Mon 14 October 2024

I wrote my last post on fpdf2 18 months ago. We released 7 more versions of fpdf2 since then! This article will present some of the major features introduced since v2.7.3 to v2.8.1 of fpdf2: click on the buttons below to reveal the various changes brought …

Wed 03 May 2023

Pylint is a great static code analyser for Python code. I have been using it for several years, in various projects, and it's simple to use yet very powerful. I even contributed to Pylint by submitting a new rule a few years ago : implicit-str-concat. For an introduction to Pylint, you …

Mon 03 April 2023

I wrote my latest post on fpdf2 almost a year ago. As we just released a new version, v2.7.3, this is the time to mention some recent additions to this library! 😊 This article will present some of the major features introduced between v2.5.3 & v2.7.3 …

Tue 28 March 2023

Illustration from realpython.com The other day, while working on fpdf2, I used @dataclass, a nice decorator that came in the standard library with Python 3.7, to quickly define a class that mostly stored data. Then a question came to my mind: is the __slots__ memory optimization compatible with …

Mon 12 December 2022

Following last week animated PDF adventure, I have been reading a series of one page dungeons... And yesterday I had the opportunity to play the best one in my opinion: The Sky-Blind Spire by Michael Prescott. It has everything I love on one page: a maze to explore, mysteries to …

Fri 02 December 2022

Last week, while translating John Harper's micro-TTRPG World of Dungeons: Turbo Breakers, I discovered the wonderful world of one page dungeons, starting with Michael Prescott splendid production at trilemma.com and also the yearly One Page Dungeon Context. While crawling through the OPDC 2021 entries, I discovered a great map …

Sun 24 April 2022

fpdf2 is a simple & fast PDF creation library for Python that I have been maintaining since mid-2020. In this article, I'm going to present some of the new features that landed since my last post on the subject. Hence, this will cover versions 2.5.0, 2.5.1 & 2 …

Fri 19 November 2021

Last month, I realized late that October was hacktoberfest month! This online event is a month-long celebration (October 1-31) of open source software run in partnership with different software companies, with a focus on encouraging contributions to open source projects. While I participated in the 2019 edition as a contributor …

Fri 20 August 2021

The other day, while watching La Carte aux trésors at my elderly neighbor's house, I casually played peg solitaire on a board she has. After many failures at trying to get rid of all pawns but one, I started to wonder about the mathematics & algorithmics behind that game... Back home …

Wed 18 August 2021

Ce blog voit l'apparition d'une nouvelle page permanente : Images libres de droits. Cette page recense des site web, des illustrateurs, des icônes et des polices de caractères libres de droits. Depuis octobre 2018, j'ai rassemblé une liste d'artistes dont j'apprécie le travail et qui placent leurs œuvres sous licence Creative …

Wed 28 July 2021

À E-voyageurs Technologies, je travaille au sein d'une équipe en charge de l'usine logicielle, qui administre depuis plusieurs années une instance Gitlab self-hosted. Cet article contient quelques-unes de nos recommandations à l'intention des utilisateurs de notre Gitlab, ayant pour but à la fois améliorer les performances de leurs pipelines …

Mon 28 June 2021

I have been amazed recently at the diversity of contributors on the fpdf2 project, coming from all around the world! Then I thought it would be nice to visualize this diversity by building a world map of all contributors locations. There it is: Click on the image to access an …

Sun 13 June 2021

Today I finally took the time to put up a live demo website for Hesperides! https://hesperides.herokuapp.com Hesperides is an open source tool dedicated to configuration management: it stores applications properties and mustache templates for configurations files. It is strongly hierarchized based on few main concepts: modules, applications …

Sat 12 June 2021

fpdf2 is a minimalist PDF creation library for Python that I am maintaining. With the release yesterday of its v2.4.0, I'm going to present some of its notable new features since the latest minor version. https://github.com/pyfpdf/fpdf2/ Doc: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/ JPEG images …

Sat 24 April 2021

Undying Dusk is a video game in a PDF format, with a gameplay based on exploration and logic puzzles, in the tradition of dungeon crawlers. A curse set by the Empress keeps the world in an eternal dusk. You have recently found shelter in an eerie monastery. Featuring: ~ 200 000 …

