Posts Archive

"It might be that pythonistas really don’t like monkey patching, but as I couldn’t find a quick answer on how to mock time in Python I thought I write down here how I did it. It’s no big deal really, just replace datetime in the module tested with a local implementation. In my case I wanted to to mock datetime.utcnow and to match the call I created a class with utcnow as a static method."

"I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon that has a 14 inch screen with a 2560x1440 resolution. While not quite Retina Display quality, it still has enough pixels to make everything on the screen appear tiny with a regular 96 DPI setting. Trying to fix this in browsers by increasing font sizes breaks quite a few sites, while custom DPI settings works better. Firefox Open about:config and set the property layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the desired value, in my case 1."

"I have once again switched browsers, the pendulum is now on the Firefox side. However when I changed my Emacs config to open links in firefox it didn’t work. Instead I got the error message “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.” It turned out that I had both the firefox and firefox-esr packages installed, and browse-url-firefox tried to open iceweasel instead of firefox."

"Lately I’ve noticed people mentioning the use of system fonts in web design. Supposedly it all started with Medium a year ago, described in this article. The idea is that the web experience should not differ that much from what the rest of the client UI looks like. I think this is great, I’ve felt for a long time that the web should settle on some sort of UI toolkit for the most common tasks."

"I have translated the talk I gave last week at Agila Sverige to English, it’s available here."

"I gave a dinner talk yesterday at the Agila Sverige conference which was fairly rantish about the state of the agile world. The text of the talk is available here (in swedish)."

"In the first post on how we moved our application to Docker on AWS, I described the reason for us to do it, and how we set up the servers. This post describes how we’ve organized the different Docker containers. Container Setup On AWS Our setup on AWS looks like this: We use an EC2 load balancer to route traffic to our web hosts. This is an easy way to setup clustering, but you should be aware that EC2 does not allow for any alternative route or html page if no hosts are available."

"Last fall, we moved the Qwaya Facebook ads tool from a single host on Rackspace to a clustered Docker based environment on AWS. This is the first blog post of hopefully more that I’m writing to remember what we did. I’ve planned two more posts, one on how we handle CI and one on container orchestration. Why Docker? The task at hand was not “Move to docker”, it was “get out of single host hosting”."

"At Qwaya we run our servers in AWS. We build our own base AMI’s in order to ensure a stable base infrastructure and to be able to quickly launch new servers when needed. We have a few AMI’s arranged as described in the image below: The base image holds all the packages we want installed on all hosts, it sets up docker, logspout logging to Papertrail and [Datadog][datadog] monitoring. The Web and Worker images holds different systemd files for different parts of our application."

"Setting up the integriy.st OpenVPN on NetworkManager is easier than the official docs describe. Instead of manually entering all the data, you can use the client.ovpn file included in the .zip downloaded. When creating the OpenVPN connection, select “Import a saved OpenVPN configuration …”. Then select the client.ovpn file. You probably want a better connection name than “client” so make one up and fill it in. Enter your username and password, save and connect."