Python: calculate lighter/darker RGB colors
Many times color palettes have lighter and darker variations of the same color. This may be used to convey relative importance, or for something as simple a...
Recent Posts
Checking RabbitMQ queue size/age with Nagios
For months we were using RabbitMQ (with celery) with no real insight into what was going on inside the queue. Recently, we deployed the mangement plug-in, w...
Creating large XML files in Python with saxutils
In the past, when I needed to produce an XML file problematically, I typically turned to templating engines. Something like the following example in Django ...
Django CSRF verification failed in IE IFRAME
I ran into an interesting issue with the Django's CSRF (cross site request forgery) protection this week. Some users were reporting seeing the dreaded "CSRF...
django-celery with postgres: “connection already closed” errors
I ran into a mysterious, transient exception this week using django-celery.
Stripping control characters in Python
Want to remove ASCII control characters from a string? Have Unicode control characters that can't be encoded into XML? Here is how to strip them with regex ...
Ubuntu Unity: I want my KeePassX panel back!
Big props to Ubuntu for taking a risk and trying to innovate in the desktop experience arena. Unity is pretty cool, but pretty raw, too. For example, some a...
Selenium: Execute arbitrary javascript (even jQuery)
We're very happy with our new-ish Selenium + Saucelabs setup for web site automation testing. But as easy as Selenium makes it to compose tests, you will in...
cron job to mail Splunk license violation alerts
Have a problem staying under the Splunk free edition cap of 500MB/day? Splunk is no help. It silently logs violations, only taking action finally by shuttin...
Measure navigation timing with javascript
Historically, site administrators would measure their site performance by timing individual page renders. If your site is serving pages in less than 500ms, ...