Fri 29 January 2021

Today, I am happy to announce version 2.3.0 of fpdf2, code name: Unbreakable! https://github.com/pyfpdf/fpdf2/ Doc: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/ Why Unbreakable? As a tribute to M. Night Shyamalan movie Because using fpdf2, your Python code can never break! ... Just kidding, I would be …

Fri 15 January 2021

fpdf2, the library I mentioned in my previous post, cannot parse existing PDF files. However, other Python libraries can be combined with fpdf2 in order to add new content to existing PDF files. This page provides several examples of doing so using pdfrw, a great zero-dependency pure Python library dedicated …

Mon 11 January 2021

Today, I am happy to announce a new version 2.2.0 of fpdf2 ! https://github.com/pyfpdf/fpdf2/ Doc: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/ During the last few months, I contributed a few improvements to fpdf2, David Ankin fork of PyFPDF, the user-friendly Python library to generate PDFs: from …

Wed 15 July 2020

Linkback protocols are an old breed. They were born in a time where MySpace, Wikipedia & WordPress had just been launched, and Friendster was more popular than this new website called Facebook. Diagram source: PPRuNe article on linkbacks The latest linkback protocol, Webmention, is relatively recent though, as it became a …

Mon 21 October 2019

At work, we needed to retrieve the full list of jobs a given Jenkins instance was hosting. Our first solution was to use the jenkinsapi Python package: import xml.etree.ElementTree as XmlElementTree from jenkinsapi.jenkins import Jenkins def get_all_jenkins_jobs(server_url): jenkins = Jenkins(server_url, lazy=True, timeout=30, username=os …

Mon 14 October 2019

Iframes not supported. Click on the link below to access the graphs. The iframe above displays some graphs I've built last week, in order to get some insight on some GitHub projects issues & pull requests evolution. They are directly inspired by nf-core project activity statistics. Click here to open those …

Sun 05 May 2019

Yesterday I was crafting some puzzles for my girlfriends, and I was looking for letter-based ones where I a secret word would be revealed once solved. With this same goal, I had already once worked on an open-source JS word search generator: https://lucas-c.github.io/wordfind/ (pour les francophones …

Tue 23 April 2019

Over the past years, on software programming projects where my end users where developers (other than myself or my team), I have tried to follow the advice of this website : keepachangelog(.com) A changelog is defined by Wikipedia as : a log or record of all notable changes made to a …

Fri 23 November 2018

I just added a favicon to this site, representing a glider of Conway's Game of Life. This GIF was made with a Python script. The source code is on GitHub, and uses Zhao Liang's gifmaze.py. Feel free to reuse the code to make you own favicons 😉 article img { transform …

Fri 19 October 2018

Almost a year ago, GitHub introduced security alerts. They are an awesome feature. They function as notifications you receive whenever a vulnerability affecting one of your project dependencies. But long after receiving a notification, how to list all security alerts affecting your repositories ? I didn't found an out-of-the box solution …

Thu 11 October 2018

Some time ago, I used the overblog platform in order to create a blog for a long trip in Ireland. Despite being sometimes very slow, it was overall a good platform, very easy to grasp for beginners. The blog is now old and unused, but before destroying it I wanted …

Wed 04 July 2018

Yesterday I've stumbled upon a very surprising bug in some Python 2 code, related to the use of the __del__ method in a vendor library we employ at work. Here is some minimal code that reproduces the issue I met: class MyClass: def __init__(self): raise RuntimeError('Woops') def __del__ …

Mon 18 June 2018

Crows Crows Crows est un studio de jeu vidéo créé en 2015, à l'origine entre autres du jeu complètement déjanté Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist et le créateur du studio, William Pugh, est également un des auteurs de The Stanley Parable. En 2016 …

Fri 15 June 2018

When I migrated this blog to Pelican, I noted one thing that I missed from Ghost: tags autocompletion, to help reusing tags I already defined in other articles. Because nowadays I mostly use Notepad++ or vim to write my blog posts, I found out an easy solution that works for …

