WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.480 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to 00:00:04.480 --> 00:00:12.120 your earbuds. This is episode 199, almost 200, Brian. Almost. Almost. Recorded September 9th, 00:00:12.120 --> 00:00:17.620 2020. I'm Michael Kennedy. And I'm Brian Okken. And this episode is brought to you by us. We'll 00:00:17.620 --> 00:00:22.480 tell you more about the things that we're doing and what we have to offer later. But for now, 00:00:22.480 --> 00:00:29.000 I want to talk about not any huge announcement, but a very, very small announcement that it's 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:33.500 also kind of huge. Very cool. Yeah. So micro, you might say. You might say it's microscopic, 00:00:33.500 --> 00:00:39.980 but it's a big deal. So MicroPython has just had a new release. And this is significant because the 00:00:39.980 --> 00:00:47.140 last release from MicroPython was December 19th of last year. So it's been, you know, what is that? 00:00:47.140 --> 00:00:51.520 Almost 10 months since the last release. So if you care about MicroPython, this is like a pretty big 00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:58.500 deal. So version 113 is out. And one of the major things is it has improved asyncio, 00:00:58.700 --> 00:01:06.880 async and await support. And it has cool Bluetooth improvements. And it even comes with the PEP 526, 00:01:06.880 --> 00:01:11.700 that walrus operator. Oh, nice. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff going on here. They basically, 00:01:11.700 --> 00:01:19.980 MicroPython, as you can imagine, comes with a micro asyncio module. I'm guessing the U is really a MU. 00:01:19.980 --> 00:01:28.500 U asyncio module that's supposed to be more compatible with CPython's asyncio. So the main idea is that the 00:01:28.500 --> 00:01:34.200 task object, you can use a task object for each coroutine, which allows you to have like unbounded 00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:39.180 queues of work and stuff like that. Whereas previously, I think you had to pre-allocate it for some reason. 00:01:39.180 --> 00:01:45.900 I never tried to do asyncio on MicroPython, but apparently it was a little bit wonky. And so now it's more 00:01:45.900 --> 00:01:52.140 consistent. Another thing that I thought was interesting about this release, Brian, was they went through and 00:01:52.140 --> 00:01:59.580 auto-formatted all the code in the entire repository. And if you look at their repo, there is Python and MicroPython, 00:01:59.580 --> 00:02:05.900 but a lot like CPython, it's a lot of C as well. Right? I think it's like 80% C or something. 00:02:05.900 --> 00:02:06.240 Okay. 00:02:06.240 --> 00:02:10.820 And so they auto-formatted the Python code with black, and that probably won't surprise too many people, 00:02:10.960 --> 00:02:18.020 but they auto-formatted C with that community's equivalent of black, and get ready for the name, 00:02:18.020 --> 00:02:22.160 Uncrustify. They uncrustified the C code. 00:02:22.160 --> 00:02:22.500 Okay. 00:02:22.500 --> 00:02:23.260 Do you know about this? 00:02:23.260 --> 00:02:26.200 No, actually, I'm writing it down because I'd like to check this out. 00:02:26.200 --> 00:02:30.840 Isn't that great? So you can basically configure how it formats your C code. And it's like black. It's 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:35.720 like, you know, it just runs automatically and fixes your C code. And boy, if you thought Python 00:02:35.720 --> 00:02:40.420 code needed some fixing, I'll bet you the C code. And there's more variety in there, right? 