To include your git branch in your bash shell prompt, add this to your .bashrc and start a new shell window. This is what you end up with. The git branch only shows up when you are in a directory that is part of a git repository. This implementation relies on gawk. If you do […]

I just got a Google Slate, largely because it can run Linux programs. By default, ssh-agent is not running when you open a terminal window. To add it, I created and enabled a systemd service for ssh-agent and I created the environment variable. Create ~/.config/systemd/user/ssh-agent.service [Unit] Description=ssh-agent service [Service] Type=simple Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/ssh-agent.socket ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh-agent -D -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK […]

I’ll admit it: I have previously tried and failed to get the new HTTP REST client in JetBrains PhpStorm to do what I wanted, especially with POST requests and file uploads. This morning, the stars aligned properly and my magic beans sprouted and life is beautiful. Here is the code. It does a POST call […]

Yesterday, I spent longer than I care to admit debugging an update to an old PHP script. It fetched a string from a MySQL database and (here’s the new part) passed the string to json_encode(). That call failed when the data included the multibyte characters ¼ or ½ or ¾. All of my attempts to remove the multibyte […]

I needed a singleton database class in a Python 2.7 program and wrote it this way. class Singleton(type): _instances = {} def __call__(cls, *args, **kwargs): if cls not in cls._instances: cls._instances[cls] = super(Singleton, cls).__call__(*args, **kwargs) return cls._instances[cls] class Database(): __metaclass__ = Singleton def __init__(self): self.db = MySQLdb.connect(…) I like this pattern but I realized that […]

Following onto yesterday’s post about Python Properties and @property, there is a neat little trick to create a read-only property of a Python class. All you have to do is omit the setter. This Hero class has a read-write property “name” class Hero(object): def __init__(self, **kwargs): self.name = kwargs[‘name’] @property def name(self): return ‘%s %s’ % […]

My son pointed me at PyCharm and, while poking through it’s built-in “intentions,” I discovered Python’s @property decorator, which led me to learn more about the Pythonic way to handle class properties. Unlike Java and C++, Python encourages you to create public class attributes (a/k/a properties). Here is an example: class Hero(object): def __init__(self, **kwargs): […]

The Python programming language has become my first choice for most tasks over the last year or so. The more I use it, the more I find to like about it. I just stumbled across generators in a way that made them make sense to me and it is so cool that I want to […]