Peterbe.com

Funniest sad news of the week:

"Muzzammil Hassan was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassa"

And what makes this horrible sad news so funny:

"He launched Bridges TV, billed as the first English-language cable channel targeting Muslims inside the United States, in 2004. At the time, Hassan said he hoped the network would balance negative portrayals of Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001."

D'oh!

When you write unit tests in Python you can use these widgets:

self.assertEqual(var1, var2, msg=None)
self.assertNotEqual(var1, var2, msg=None)
self.assertTrue(expr, msg=None)
self.assertRaises(exception, func, para, meters, ...)

That's fine but is it "pythonic" enough? The alternative is to do with with "pure python". Eg:

assert var1 == var2, msg
assert var1 != var2, msg
assert expr, msg
try:
   func(para, meter)
   raise Exception
except exception:
   pass

I'm sure there are several benefits with using the unittest methods that I don't understand but I understand the benefits of brevity and readability. The more tests you write the more tedious it becomes to write self.assertEquals(..., ...) every time. In my own code I prefer to use simple assert statements rather than the verbose unittest alternative. Partially because I'm lazy and partially because they read better and the word assert is highlit in red in my editor so it just looks nicer from a distance.

Perhaps some much more clever people than me can explain what a cardinal sin it is to not use the unittest methods over the lazy more pythonic ones.

Incidentally, during the course of jotting down this blog I reviewed some old inherited code and changed this:

self.assertEqual(len(errors),0)

into this:

assert not errors

Isn't that just nicer to use/read/write?

If you, like me, is equally fascinated by female body builders this is a great page. It's quite incredible. I'm sure there's a large community of those who do it (men and women) and there's probably men out there who actually like this. I wish Michael Moore would do his next documentary on this instead.

Boston.com has done it again with absolutely stunning photography!

There's a new restaurant on my street called The Albion. I went there for lunch today and had the steak and kidney pie with bread. It's a proper restaurant so including tip it came to £11 with tap water. Not cheap but the service was good and the food was really great. They've got a great delicatessen section with the usual tins of overly prices Italian olives and organic vegetables and yummy desserts.

Now, this blog is not a restaurant review blog but rather a (web) technical one. What strikes me is that these guys don't have a website! How can you not have that these days? Or perhaps they do but I just can't find it anywhere on Google. There's a Albion London advertising agency a stone throw from the restaurant and there's a The Albion in Islington but no Albion restaurant in Shoreditch London on Google.

If you're going to spend thousands of pounds on a nice chairs and lamps, like this restaurant clearly has done, then why not spend a couple of pennies on SEO and getting a decent website. Granted, it's a new restaurant but it only takes Google a couple of weeks to review its indexes. Come on my-new-favorite-restaurant-around-the-corner!

If you zoom in enough you can also see the label on Dick Cheney's wheelchair. I think we'll see more of these mega megapixel shots with Google maps like navigation.

But so does poking needles in at random places. Basically, this article talks of a study that proved that acupuncture does work to treat headaches.

"The Cochrane reviews involved a total of 6,736 patients, who were given acupuncture to prevent either mild to moderate "tension" headaches, or migraine attacks.

Following a course of at least eight weeks, acupuncture patients suffered fewer headaches than those given only painkillers."

That's interesting. So it is better than painkillers. But like my colleague Shane said "I bet it's because it's so relaxing to take a break and sit down and get the treatment unlike painkillers where you don't stop". The report continues

"The scientist leading the review said the results showed that putting needles into particular locations might not be that important."

If you're wondering. I take neither painkillers or acupuncture and I personally think both western and eastern medicine has merits.

How cool is the interior design of Frank Zappa's parents?

I've done a site that is initially only going to be in Swedish. So I set the LANGUAGE_CODE like this:

# Language code for this installation. All choices can be found here:
# http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/language-identifiers.html
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'sv-SE'

I then go ahead and mark my templates and code and run django-admin.py makemessages -l sv-SE. Then I fire up Poedit to translate the .po file and then compile to make the .mo file, so now I had a file called <my project>/locale/sv-SE/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo but it just wouldn't work!! I tried debugging django.utils.translation with little success. Eventually through trial-and-error I found that if I change it to "sv" instead of "sv-SE" it works.

Is this a problem with gettext or a problem somewhere in Django? It might cause equally much headache for other developers so I wouldn't mind that we get to the bottom of this.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there a better method than this to format numeric amounts? Here's a solution I picked up from somewhere and slightly modified. It's heavily string based but passed the tests:

function format_amount(i) {
  if(isNaN(i)) { i = 0.00; }
  var minus = '';
  if(i < 0) { minus = '-'; }
  i = Math.abs(i);
  i = parseInt((i + .005) * 100);
  i = i / 100;
  s = new String(i);
  if(s.indexOf('.') < 0) { s += '.00'; }
  if(s.indexOf('.') == (s.length - 2)) { s += '0'; }
  s = minus + s;
  return s;
}

The "tests" are:

format_amount(100)       == "100.00";
format_amount(100.0)     == "100.00";
format_amount(100.05)    == "100.05";
format_amount(100.051)   == "100.05";
format_amount(-100)      == "-100.00";
format_amount(-100.0)    == "-100.00";
format_amount(-123.45)   == "-123.45";
format_amount(-123.450)  == "-123.45";

So functionally it's OK but I'm not sure it's the best way to do it.