00:02:40.420 --> 00:02:43.380 Yeah. I've seen some ugly C code in my day. 00:02:43.380 --> 00:02:48.800 Yeah, for sure. For sure. Because with the curly braces and semicolons, you have a lot more flexibility 00:02:48.800 --> 00:02:53.500 in how you format stuff, whereas Python forces some of that structure upon you. 00:02:53.500 --> 00:03:00.700 All right. They also added Blue Kitchen. Apparently Blue Kitchen is a Bluetooth stack. And so they added a 00:03:00.700 --> 00:03:09.520 micro Mew Bluetooth module as an alternative to the Nimble stack as well. And there's a Unix port, 00:03:09.520 --> 00:03:14.360 and you can build the Unix port with the Bluetooth support for either of these bindings. That's pretty 00:03:14.360 --> 00:03:20.800 cool. That comes with new events. So if you're doing like Bluetooth discovery and things like that, 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:27.640 you can like scan for Bluetooth stuff more easily. It also came with a big memory leak fix for ARM 00:03:27.640 --> 00:03:35.180 chips, which is big in the small space, ironically. So apparently, there was certain memory that was 00:03:35.180 --> 00:03:38.960 not reclaimed by the garbage collector and other types of things. So if you've, you know, and at the 00:03:38.960 --> 00:03:43.300 same time on these very small devices, you care a lot about not wasting memory, right? It's not like 00:03:43.300 --> 00:03:48.540 you got 32 gigs like my laptop does. So like whatever, right? It's going to matter if you lose memory on 00:03:48.540 --> 00:03:56.680 like a little micro Python chip. And also they set it up so you can run parallel tests against multiple 00:03:56.680 --> 00:04:01.740 micro Python targets. So I'm guessing like different chips and different devices, you can just say go test 00:04:01.740 --> 00:04:07.060 them, run it synchronized across two or more micro Python targets. I don't know if that's to speed it 00:04:07.060 --> 00:04:12.860 up or to like, test the whole thing on different platforms in parallel or whatever. But it sounds like a 00:04:12.860 --> 00:04:16.960 good improvement. And it does come with a few breaking changes. So people can check that out. 00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:22.220 Anyway, if you care about micro Python, and I'm guessing this may make its way over to CircuitPython 00:04:22.220 --> 00:04:27.080 as well at some point, knowing that those projects are really close. So anyway, this looks really good 00:04:27.080 --> 00:04:29.340 if you're doing big stuff on small things. 00:04:29.340 --> 00:04:31.420 Yeah, it's good to see this going forward. 00:04:31.420 --> 00:04:35.440 And thanks to Matt Trentini for sharing this and bringing it to our attention. 00:04:35.440 --> 00:04:40.500 I wish I was better at remembering names, but somebody I had on testing code brought up 00:04:40.500 --> 00:04:49.800 respx and or respix. I should stop. R-E-S-P-X. It's a utility for mocking out the Python HTTPX library. 00:04:49.800 --> 00:04:54.180 So that somebody brought that up and I had never heard of it before. So I figured we'd bring it up 00:04:54.180 --> 00:05:02.040 here. So with requests, if you want to mock it, there's a whole library called responses and cleverly 00:05:02.040 --> 00:05:08.200 named a bit hard to search for. And then with HTTPX, if you want to mock it, there is respx. 00:05:08.200 --> 00:05:12.100 I'm going to name it response X, but we just the other part, you just don't write it. 00:05:12.100 --> 00:05:15.800 It's like the opposite of a silent E. It's it's not written. 00:05:15.800 --> 00:05:17.000 Maybe. 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:21.140 Sorry, keep going. It sounds like a great idea. 00:05:21.140 --> 00:05:25.700 Well, interestingly enough, when you write the two imports out, they're the same number of characters. 00:05:25.880 --> 00:05:32.000 Maybe that's part of the reason why they did that. Anyway, that quick start is like shows it's really quick. 