Code Posts

5 posts tagged with code

Apr 19, 2017
in Tech

Speeding up Websockets 60X

I recently I had the opportunity to speed up some Websocket code that was a major bottleneck. The final solution was 60X (!) faster than the first pass, and an interesting exercise in optimizing inner loops.

When you send data via a websocket it is masked with a randomly generated four byte key. This masking provides protection from certain exploits against proxies (details here). The algorithm is super simple; essentially each byte in the payload is XORed with a corresponding byte from the key.

The first version of my XOR mask function looked this:

That's the kind of unfussy and elegant code you want to write for a job interview. If that's the solution that first came to mind, then you know your Python. Alas, this code is as slow as it is beautiful. continue reading…

Dec 2, 2016
in Tech

Strings hiding in plain sight

It's not often I come across something in Python that surprises me. Especially in something as mundane as string operations, but I guess Python still has a trick or two up its sleeve.

Have a look at this string:

How many possible sub-strings are in s? To put it another away, how many values of x are there where the expression x in s is true?

Turns out it is 2.

2?

Yes, 2.

The empty string is in the string "A". In fact, it's in all the strings.

Turns out the empty string has been hiding every where in my code.

Not a complaint, I'm sure the rationale is completely sound. And it turned out to be quite useful. I had a couple of lines of code that looked something like this: continue reading…

Aug 7, 2013
in Tech

Resurrecting the blink tag

After today's news that the <blink> tag will be deprecated in Firefox, I decided to re-implement it in html5 / CSS3 (no Javascript required). Now it's all modern again, you are free to use <blink> liberally in your web application.

Be sure to give attribution for the above code, so your users will know where to go to thank me…

Edit: Just to demonstrate that it works!

Inspect the code if you don't believe me...

Dec 9, 2012
in Tech

Where are those Print statements?

When I'm debugging Python I tend to sprinkle my code liberally with print statements. Trouble is, I forget which files I added those print statements to and have to waste a few minutes tracking them down. Time which could be better spent doing pretty much anything else.

Not sure why I didn't think of this before, but I hacked together something that automatically prints the file and line of the print statement next to the output.

Here's the code:

To use it, save it as ‘debugprint.py’ then imported it somewhere. That's all you need to do. Works on Python 2.7 and probably other 2.X Pythons.

Here's what happens if you do it from the console:

For print statements in your app, you will get something like:

Jan 9, 2011
in Tech

Spatial Bookmarking Service goes Open Source

Locidesktop was my coffee shop coding project of last year. I was quite pleased with the results. Locidesktop.com has been happily serving link desktops to some loyal visitors for months now – with no maintenance required on my part (a good thing because I've been busy with other projects). continue reading…

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