Abstraction Cascade

Tue 14 November 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(This is an adaptation of part of the talk Kurt Rose and I gave at PyBay 2017)

An abstraction cascade is a common anti-pattern in legacy system. It is useful to understand how to recognize it, how it tends to come about, how to fix it -- and most importantly, what …

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Gather

Mon 13 November 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Gather is a plugin framework -- and it now has its own blog.

Use it! If you like it, tell us about it, and if there is a problem, tell us about that.

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Brute Forcing AES

Wed 27 September 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Thanks to Paul Kehrer for reviewing! Any mistakes or oversights that are left are my responsibility.

AES's maximum key size is 256 bits (there are also 128 and 192 bit versions available). Is that enough? Well, if there is a cryptographic flaw in AES (i.e., a way to recover …

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Announcing NColony 17.9.0

Tue 19 September 2017 by Moshe Zadka

I have released NColony 17.9.0, available in a PyPI near you.

New this version:

  • CalVer
  • Python 3 support!
  • You can ask to, explicitly, inherit environment variables from the monitoring process.
  • Website

Thanks to Mark Williams for reviewing many pull requests.

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SSH to EC2

Wed 30 August 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(Thanks to Donald Stufft for reviewing this post, and to Glyph Lefkowitz for inspiring much of it.)

(JP Calderone wrote a Twisted version of this approach.)

It is often the case that after creating an EC2 instance in AWS, the next step is SSHing. This might be because the machine …

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Image Editing with Jupyter

Tue 25 July 2017 by Moshe Zadka

With the news about MS Paint going away from the default MS install, it might be timely to look at other ways to edit images. The most common edit I need to do is to crop images -- and this is what we will use as an example.

My favorite image …

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Anatomy of a Multi-Stage Docker Build

Wed 19 July 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Docker, in recent versions, has introduced multi-stage build. This allows separating the build environment from the runtime envrionment much more easily than before.

In order to demonstrate this, we will write a minimal Flask app and run it with Twisted using its WSGI support.

The Flask application itself is the …

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Bash is Unmaintainable Python

Mon 17 July 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(Thanks to Aahz, Roy Williams, Yarko Tymciurak, and Naomi Ceder for feedback. Any mistakes that remain are mine alone.)

In the post about building Docker applications, I had the following Python script:

import datetime, subprocess
tag = datetime.datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
tag = tag.replace(':', '-').replace('.', '-')
for ext in ['', '-slim']:
    image = "moshez …
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Imports at a Distance

Sun 25 June 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(Thanks to Mark Williams for feedback and research)

Imagine the following code:

## mymodule.py
import toplevel.nextlevel.lowmodule

def _func():
    toplevel.nextlevel.lowmodule.dosomething(1)

def main():
    _func()

Assuming the toplevel.nextlevel.module does define a function dosomething, this code seems to work just fine.

However, imagine that later we …

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X Why Zip

Sat 24 June 2017 by Moshe Zadka

PEP 441 resulted in the creation of the zipapp module. The PEP says "Python has had the ability to execute directories or ZIP-format archives as scripts since version 2.6 [...] This feature is not as popular as it should be mainly because it was not promoted as part of Python …

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