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:39.260 You just it's a really just a few lines of code to mock out a request response call or response call. 00:05:39.260 --> 00:05:44.580 You can do things like things that you would expect, like an assert that something was actually called 00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:48.180 and what the status code was and things like that. 00:05:48.180 --> 00:05:53.260 But you can also have custom content and you can return JSON content. 00:05:53.260 --> 00:05:57.580 of course, there's some examples. What I like is the documentation is pretty nice. 00:05:57.580 --> 00:06:01.380 There's some examples on how to use it with both pytest and UnitTest, 00:06:01.380 --> 00:06:05.800 including how to set up like a mocked API fixture for pytest. 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:09.140 You can have multiple tests using the same mocked endpoint. 00:06:09.140 --> 00:06:12.680 And there's a bunch of nice things about it. 00:06:12.680 --> 00:06:16.720 Like, for instance, if you want to mock out a whole bunch of different URLs, 00:06:16.720 --> 00:06:22.780 you can use some regular expressions to set what URLs you want to catch with that. 00:06:22.780 --> 00:06:35.280 and then also the content that you return from your mocked object, your mocked request is you can have a callback that can generate that on the fly based on what you pass in it. 00:06:35.440 --> 00:06:40.760 If you have a HTTPX based application, you definitely need to know about this for testing. 00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:41.620 Yeah, absolutely. 00:06:41.620 --> 00:06:47.860 And one of the things that's challenging about testing the HTTPX is the async stuff, right? 00:06:47.860 --> 00:06:52.480 And so this is a really cool way to get in there and just make it work, right? 00:06:52.480 --> 00:06:52.780 Yeah. 00:06:52.820 --> 00:06:57.420 Just put a decorator there and it just mocks it out for you like you would expect. 00:06:57.420 --> 00:06:58.560 Looks very clean. 00:06:58.560 --> 00:06:59.780 Yeah, pretty easy. 00:06:59.780 --> 00:07:05.480 And there's a lot of magic going on under the hood to make that a clean interface, but I think they did a good job. 00:07:05.480 --> 00:07:05.740 Yeah. 00:07:06.520 --> 00:07:14.980 So HTTPX comes from sort of an async derivative of requests, which I think is a really fantastic library. 00:07:14.980 --> 00:07:16.680 And I've done some cool stuff with HTTPX. 00:07:16.680 --> 00:07:18.080 So yeah, I'm a fan of this. 00:07:18.080 --> 00:07:18.460 It's great. 00:07:18.460 --> 00:07:27.060 Now, before we move on, let's talk about a couple of things that we got going on that people can check out that will definitely help support the show. 00:07:27.180 --> 00:07:28.740 And they might find interesting. 00:07:28.740 --> 00:07:31.960 I know that you've got some updates for your book. 00:07:31.960 --> 00:07:32.340 Is that right? 00:07:32.340 --> 00:07:32.640 Yeah. 00:07:32.640 --> 00:07:38.180 The Python testing with pytestBook, just a minor, the book itself has a minor update. 00:07:38.180 --> 00:07:44.900 So there's, it wasn't a big enough change to change the hardback version, but the ebook will be updated. 00:07:44.900 --> 00:07:53.300 I don't think the hardback is going to be updated, but it's a couple lines of code in a couple of code examples in chapter five. 00:07:53.300 --> 00:07:55.620 So it's a very minor thing. 00:07:56.160 --> 00:07:59.240 But the big difference is the code download. 00:07:59.240 --> 00:08:01.300 So we've updated the code download. 00:08:01.300 --> 00:08:09.080 So even if you're working with the hardback book or using the old version and don't update the ebook, please redownload the code. 00:08:09.080 --> 00:08:11.800 It'll make your learning experience better. 00:08:11.800 --> 00:08:20.240 And the main change is that I've pinned the dependencies in the target project or the example project so that everything works better. 