Black out

I've been a bit slack and have yet to black out my website or avatar to protest the Australian government's mandatory Internet censorship policy.

In case circumstances prevent me from doing so, please read the Internet Blackout Australia website to see why it's so important. You might also want to read Hugh Blemings' well-written thoughts on the matter.

Electronic book reader?

On my other blog, I ask about electronic book readers. Recommendations greatly desired.

Python testing goodies

Just found out that there's a PPA with the latest releases of a whole bunch of Python testing goodies, including:

• testtools - Extensions to unittest that make real extensions possible
• testresources - Safely re-use expensive resources in tests without paying massive set-up costs
• subunit - Manipulate, exchange and analyze test results without writing code
• testscenarios - Run the same tests against many different implementations

If you are running Ubuntu 9.10 or later, then sudo add-apt-repository ppa:subunit will add it to your apt sources.

We're starting to grow a lot of useful, small testing tools that become even more useful when combined. I really like the "small pieces, loosely joined" approach, but sometimes that can make deployment & dependency management a colossal pain. Happily, Ubuntu, Rob and Launchpad PPAs to the rescue.