News from the Blog 2021-03-04

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  • I’ve recorded two live sessions of Refactoring and Unit Testing working on the project cmemgzip v.0.4.
    It is basically the exercise of Refactoring a code that is too big, and extracting sections to small methods, and then adding pytest Unit Testing code coverage.
    I explain the arrays I use for testing a battery of cases instead of few of them.
    Is an exercise of talking loud what I do normally, so you can understand many small details so subtle as the order of parameters or consistency.
    I use this material so my students, colleagues learning Unit Testing, and other people can learn and make their code more resilient and high quality.
  • I’ve implemented a plugin for my Open Source Software CTOP that allows to interact with LED through the Raspberry Pi GPIO.

Plugins architecture in CTOP is something I really like. I had a lot of fun creating it, and is super powerful. Basically I load Python plugins on demand, that are able to register the methods to be called, using hooks. The plugins receives an instance of CTOP itself, injected as dependency, so they have completely visibility over all the status of the machines.

  • I’ve been developed a new version of CTOP compatible with Python 2.7.
    I will be adding to master branch and releasing as part of tag 0.8 soon.
  • I’ve released cmemgzip v.0.3 (stable) and v.0.4 (ongoing) which is a Python 3 Open Source utility like gzip, with the difference that the files are loaded into memory, then compressed in memory, then the original file is deleted and the compressed data is written to a .gz file.

That means that you can use it on systems that have no space left on the disk, as long as you have memory.

Please note, is possible to compress files much bigger than actual size of the memory as the Block size to be compressed can be indicated with parameter -m. Resulting gz file are completely compatible with gzip/gunzip, zcat, etc…

  • I’ve made a donation to vokoScreen author €25 (around $30 USD).

This is the Software that I’ve been using recently in Linux, and is very useful, specially having several monitors, so I’m thanking the author with a donation.

I’ve been using this Software to record the classes for my students, so I find nice to share the love.

For windows time ago I bought a commercial Software and it doesn’t do more than vokoScreen, which is available for Windows too.

During covid I lowered the price of my books to the minimum allowed by LeanPub, to $5 USD, and I find it so nice when people donate more, that I’m happy to contribute to brilliant authors. I support authors since I started to get my first salary several decades ago.

I’m an author. I create Software and Books. So I think is normal, common sense and healthy that we, developers, value our work and support other authors. :)

  • Long time ago I wrote an article about zoning and NDS-4600. A colleague asked me for help, as he bought a second hand unit and it was doing tests. I wrote and explained everything, and added this information to my ZFS in Ubuntu book.
  • I was very happy to see that you keep buying my books. :)

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