00:08:20.240 --> 00:08:20.960 Good. 00:08:20.960 --> 00:08:24.980 There was a tiny DB is a database that I use in the project. 00:08:25.140 --> 00:08:27.700 And it had some incompatible changes. 00:08:28.060 --> 00:08:35.000 And instead of trying to update everything to use the new, the new tiny DB, I just pinned it to an old version. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:35.840 Yeah, that makes sense. 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:39.380 I mean, it's not like you're trying to teach people tiny DB. 00:08:39.380 --> 00:08:40.480 You're like, here's a dependency. 00:08:40.480 --> 00:08:42.180 We're trying to get around to something. 00:08:42.180 --> 00:08:42.500 Yeah. 00:08:42.620 --> 00:08:46.960 So that's not important to the content of teaching people how to write tests. 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:49.020 Yeah, that's the problem of creating content. 00:08:49.020 --> 00:08:52.420 The world moves on and they're not always compatible with what you did. 00:08:52.420 --> 00:08:53.060 How about that? 00:08:53.220 --> 00:08:53.400 Yeah. 00:08:53.400 --> 00:08:57.920 Over at Talk Python, we've got a whole bunch of stuff coming. 00:08:57.920 --> 00:09:04.300 And so what I'd like to encourage people to do is just to go to talkpython.fm or training.talkpython.fm. 00:09:04.300 --> 00:09:08.000 And right there you can, at the front of the training site, you can just enter your email. 00:09:08.220 --> 00:09:14.380 So if you get a bunch of announcements, because I believe we are working on five or six courses right now are under active development. 00:09:14.380 --> 00:09:16.200 We've got all sorts of great stuff. 00:09:16.200 --> 00:09:18.980 And rather going through it, just sign up to get notified when those come out. 00:09:18.980 --> 00:09:19.460 Very cool. 00:09:19.460 --> 00:09:20.300 Indeed, indeed. 00:09:20.300 --> 00:09:26.480 So a while ago, I went on this Twitter journey, let's say. 00:09:26.480 --> 00:09:27.840 I don't know how to really explain it. 00:09:27.840 --> 00:09:31.740 It was like I posted a quick question that led to a ton of feedback. 00:09:32.200 --> 00:09:39.100 And then, wow, so many pieces of information and ideas and variations were sent around. 00:09:39.100 --> 00:09:45.720 What I was trying to say, like, I'd like a dictionary that contains objects that I can access, say, with different keys. 00:09:45.720 --> 00:09:52.020 Like, I'd like to put a bunch of users and access them by ID, but maybe also by email or by city. 00:09:52.020 --> 00:09:52.880 And that would come with a bunch. 00:09:52.880 --> 00:09:55.080 So it was like this sort of exploration there. 00:09:55.080 --> 00:10:01.980 And one of the recommendations that came over sort of around that is like, hey, you should check out this thing called GetPy. 00:10:02.240 --> 00:10:02.480 Okay. 00:10:02.480 --> 00:10:06.280 I don't know where the name comes from, but it doesn't tell a lot about what it is. 00:10:06.280 --> 00:10:10.860 But it's a vectorized Python dictionary and set implementation. 00:10:10.860 --> 00:10:20.740 And vectorized as in it matches up perfectly with NumPy and so pandas and all the things that are built upon NumPy to plug straight into them. 00:10:20.740 --> 00:10:31.540 So imagine I want to have a dictionary that has data in NumPy, but lets me treat it like a regular Python dictionary or a set and things like that. 00:10:31.540 --> 00:10:33.500 So that's what this is. 00:10:33.500 --> 00:10:43.400 It basically brings a super high performance Python dictionary and set implementation that automatically integrates into the Python scientific ecosystem, which I think is pretty cool. 00:10:43.400 --> 00:10:43.720 Yeah. 00:10:43.720 --> 00:10:44.040 Yeah. 00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:47.340 And it's built upon this thing called parallel hash map. 00:10:47.340 --> 00:10:55.860 So parallel hash map is apparently the current state of the art unordered map set with minimal memory overhead and super fast runtime. 