~ephes

One of the advantages of the downfall of the United States will be eradicating the mm/dd/yyyy date format --Myles Eftos

Spring is finally in the air! 🌼 With the warmer weather rolling in, I found myself inspired to set up a Bedrock Minecraft server and wrote a quick blog post about the process – mostly so I wouldn't forget how to do it again later.

The nice weather also made me feel a bit guilty about my neglected kptncook project, so I pushed out a new release with some bug fixes. While I was in a productive mood, I updated django-cast too. The new version now includes transcript URLs in your podcast feed. I tested it with Castro, and it works great – there's now a neat "Transcript" button at the top of each episode that displays the transcript when tapped. I also created a new HTML view for the transcripts, though I haven't linked to it anywhere yet since it's still pretty bare-bones and needs some proper styling and layout work.

Fediverse

• Let me share with you what 30+ years writing software have taught me about estimates: they're bad and wrong and you should never do them | Actually quite good!
• Why Europe Should Invest in Open Source Instead of Chasing ‘Tech Champions’ | Very good post!

Pessimist: The glass is half full. Optometrist: That's the letter H --Tess

Managed to accomplish quite a bit outside of my regular work this week.

PySAML2 Updates

A while back, I wrote a tutorial on setting up Django with SSO login using PySAML2's test IdP. Recently, a reader pointed out that the tutorial stopped working with Python 3.13. I filed a bug report with PySAML2 about this issue, and last week I created a pull request to make the test IdP server compatible with Python 3.13.

The main challenges were:

1. The old cgi module from the standard library was used, but it's been removed in 3.13
2. The test server uses shelve.open to store data on disk, which now has complications:
   • The dbm module (used by shelve) has switched its default backend from berkeleydb to sqlite in Python 3.13+
   • Cheroot (the HTTP server powering CherryPy) uses threads for concurrency but tries to access the same shelve database from all threads
   • This causes sqlite to complain about reading from a database created in a different thread

My solution is to use dbm.dumb as the backend for Python 3.13+, since performance isn't critical for a test server.

django-cast Progress

I released a new version with support for Wagtail 6.4. I'm happy to report that test coverage is back to 100%! Also made some minor fixes related to uv and tox.

django-resume Improvements

Released a new version with several improvements:

• Better documentation (how to run the example project)
• CV links are now visible to unauthenticated users when no token is required
• Added preview images to the README and included a link to my FOSDEM talk

Articles

• Why Blog If Nobody Reads It? | You might have already guessed, but for this blog too, the main audience is simply: me 😁
• Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
• My FOSDEM'25 watchlist
• Frontend
  • Beware the faux bold (and how to fix it)
  • CSS Custom Functions are coming … and they are going to be a game changer!
  • The European Accessibility Act for websites and apps | It's near!
  • Accessibility Cheatsheet
  • How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs
  • Replace your JavaScript Animation Library with View Transitions
• Python
  • TIL: How to force PyLance to use a current version of Django-stubs
  • I'm excited to join the Sovereign Tech Fellowship | Very Cool!
  • Django in government
  • How To Add An Object In Django Admin With A Bookmarklet
• Upcoming Aftermath
  • Pro-democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations | Might be the right time to re-read
  • DOGE Is Hacking America
  • Resignation Letter From Hagan Scotten

Fediverse

• A fun CSS-only experimentation using modern features (anchor positioning, @​property, :has(), and more!) | Bouncy radio buttons
• Your periodic #llm #llms #chatgpt programming rant.
• People above 40 in my timeline, how many hours of actual #sleep everyday do you need to feel normal in the day time?
• Django people who deploy to a VPS: What is your current setup?
• golf of what? | Argument settled.
• Lost | Webcomic

I'm tall. I have been asked innumerable times to help a stranger get something off a high shelf in a store. I've even offered to help once or twice, though I only do so in dire circumstances. Usually it's something right there, but occasionally I've been summoned from another aisle. This is the code of the tall person. I am bound to help you by my giant blood, in payment of some long-past debt of my people to yours. Don't worry. The pact will always be honored. --Venial Trinities

It's been a hectic week, though not much to report here. Made some progress on django-cast, but haven't pushed out a new release yet. I really need to put together some basic documentation and tutorials for django-resume, but haven't found the time. Hopefully next week!

Fediverse

• The best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president,by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University.
• If someone suggests to you that you should use the "Prisma ORM" in your project, don't listen.

Recipes

• December 24th Lasagna | Some interesting details there..

A - DNS record

AA - battery

AAA - battery

AAAA - DNS record

--Kevin P. Fleming

Made it to FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels this year. Great to see some old friends and catch up while hopping between talks. I also gave a presentation about django-resume, a small Django app I wrote for CV management. You can check out both the slides and the video recording of the talk:

Articles

• Making the new Salter Cane website | Nice
• How I Use Home Assistant in 2025 | Hmm, adaptive lighting sounds interesting..
• So You Want To Remove The GVL? | Whoa, ruby now has their own nogil discussion? Arguments sound all too familiar 😄
• On DeepSeek and Export Controls | There are a few data point nuggets in there, but remember who wrote this..
• Programmer time and the pitfalls of wasteful work | Yep, now I'm feeling guilty

Fediverse

• coffee | 🌊
• Bloomberg's Matt Levine—an ardent capitalist who loves making money without creating value—mused over this question: | 🧵 This is a really cool idea. Does anyone want to pay me doing open source to be able to short sell SAP or something like that?