metaprogramming and politics

Decentralize. Take the red pill.

Archive for August 2009

Let’s prevent a no-privacy world by better technology!

with one comment

Dear Google, Amazon and web 2.0: you are doing a great job of providing cool services and apps, you are doing away with obnoxious installation and upgrade steps, your stuff often works out of the box and you offer convenient interfaces. Great.

Comes with a caveat, though: the loss of control of my data and my communication, loss of ability to install and run whichever programs I like. You as central organisations and your ruling governments develop the practical possibility to get at all this data, on a mass basis and retro-actively. Something needs to change about this or we all will be ending in a world with historically unprecedented power structures in the hand of few. A world with virtually no privacy.

Part of what i can do is thinking about cool new technology to counter these developments. I am convinced we need a more decentral application execution infrastructure. We need open cloud software and infrastructure that allows to have easy-to-develop apps run "on the net" – a wealthy network of PCs and mobile phones. A free wireless-type network, not expensive mobile "total control" networks.

Written by holger krekel

August 15, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Posted in politics

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pylib 1.0.0 released: the testing-with-python innovations continue

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Took a few betas but finally i uploaded a 1.0.0 py lib release, featuring the mature and powerful py.test tool and "execnet-style" elastic distributed programming. With the new release, there are many new advanced automated testing features – here is a quick summary:

  • funcargs – pythonic zero-boilerplate fixtures for Python test functions :
    • totally separates test code, test configuration and test setup
    • ideal for integration and functional tests
    • allows for flexible and natural test parametrization schemes
  • new plugin architecture, allowing easy-to-write project-specific and cross-project single-file plugins. The most notable new external plugin is oejskit which naturally enables running and reporting of javascript-unittests in real-life browsers.
  • many new features done in easy-to-improve default plugins, highlights:
    • xfail: mark tests as "expected to fail" and report separately.
    • pastebin: automatically send tracebacks to pocoo paste service
    • capture: flexibly capture stdout/stderr of subprocesses, per-test …
    • monkeypatch: safely monkeypatch modules/classes from within tests
    • unittest: run and integrate traditional unittest.py tests
    • figleaf: generate html coverage reports with the figleaf module
    • resultlog: generate buildbot-friendly reporting output
    • …
  • distributed testing and elastic distributed execution:
    • new unified "TX" URL scheme for specifying remote processes
    • new distribution modes "–dist=each" and "–dist=load"
    • new sync/async ways to handle 1:N communication
    • improved documentation

The py lib continues to offer most of the functionality used by the testing tool in independent namespaces.

Some non-test related code, notably greenlets/co-routines and api-generation now live as their own projects which simplifies the installation procedure because no C-Extensions are required anymore.

The whole package should work well with Linux, Win32 and OSX, on Python 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6. (Expect Python3 compatibility soon!)

For more info, see the py.test and py lib documentation:

http://pytest.org

http://pylib.org

have fun, holger

Written by holger krekel

August 4, 2009 at 10:05 am

Posted in metaprogramming, testing

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