Tue 12 June 2018

At work we have a component not yet migrated to Python 3, and we recently had some difficulties diagnosing a problem with the MySQL connector. Because we were catching the mysql.connector.errors.Error and raising a custom exception, we were loosing the underlying stacktrace and hence couldn't troubleshoot the …

Sun 06 May 2018

Voici une petite dépêche que j'ai écrite sur le site LinuxFr : https://linuxfr.org/news/generateurs-de-puzzles-libres

Tue 24 April 2018

flask httpie requests simplejson botocore scrapy docker-compose ansible What are those diagrams ? They show dependencies between the internal modules of various well-known Python libraries. They goal is to provide a global overview of a Python project architecture, as a map of modules & packages, the top-level code abstractions. Note that all …

Sun 18 February 2018

This week I discovered the fantastic glitch art Reddit community (for a little more context on glitch art, wikipedia has a page). These are the pieces I love the most (click on them to find the source): This one above reminds me of The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Like many …

Fri 16 February 2018

On my personnal server, I used to send myself alerts by email using the handy standard mail command. However, recently it appeared that my server became categorized as "spammer" by some online service providers, due to the alerts frequency (a little bit more than one per day). Hence, I got …

Wed 14 February 2018

Ces dernières 24h, j'ai eu cette lubie stupide de vouloir utiliser l'API Tickets Restaurant. Une API qui n'est pas documentée. Dont le site est en ASP.NET (beurk). Qui a une app officielle android. Ahah ! Bref, j'ai tenté de reverse-engineer un APK alors que je n'ai même pas de smartphone …

Thu 16 November 2017

Connaissez-vous l'accessibilité numérique ? En très bref: L'accessibilité numérique est la mise à la disposition de tous les individus, quels que soient leur matériel ou logiciel, leur infrastructure réseau, leur langue maternelle, leur culture, leur localisation géographique, ou leurs aptitudes physiques ou mentales, des ressources numériques. Pour plus de détails …

Mon 25 September 2017

Cette année, voyages-sncf.com m'a permis d'aller à la conférence annuelle Python à Toulouse. En vrac, voici un petit résumé personnel de cette PyConFr. J'y étais présent 3 jours sur 4 (sprint le premier et conférences les deux autres), et j'y ai donné donné 2 présentations, dont le contenu est …

Mon 11 September 2017

Avec Thomas Durey, nous organisons un meetup à Nantes mardi 3 octobre dans les locaux de Voyages-Sncf.com avec l'AFPY pour échanger autour du langage Python ! Au programme : un talk sur les pipelines luigi et comment les tester avec behave nous vous proposerons ensuite de participer à un barcamp …

Tue 15 August 2017

Ça y est ! Bascule effectuée ! Ce blog est désormais un blog statique, généré avec Pelican. Et au passage: c'est son anniversaire ! 3 ans :) Pourquoi migrer vers un blog statique avec Pelican ? par souci de simplicité: make publish et il n'y a plus qu'à servir les fichiers HTML générés par sécurité …

Tue 04 July 2017

I ended up not using this code, but it may be useful to others: mock_setup_provider.py: import sys from unittest.mock import Mock class MockSetupProvider(Mock): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) self.captured_setup_requires = set() def setup(self, *args, **kwargs): self.captured_setup_requires.update(kwargs.get('setup_requires')) setup_extractor …

Thu 18 May 2017

What do you think of the following innocuous Python code ? from gevent import monkey monkey.patch_all(thread=False, select=False) import requests requests.get('http://i-do-not-exist.com') print('THIS WILL NEVER BE PRINTED !!!') Guess what ? The string message will never get printed :( Simply remove the monkey.patch_all line and you'll …

Wed 17 May 2017

Une courte présentation que j'ai donné cette après-midi à Voyages-sncf.com Technologies : Iframes non supportées. Cliquez sur le lien dans le paragraphe ci-dessous pour accéder directement aux slides. Les slides sont accessibles ici en plein écran.

