Lately I’ve been working on resurrecting a project, called Kollektor, that I have on SourceForge. Kollektor is a personal book collection manager that can fetch information from Amazon. It’s been a few years since I worked on it and in the mean time the Amazon interface has changed significantly. A couple days [...]

Posted in Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

As far as I know there is no official way to clone a list in Python. This is desirable at times because normal variable assignment of lists is just a reference copy. For example:
 
>>> listA = [’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listB = listA
>>> listA
[’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listB
[’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listA.remove(’C')
>>> listA
[’A', [...]

Posted in Python No Comments »

Linux has many amazing programs that can be chained together to produce amazing results. Today I needed to turn a multi-line file into a CSV (comma separated) file. In Linux this is super easy:
cat file | tr ‘\n’ ‘,’
Basically, this will turn a file like this:
Line1
Line2
Line3
Line4
Into this:
Line1,Line2,Line3,Line4

Posted in Bash/Shell No Comments »

One of the greatest things about being a test engineer is that I get to delve into a little bit of everything. At work I use a handful of different languages to accomplish different tasks. Up until recently TCL programming has been a thorn in my side. I love the interactive Python [...]

Posted in TCL 2 Comments »

Background
I love Python and my personal experience has shown that testers are about 4x more productive when using Python than when using Java. However, at work I am a tester on a Java application. I’ve been looking for a way to bridge that gap and allow me to write my tests in Python [...]

Posted in Java, Programming, Python 1 Comment »

Dataflow programming is something new to me.  Lately I’ve been looking up articles and information about this programming paradigm.  In a sense I suppose that I am familiar with the concepts.  In Linux I use the pipe “|” a lot to pump data from one program to another.  Each program in the stage alters the [...]

Posted in Programming, Python No Comments »

I think it’s a safe bet to say that anyone who has been in software testing or programming for any length of time has had to create a regular expression (RE). Most of the RE’s that I create are simple and I can do them quickly. However, this past week I had need [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

If you are a SOAP fan then you may want to stop reading now.  Seriously, I am not interested in a philosophical debate on the “merits” of SOAP.  Personally, I think SOAP is a horrible way for distributed resources to communicate.  The idea of SOAP being XML and hence partially readable is OK, but for [...]

Posted in Internet, Programming No Comments »

I found this TCL call graph generator today. I find that call graph generators are useful for static debugging and tracing of program flow.
http://www.fincher.org/tips/Languages/tcltk.shtml
Link Summary

http://http://www.fin…Languages/tcltk.shtml

Posted in Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

Believe it or not this actually took some time to find, so I am posting it here for future reference. To do a find and replace recursively in Linux type:
 
find ./ -type f | xargs sed -i ’s/string1/string2/g’
 
That will replace every occurrence of “string1″ with “string2.”

Posted in Bash/Shell, Linux No Comments »