00:10:55.860 --> 00:10:58.100 So like a C binding. 00:10:58.300 --> 00:11:02.620 And so this is just a Python wrapper on top of the C library. 00:11:02.620 --> 00:11:05.020 That's a super fast dictionary and set. 00:11:05.020 --> 00:11:06.320 So that's pretty awesome. 00:11:06.320 --> 00:11:11.260 And here's another one for you, Brian, for your C++ adventures. 00:11:11.560 --> 00:11:18.640 The integration between getpy and parallel hash map is this thing called pybind11. 00:11:18.640 --> 00:11:25.680 So pybind11 is a compatibility layer between C++11 and Python. 00:11:25.680 --> 00:11:32.400 So if you want to write like modern C++ and then plug it in easily to Python, here you go. 00:11:32.400 --> 00:11:32.920 Nice. 00:11:32.920 --> 00:11:33.280 Yeah. 00:11:33.280 --> 00:11:34.000 So that's pretty cool. 00:11:34.000 --> 00:11:34.300 Okay. 00:11:34.300 --> 00:11:39.580 There's two classes, GP, so getpy, gp.dict and gp.set. 00:11:39.580 --> 00:11:44.800 And they're designed to be basically similar to the standard dictionaries and sets from Python. 00:11:44.800 --> 00:11:45.800 But there's a few differences. 00:11:45.800 --> 00:11:46.900 So check out the docs. 00:11:46.900 --> 00:11:51.620 And then I threw in a quick little example here that has two numpy arrays. 00:11:51.620 --> 00:11:55.020 And you can say, here are the keys, here are the values, put them together. 00:11:55.020 --> 00:11:58.040 And then you can just access different values. 00:11:58.040 --> 00:12:01.120 And it's also typed, which I think is kind of interesting, right? 00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:06.140 Like it has like an unsigned 8-bit integer or something like that. 00:12:06.140 --> 00:12:08.020 Much like numpy is. 00:12:08.020 --> 00:12:16.480 But it's more like a Python array where you specify the numerical type than it is just an unbounded list. 00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:17.120 Right. 00:12:17.120 --> 00:12:18.480 So there's some interesting stuff going on here. 00:12:18.480 --> 00:12:20.420 Does it solve your problem that you were looking for? 00:12:20.420 --> 00:12:21.480 No, not at all. 00:12:21.480 --> 00:12:23.520 But it's very interesting. 00:12:23.520 --> 00:12:24.480 But it's still neat. 00:12:24.480 --> 00:12:24.780 Yeah. 00:12:24.780 --> 00:12:25.480 Yeah, it's still neat. 00:12:25.480 --> 00:12:28.920 Speaking of neat, we already talked about black once, but it's pretty neat. 00:12:28.920 --> 00:12:29.700 Let's talk about it again. 00:12:29.700 --> 00:12:31.820 Yeah, this was sent in by John Hagen. 00:12:31.820 --> 00:12:36.600 And he mentioned that, I mean, I'm pretty sure we've mentioned ISORT before. 00:12:36.600 --> 00:12:37.940 I know we've mentioned black. 00:12:37.940 --> 00:12:40.780 But a lot of projects use both. 00:12:40.780 --> 00:12:45.460 So ISORT will sort your imports so you don't have to. 00:12:45.460 --> 00:12:50.080 And then just so they're consistent and they're alphabetically sorted. 00:12:50.080 --> 00:12:51.240 And then there's some other. 00:12:51.240 --> 00:12:51.500 Right. 00:12:51.500 --> 00:12:58.680 And there's PEP 8 recommendations about that, I believe, about like grouping stuff that comes from the library, from standard library versus externals and whatnot. 00:12:58.680 --> 00:12:59.080 Yeah. 00:12:59.080 --> 00:12:59.160 Yeah. 00:12:59.160 --> 00:13:00.940 And so you don't have to think about it. 00:13:00.940 --> 00:13:01.840 You can just use ISORT. 00:13:01.840 --> 00:13:05.660 Black also is becoming more and more popular, I think. 00:13:05.660 --> 00:13:08.500 Or it's just constantly very popular. 00:13:08.500 --> 00:13:12.580 Reform, it's all of your code, but it includes the import statements as well. 00:13:12.960 --> 00:13:17.660 So there was this issue that some projects wanted to use both ISORT and black. 