Wed 17 May 2017

Last week, my father asked me if I could make a backup of an old lovely voicemail message he had, recorded by my sister when she was a kid. I wrote a short Python script to accomplish this using Twilio: twiml_url = 'https://handler.twilio.com/twiml/EH9515e9e0d2fb81f27d75a493225ae703' client = Client(os …

Wed 15 March 2017

In this blog post, I'm going to demonstrate how to reuse WiseMapping HTML+JS rendering engine to easily visualize... text-based mindmaps like this one have many benefits they are readable as-it-is they don't require any tool to be edited [they follow the UNIX tenets](http://www.ru.j-npcs.org/usoft …

Wed 22 February 2017

This week I wrote a small Python script, that can generate a mindmap from a simple indented text input like this: Winter december january february Spring march april may Summer june july august Autumn september october november The command: ./graphviz_mindmap.py seasons.txt. The results, with various layout parameters: Another …

Thu 30 June 2016

Due to a long standing bug, no history file will be kept of the commands you enter in an interactive shell when using a Python 3 virtualenv. I found out a simple workaround. Simply put the following in your ~/.pythonrc : import atexit, os, readline, sys if sys.version_info >= (3, 0 …

Thu 14 April 2016

En mars dernier, j'ai participé à la Battledev de RegionJobs. Et c'était super fun. Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, c'est une compétition de programmation en ligne, où l'on doit résoudre 5 questions de difficulté croissante en 2 heures. J'ai eu l'occasion d'y participer avec quelques collègues, et ça a …

Thu 14 April 2016

Last week, I made up a basic TCP server in Python, to receive log lines. To split log lines, I used the ascii line feed ascii character : \n aka 0xa in hexadecimal. But then I wondered : could this byte appear elsewhere in the UTF8-encoded strings of text I was sending …

Thu 14 April 2016

Le mois dernier j'ai rapidement présenté le language Python et les frameworks web existants à mon équipe à Voyages-Sncf.com. Les slides sont accessibles ici, ainsi que les sources Markdown pour Reveal.js. Iframes non supportées. Cliquez sur le lien dans le paragraphe au-dessus pour accéder directement aux slides. Il …

Thu 11 February 2016

Python generators are awesome. Why ? their syntax is simple an concise they lazily generate values and hence are very memory efficient bonus point: since Python 3 you can chain them with yield from Their drawback ? They can be iterated only once, and they hide the iterable length. I took an …

Tue 12 January 2016

First, lets mention Git Bash (aka msysgit) : the old version was a PITA to extend with additional packages (e.g. adding common C libs like libxml), and the new one (renamed Git for Windows), is based on MSYS2, but does not include a package manager. Hence, we were left with …

Fri 08 January 2016

... and the standard UNIX tool zipinfo cannot display them ! So here is Python one-liner to extract them, and other useful meta informations: python -c "import json, sys, zipfile; json.dump([{k: str(getattr(i, k)) for k in zipfile.ZipInfo.__slots__} for i in zipfile.ZipFile(sys.argv[1]).infolist …

Wed 16 December 2015

Say you are generating a colored diff output with the standard difflib Python package: diff = difflib.ndiff(file1_lines, file2_lines) print('\n'.join(diff)) Now, I'll show you how to write a simple color_diff function that you can use to color your diff like this: diff = difflib.ndiff(file1_lines, file2_lines) diff …

Sun 23 August 2015

Il y a quelques jours, un ami m'a demandé de jeter un oeil à un problème qu'il recontrait: alors qu'il analysait des données de donneespubliques.meteofrance.fr dans un IPython notebook, en utilisant la fantastique lib requests, il a été confronté à un bug étrange: Mon soucis c'est que ma …

Fri 24 July 2015

Depuis plusieurs années, je ruminais contre Youtube: chaque fois qu'une vidéo est supprimée d'une playlist (parce que l'utilisateur qui l'avait uploadé l'a supprimé par exemple), son nom n'est même pas conservé, seul un lien mort persiste dans la liste. Et la seule solution est alors de googler le nom de …

