos) that required one-line changes in lots of files.

   Quick note here that I'm using GNU sed. If you're on a Mac, you can use GNU sed, too (via Homebrew, for example).

   Example 1: Change Status

   In this first …

4. [Python] Popular Search Terms

   Posted on October 03, 2022 in programming

   I thought it would be neat to keep an eye on the popular google search terms related to Python.

   The list below uses JavaScript from Google Trends. You can use the kebab menu icon to choose between "Top" and "Rising" search phrases.

5. 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 …

6. [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 …

7. [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 …

8. 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 …

9. 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 …

10. [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 …