00:13:17.660 --> 00:13:22.500 And there is, and they kind of fight with each other right out of the box. 00:13:22.500 --> 00:13:28.380 If you run ISORT, you'll have one answer and black will do something different in some cases. 00:13:28.740 --> 00:13:29.680 So what do you do? 00:13:29.680 --> 00:13:40.400 Well, there's black had a configuration page, and we'll link to this in the show notes, that has documents what settings you have to set for ISORT so that it's compatible with black. 00:13:40.840 --> 00:13:44.420 They also do that for FLAKE 8 and PILINT, which is nice. 00:13:44.420 --> 00:13:47.160 But FLAKE 8 and PILINT are not that complicated. 00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:50.740 It's the ISORT that's, there's like six settings you have to change. 00:13:50.740 --> 00:13:53.380 But ISORT 5 just came out. 00:13:53.380 --> 00:13:56.940 And ISORT 5 has what they call profiles. 00:13:56.940 --> 00:14:07.480 And so if you run ISORT with Profile Black, black is one of the built-in profiles, it will sort the imports such that they're compatible with black. 00:14:07.480 --> 00:14:08.420 Nice. 00:14:08.420 --> 00:14:16.820 So now if you use ISORT with the black profile and black, also they won't fight with each other anymore. 00:14:16.820 --> 00:14:18.280 That's very cool. 00:14:18.280 --> 00:14:21.920 Black also came out with some new changes. 00:14:21.920 --> 00:14:24.920 So if you're interested in black, check those out. 00:14:24.920 --> 00:14:27.220 They're not huge changes, but some minor fixes. 00:14:27.220 --> 00:14:29.600 The profile feature is pretty cool. 00:14:29.600 --> 00:14:33.180 And even if you don't care about black, I think you should check it out. 00:14:33.180 --> 00:14:41.320 They do, apparently, Django, PyCharm, Google, OpenStack, Clone, Adders, and Hug are other profiles that are included. 00:14:41.320 --> 00:14:47.380 And also, they're just good examples so that you can look at how different projects are configuring their ISORT. 00:14:47.380 --> 00:14:49.880 You can configure yours if you want. 00:14:49.880 --> 00:14:50.980 Yeah, I really like it. 00:14:50.980 --> 00:14:51.660 That's super cool. 00:14:52.100 --> 00:14:59.020 And it is nice to have the top of your files nice and clean and organized in some certain way. 00:14:59.020 --> 00:14:59.660 It's interesting. 00:14:59.660 --> 00:15:04.020 There's a lot of people do different linters or code reformatters. 00:15:04.360 --> 00:15:11.640 But this combination of ISORT plus black is something that's becoming more and more common in a lot of projects. 00:15:11.640 --> 00:15:11.920 Yeah. 00:15:11.920 --> 00:15:12.480 Yeah. 00:15:12.480 --> 00:15:13.300 Very cool. 00:15:13.300 --> 00:15:15.920 So I have something interesting for you. 00:15:15.920 --> 00:15:28.940 If you were to think of the influence of Microsoft Excel relative to the influence of, like, all of human genetics and the genome science of the world, and they got into a fight, who would win? 00:15:28.940 --> 00:15:30.140 Like a superhero. 00:15:30.140 --> 00:15:32.660 You seem like apples and oranges. 00:15:32.660 --> 00:15:33.380 I have no idea. 00:15:33.380 --> 00:15:35.460 Well, they did get into a fight, and Excel won. 00:15:35.460 --> 00:15:36.720 So here's the story. 00:15:36.840 --> 00:15:39.300 There's an article that was sent over by Chris Moffitt. 00:15:39.300 --> 00:15:44.800 He's the guy who wrote the Moving from Excel to Python and Pandas course over at Talk Python. 00:15:44.900 --> 00:15:48.680 So we did a bunch of research into, like, all these funny things and weird things around Excel. 00:15:48.680 --> 00:15:51.360 So he sent this one over, and I thought I'd cover it because it's fun. 00:15:51.360 --> 00:16:00.920 So on The Verge, there's an article that talks about how scientists have renamed human genes to stop Excel from misreading them as dates. 