The first thing I noticed when I moved to Santa Barbara and started going outdoors was that everything just seemed a little more hostile than what I was used to. There are the ever present threats of overwhelming heat, lack of water, exposure and poison oak. By now, I’ve come to know some of the more subtle actors as well.

One of them I met today: Pitchfork Weed aka Bidens frondosa or, the Devil’s Beggarticks, Devil’s Pitchfork, Tickseed Sunflower… Would you believe it is closely related to the lovely sunflower? Neither would I, the family resemblance is illusive. Trust me, you don’t want to run through a field of these, and their seeds are not pleasant.

So I really like code linters. My coworkers know this. Actually, I got called a syntax Nazi today by a fellow developer. I’m OK with that. I believe in readability and consistency.

In my projects I make it impossible to make a git commit before the source code passes a flake8 check. How to perform this minor miracle you ask? With a simple git pre-commit hook:

myproject/.git/hooks/pre-commit

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#!/bin/sh
flake8 .

When I commit, the hook executes. Since git knows a return of anything besides 0 means abort, it stops the commit from happening. Awesome.

Here is a terminal recording of it in action:

Don’t forget to make your pre-commit hook file executable!

Recently I started a new Django project, and this time I decided to go all in on Docker. No virtualenvs, no local databases - containers all the way.

There are about a million and ten articles about how to dockerize webapps by now. However, none of them seem to address one simple fact: we don’t simply want to dockerize our applications, we want to develop them too!

sane-django-docker contains a sample django project webapp as well as the necessary config files to run both a development and production server.

I’ve been pretty good about not becoming a open source pundit. But today I feel like writing something useless.

My laptop’s ssd crapped out yesterday so I spent the day restoring backups and installing operating systems. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a few years now, so I thought it would be great to revisit Gnome and see how the 3.x development is coming along, maybe even switch back.

Nope.

I was waiting in line at the supermarket this morning when I came across this cover of the June 2015 Vanity Fair:

Immediately something struck me as very, very wrong.

I know we all hope the new Star Wars will be good and make up for the complete travesty of episodes I, II and III. But I’m going to make a quick and uninformed judgment based solely on this magazine cover and say: no, no it won’t.

I just upgraded this VPS from Debian Wheezy to Jessie. The upgrade went pretty flawless, excpet some minor issues with postgres and the new bad systemd smell.

<img class=”img-fluid” src=”http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pedaldp/images/2015-03-feynman-on-computer-disease/feynman.jpg %}

I’ve spent a good deal of time in the last few days searching for a good library to draw star charts (finder charts) that I could use to integrate with AstroChallenge. While there are plenty of utilities to create star maps, they mostly consist of desktop software or websites that are not open source.

Eventually I found fchart which resembled was I was looking for. A set of python scripts with minimal dependencies that would output star maps! This I could use.