Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

“Papa, I fixed it. I plugged it out and plugged it in and then it worked!”

Only 3 years old and already turning it off and then on again. So proud.

New blog post out today: How and why I use pytest’s xfail: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/11/pytest-xfail.html

@skunksarebetter Am I mis-remembering, or did you once recommend a CLI tool that would execute a terminal command in response to changes in a set of files? I remember it as being a recommendation for fzf, but I’m not seeing that anywhere, and fzf doesn’t seem to advertise that capability.

I should probably be less negative and more grateful that my employer has allowed me to work on this on work time. Thanks, Google!

Coming soon to Python: A basically full-spec iso8601 parser.

Though I’m already pessimistically expecting a bunch of comments like, “Finally, I still didn’t understand why they didn’t do that in the first place.” and “Oh this function is finally useful, thought the core devs were being intransigent on this.”

Comments available on HN (on the front page now!), subreddits r/Python and r/programming and lobste.rs:

https://lobste.rs/s/ajhbif/why_you_shouldn_t_invoke_setup_py_directly

Latest post is a big one: “Why you shouldn’t invoke setup​.py directly”

A lot of people don’t know about this because we haven’t been great about getting the word out. This blog post is in part an attempt to remedy this.

Please help spread the word!

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html

Is there a costume that clearly reads as “robot maker” (to match my sons’ robot costumes)?

The best I’ve come up with is “mad scientist”, which doesn’t seem right to me.

Of course, just when I am feeling maximally motivated to sit and write a blog post or something else creative, the SSD on my home server inexplicably won’t boot.

Asked about this on twitter and someone helped me debug it, it turns out the issue was that the .target was outliving the services it’s grouping, so the .timer thought there was nothing to do:

https://serverfault.com/a/1080223/336913

Seems someone submitted my article on Hamming numbers to reddit and it got a lot of upvotes but zero comments: https://teddit.net/r/Python/comments/q3xryc/paul_ganssle_generating_ksmooth_numbers_in_python/

Probably for the best, but it kinda feels like when you give a talk and get zero questions at the end…

Any #systemd experts want to take a crack at this one? https://serverfault.com/q/1079993/336913

Trying to set up a single timer that rebuilds all my websites at some regular interval, but I can only ever get it to trigger once using the only method I’ve found to do it.

My “short” blog post on generating regular numbers in Python, finally available only 7 months after I started writing it 😅: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/regular-numbers-in-python.html

#python

“Awesome, do you get to choose the color of the lasers?”
“I should back up a second.”

If you went back in time to the 1980s and told people that something called “Laser Eye Surgery” was going to be commonplace, I imagine they’d be very disappointed when they found out what it actually is.