Tue 14 July 2015

Depuis mai 2015, Python 3.4 est disponoble sous Cygwin. Si vous aviez précédement installé Python 3.2, voici comment passer à la version 3.4. Tout d'abord, je vous recommande l'excellent gestionnaire de package apt-cyg. C'est tout simplement une interface en ligne de commande équivalente au setup-x86.exe (ou …

Sat 20 June 2015

The timeit module is useful for micro benchmarks, but does not allow to measure execution time of large snippets, as it requires the code tested to fit in a string. Hence, I went looking for a context or decorator-based solution. And I found this bug report commented by Guido van …

Tue 19 May 2015

Pourquoi, mais pourquoi faut-il 3 lignes en Java pour juste extraire un groupe d'une expression régulière qui "match" ??? Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("o?k(b|i)s+").matcher("kiss"); matcher.matches(); assert matcher.group(1) == "i"; En Python: assert re.match("o?k(b|i)s+", "kiss").group(1) == "i …

Fri 01 May 2015

I'd like to introduce you to an awesome git companion : pre-commit hooks by Yelp. Git hooks are scripts that git executes before or after events such as: commit, push, and receive. Git hooks are a built-in feature, but git does not offer much support for them: if there is a …

Mon 06 April 2015

I recently worked on a short website project using Django & Heroku. It was my very time using this Python framework, and I really liked it ! This is a compendium of tips & tricks that I, as a Django beginner, found quite useful : Django enhanced shell To install it : pip install django-extensions …

Wed 25 March 2015

Die shell script, DIE ! In this post, I'll show how easy it ease to convert fragile shell scripts to Python scripts, using sh.py. I'll use as an example a simple script to check your HTML code from the command-line, using the W3C validator. Now you ask me, why the …

Wed 25 February 2015

Sometimes, it's useful to print some source code on paper. And PDF is a very common file format, that you can be sure your printer will accept, and that will let you preview the final page layout. But how to quickly perform syntax-coloring and export to PDF ? I've been experimenting …

Tue 17 February 2015

Disclaimer: this post was heaviliy inspired by the 2 following gists: color_log.py using termcolor recipes colorlog.py using colorama I loved the simplicity of the first, not having to manipulate any of the logging internal API, but I prefer colorama over termcolor. Without further ado, there is my solution …

Sun 15 February 2015

Pytest is a very complete test framework for Python. I like how you can write a basic unittest.TestCase and the py.test test runner command will inject all its magic at runtime, without you having to directly import anything: awesome separation of concerns. This modularity comes at a cost …

Mon 12 January 2015

Under Windows, CPython is shipped with a very useful py command. PEP-397 describes in details its behaviour, and its C implementation can be found in the CPYthon Mercurial repository. There has already been a lenghty discussion in the "python-ideas" mailing list to write a Linux equivalent. I agree with what …

Thu 11 December 2014

A month ago, I wanted to automate queries to a website that is using the PHPSESSID cookie to keep track of sessions. I struggled a lot and couldn't find any documentation covering the behaviour I was observing. But yesterday I finally found a solution ! In hope it could help others …

Mon 08 December 2014

Consider the following Python expression: print("".join(set("ABCDE"))) What do you think it produces ? Not necessarily "ABCDE". Right, but you would expect the result to be consistent, isn't it ? $ for i in {1..3}; do python2.7 -c 'print("".join(set("ABCDE")))'; done ACBED ACBED ACBED Great ! ... But with …

Wed 26 November 2014

This post is only relevant to you if you use browserify. For a good introduction to this powerful Javascript bundling tool, check this doc. First of all, I'd like to take my hat off to James Hallyday and Peteris Krumins who have built such amazing tools as browserify, testling and …

Fri 07 November 2014

This post aims to introduce a very useful tool to debug low-level issues in Python, how to enhance it and finally how to solve two annoying common problems. 1. Debugging Python with gdb All the basics are there : https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb Tl;dr : gdb -p $(pgrep -f …

Tue 09 September 2014

As a tabletop RPG game master, whenever I need to imagine a universe background for a scenario, I need illustrations to picture myself the atmosphere, and get some inspiration. I usually simply surf the web from blog to blog, or spend some time on inspirational websites like DeviantArt, Tumblr, Unurth …