Tips – Chad Dotson

iPhone 5 / Verizon 4G – No Bars / 3g No Service Fix

By chad June 10, 2017Technology, Tips18 Comments

Problem: You've got a iPhone 5 that reports that it has 4g LTE service but 0 bars and, if you turn off LTE, it reports No Service under 3g. Solution: The fix, turn off all roaming . Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data Options > Roaming - Turn off…

SSLError with Python 3.6.x on macOS Sierra

By chad January 22, 2017Programming, Tips18 Comments

SSLError Have you ran into trouble with SSLErrors after upgrading to Python 3.6 on macOS Sierra? For me, my first encounter was downloading the bokeh sample data (included here). Python 3.6.0 (v3.6.0:41df79263a11, Dec 22 2016, 17:23:13) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits"…

Pip Installs From Github

By chad January 10, 2017Programming, TipsNo Comments

Pip installs From github Installing a package from github is fairly simple. The following are examples of installing packages from github. # Install repo package from the url, master branch pip3 install git+https://github.com/username/repo.git @ Install repo from the specified branch pip3 install git+https://github.com/username/repo.git@branch # Install repo from the specified commit.…

Saving Console Messages in JavaScript

By chad April 17, 2016Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, Tips, UncategorizedNo Comments

Have you ever encountered a situation where it would be beneficial to save whatever is written to the console across browser sessions? If you have, you know there are not many solutions. I recently decided that localStorage would be a good candidate to implement a solution to this problem with.…

You're Too Close

By chad December 9, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, TipsNo Comments

Have you encountered the following scenario? You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, "why don't you do it this…

Creating Web Workers From Functions (No File Needed)

By chad October 31, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

So, you want to create a web worker from a function, the problem is all the examples examples show creating a web worker using a separate JavaScript file or from embedded JavaScript source. There is a way to do it and that is using Blob URLs. In the example below,…

Creating Downloadable CSV (Or Any Other) Files In Browser With JavaScript

By chad October 25, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

Many of us have wanted to create downloadable content straight from the browser. I remember several years back where it was more difficult and the solutions were not clean. Today, it is much much more simple and clean. Enter Blob URLs. In this example, I have an object of arrays. …

Virtualenvwrapper / Updating Tools

By chad August 15, 2015Programming Live Blog, TipsNo Comments

If you are using virtualenvwrapper with the default version of python on your system (OSX in particular) and I recommend updating pip and setuptools as part of your postmkvirtualenv hook. Just add the following line to YOURVIRTUALENVDIRECTORY/postmkvirtualenv. pip install -U pip setuptools

The Python "in" Operator – Theoretical vs Actual Time Complexity

By chad July 20, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Background Sometimes we may generate or retrieve a list, set or even dict when creating collection of things that we will be testing against. Theoretically a set, frozenset or dictionary should be the fastest (and equivalent) forms of storage for this operation. However, what I've found is that on some…

Python Logger

By chad June 29, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

The Scenario This scenario illustrates two possible mistakes people make when using the python logging module. Analyze the following code and look for issues. try: ... except SomeException as e: logger.error("Some meaningful error message. message={0}".format(e.message)) So what is wrong with that? First and foremost, the code fails to use the…