Python on Og Maciel's Journal

Built To Last

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Built To Last

On learning by building, lowering the bar to entry, and the quiet legacy of useful work

Built To Last

From the very beginning, when I first got my first computer—around the age of 11 or 12—I felt inclined toward building things that were helpful and useful to others. Like many of my friends who eventually went into the computer industry and became software engineers, it all started with games. The thrill of writing your own game—something other people could use and that you could show off to your friends—was incredibly exciting to me.

FauxFactory 0.3.0

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Took some time from my vacation and released FauxFactory 0.3.0 to make it Python 3 compatible and to add a new generate_utf8 method (plus some nice tweaks and code clean up).

As always, the package is available on Pypi and can be installed via pip install fauxfactory.

If you have any constructive feedback, suggestions, or file a bug report or feature request, please use the Github page.

FauxFactory 0.2.1

Fri, 09 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Short on its heels, today I'm releasing FauxFactory 0.2.1 to fix a brown paper bag bug I encountered last night before going to bed.

Basically, the new "Lorem Ipsum" generator was not honoring the words parameter if you asked for a string longer than 70 characters. I have fixed the issue as well as added a new test to make sure that the generator does the right thing.

The package is available on Pypi (sadly the page is still not rendering correctly... suggestions welcome) and can be installed via pip install fauxfactory.

FauxFactory 0.2.0

Thu, 08 May 2014 19:12:00 +0000

Today I'm releasing FauxFactory 0.2.0 with a new feature, a "Lorem Ipsum" generator. I confess that I did not look around for any existing implementation in python out there and just started writing code. My idea was to create a method that would:

Return a "Lorem Ipsum" string if I passed no arguments:

In [1]: from fauxfactory import FauxFactory

In [2]: FauxFactory.generate_iplum()
Out[2]: u'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut
enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi
ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in
reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.'

Return a single paragraph with a fixed number of words if I passed a numeric words=x argument. If words was a large number, the text would 'wrap around' as many times as needed:

Hiring is Tough!

Thu, 01 May 2014 18:05:45 +0000

So I've been trying to hire two python developers to join my automation team here at Red Hat since last November, 2013... and believe it or not, so far I've had absolutely zero success in finding good, strong, with real world experience candidates in North Carolina! I either find really smart people, who do have relevant backgrounds or could 'hit the ground running' but are way out of my current budget, or they lack real world experience and fall into more of an entry level position.

Emacs + Rope for Python Development

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: This is more of a note for myself than a proper tutorial or howto, so I make no promises that this will work for you. The setup used through this post was a Mac OS laptop upgraded to the very latest version of the OS.

Ever since I started doing Python development using Emacs, I have unsuccessfully tried to configure Rope, “a python refactoring library”… until last Friday. Turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark during the many iterations I went through to get it done, but the following post was tremendously helpful to me: http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2010/05/my-emacs-python-environment/

Using Python to Control Katello

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I usually like to use python to script my day to day tests against Katello (you may have seen some of my previous posts about using the Katello CLI for the same purpose) and I figured I’d start showing some basic examples for anyone else out there who may be interested.

Assuming you have already installed and configured your Katello instance (learn how to do this here) with the default configurations, we now have a few options to proceed:

PyCarolinas 2012

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen the (yet unpublished draft) schedule and it looks great!

WHEN:

| | October 20-21, 2012

WHERE:

| | Kerr Hall | UNC School of Pharmacy | Chapel Hill, NC

How to import WordPress XML files

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

… or, how I brought an old python code back from the dead!

Inspired by Kenneth Reitz's recent post and spurred by recent events, I decided to turn an old python code I wrote a while back into something that can be (hopefully) easier to get to than by sheer luck.

I’m talking about ChoppedPress, my script that let’s you split WordPress exported XML files into smaller files that can be easily imported into new WordPress installations. I’m sure that some of you have experienced the frustration of not being able to import this xml file due to size upload constraints on your host providers… One of my close friends who provides mostly support for WordPress gave me the idea a while back and that is how the script came about. Little did I know that other people have find it useful too, specially for migrating away from WordPress! As a matter of fact, I too used it when I moved to Tumblr, but that another story.