Posts tagged Python

Yesterday I slashed 50% of run time from our applications functional test suite by modifying a single function. I had no idea that function was responsible for 50% of the run time until I started profiling. Profiling a Python program is getting easier and easier: $ python -m cProfile -o prof.data bin/test -f runs our test runner (which is a Python script) under the profiler and stores the results in prof.

Things I've taken up to do in the nearest future: Read and review Python Testing: Beginner's Guide and Grok 1.0 Web Development for Packt. (The links are trackable to my blog, but I'm not getting anything out of it. Other than free copies of the e-books, which I already received, in exchange for a promise to review them on this blog.) Help Reportlab folks set up continuous integration (most likely Hudson, since Buildbot, while powerful, has a steep learning curve).

On Tuesday we started what will hopefully become a tradition: weekly IRC meetings for Zope developers. Topics covered include buildbot organization and maintenance, open issues with the ZTK development process, and the fate of Zope 3.5 (= BlueBream 1.0). There are IRC logs of the meeting, and Christian Theune posted a summary to the mailing list. My take on this can be summed up as: Zope ain't dead yet! The project has fragmented a bit (Zope 2, Zope Toolkit, Grok, BlueBream, Repoze), but we all share a set of core packages and we want to keep them healthy.

Michael Foord wrote about some Latin-1 control character fun in a blog that's hard to read (the RSS feed syndicated on Planet Python is truncated, grr!) and hard to reply (no comments on the blog! my Chromium's AdBlock+ hid the comment link so I couldn't find it), but never mind that. Unfortunately the data from the customers included some \x85 characters, which were breaking the CSV parsing. 0x85 is a control character (NEXT LINE or NEL) in Latin-1, but it's a printable character (HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS) in Microsoft's code page 1252, which is often mistaken for Latin-1.

Back in 2004 I wrote a small Gtk+ app to help me keep track of my time, and called it GTimeLog. I shared it with my coworkers, put it on the web (on the general "release early, release often" principles), and it got sort-of popular before I found the time to polish it into a state where I wouldn't be ashamed to show it to other people. Fast-forward to 2008: there are actual users out there (much to my surprise), I still haven't added the originally-envisioned spit and polish, haven't done anything to foster a development community, am wracked by guilt of not doing my maintainerly duties properly, which leads to depression and burnout.