Hackzine.org

It's quite common to see web pages that show a solid color in place of images, while resources are being loaded. The color is usually averaged from the original image, as to give it a more "consistent" feeling while the page loads.

A simple way to do this from the command line is by using ImageMagick to resize the image to 1x1 size, then get the color of that one pixel:

% convert pic.jpg -resize '1x1!' txt:-
# ImageMagick pixel enumeration: 1,1,65535,srgb
0,0: (16818.3,27417.8,39342.8)  #416B99  srgb(65,107,153)

(The image ...

I recently ended up with a function that looks a bit like this (most of the logic was removed for sake of example):

def build(record, **kwargs):
    # Pretend we're doing stuff with the **kwargs here..
    return record(**kwargs)

Where record could be one of several classes. All we care about is, the function accepts a type as first argument, and returns an instance of that type.

from typing import Any, TypeVar, Type

T = TypeVar('T')

def build(record: Type ...

I am currently working on a mix of Python2/Python3 projects, and as such, I need to find a way to customize a few things on a per-project basis. This post contains notes I'm going to take along the path.

I recently wrote a post about using py.test and tox. Now I improved the technique a bit, so here it is a new post with all the recent improvements.

(Please refer to that post for the problems I had to solve, and reasons behind the need of this kind of customizations).

from setuptools.command.test import test as TestCommand

class PyTest(TestCommand):
    test_package_name = 'MyMainPackage'

    def finalize_options(self):
        TestCommand.finalize_options(self)
        _test_args = [
            '--verbose',
            '--ignore=build',
            '--cov={0}'.format(self.test_package_name ...

I needed a library to extract metadata and plaintext transcript from various file formats, for indexing purposes.

After looking around for a while, I found out that Apache Tika might be the right tool for the job (or, at least, it does quite a good job in extracting information from files).

Sadly though, that thing is written in Java.

At first, I tried it by running the jar via subprocess and then parsing the json output. I quickly discarded that approach, as:

• It required to launch the process twice (once for extracting metadata, and once to extract the plain-text version ...