00:16:00.920 --> 00:16:02.860 Okay. 00:16:02.860 --> 00:16:03.560 Is that crazy? 00:16:03.560 --> 00:16:04.000 Yeah. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:04.460 Yeah. 00:16:04.460 --> 00:16:08.420 So you think it was just, like, formatting and stuff like that. 00:16:08.420 --> 00:16:17.140 So there's, like, tens of thousands of genes in the human genome, and each gene is given a name and a numerical code, and then you used to talk about it. 00:16:17.140 --> 00:16:22.560 So, like, this one controls, like, what color of hair you have or whatever, right? 00:16:22.560 --> 00:16:31.060 So over the past year or so, 27 human genes have been renamed all because Excel kept rereading them as symbols. 00:16:31.060 --> 00:16:32.160 They're symbols as dates. 00:16:32.160 --> 00:16:32.600 Okay. 00:16:32.600 --> 00:16:34.200 Well, the examples are important. 00:16:34.200 --> 00:16:34.600 Yeah. 00:16:35.080 --> 00:16:37.000 So, like, March 1. 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:39.140 No spaces. 00:16:39.140 --> 00:16:42.080 March 1 is one of the genes, right? 00:16:42.080 --> 00:16:50.080 But it gets converted to 03 slash 01 slash the year, or if you're in Europe, 01 slash 03 slash the year, right? 00:16:50.080 --> 00:16:52.180 Either way, that's not what you wanted. 00:16:52.180 --> 00:17:02.000 So March 1 actually stands for membrane-associated ring CH-type finger 1, which, of course, is the first of March. 00:17:03.340 --> 00:17:06.380 Now, it sounds funny, and, like, we're making fun of, like, ah, whatever. 00:17:06.380 --> 00:17:20.020 There was a study in 2016 that examined the genetic data shared alongside 3,600 published papers and found that one-fifth of them, which, what is that? 00:17:20.020 --> 00:17:24.200 That's, like, 700 papers were affected by Excel errors. 00:17:24.200 --> 00:17:25.460 Oh, man, yeah. 00:17:25.580 --> 00:17:26.520 Isn't that messed up? 00:17:26.520 --> 00:17:33.900 So, there's a scientific body in charge of naming genes called Hugo Gene Nomenclature Committee. 00:17:33.900 --> 00:17:34.400 Who knew? 00:17:34.400 --> 00:17:36.340 There's a committee for naming genes, but apparently. 00:17:36.340 --> 00:17:43.420 So, they published new guidelines for naming genes, and they said, you have to consider what happens if you type into Excel. 00:17:43.420 --> 00:17:45.520 If it gets reformatted, that's not okay. 00:17:45.520 --> 00:17:46.980 Got to pick a new name. 00:17:48.660 --> 00:17:55.580 So, they put, like, weird suffixes and stuff on these things to make them work, like, March 1 is now, like, March 1 N1 or something like that. 00:17:55.580 --> 00:17:57.800 Anyway, so, why do I bring this up on the Python show? 00:17:57.800 --> 00:18:06.100 You know, so much of this work that people are doing there can totally be solved by Pandas and Jupyter Notebook and stuff. 00:18:06.200 --> 00:18:14.580 And so, you know, the guy who was quoted in there was like, hey, I made these mistakes when I was in grad school because all I knew how to use was Excel. 00:18:14.580 --> 00:18:28.160 So, here's a bit of an example along with a plea to help folks who are overusing Excel to take a step forward and use, you know, something like Pandas and Jupyter. 00:18:28.160 --> 00:18:33.280 And, you know, you're going to be able to do a lot more cool processing anyway, which I think is great. 00:18:33.280 --> 00:18:33.520 Yeah. 00:18:33.640 --> 00:18:50.080 Also, one other thing, if you think that geneticists have an exclusive right to these mistakes, there's a really cool article, blog post over on Oracle's blog, actually, called The 10 Costliest Spreadsheet Boo-Boos in History. 00:18:50.080 --> 00:18:52.080 And they're really hilarious. 00:18:52.080 --> 00:18:54.540 And, like, thank God this didn't happen to me. 00:18:54.540 --> 00:18:58.560 Well, and just, like, awesome stock photo that they have for this, too. 00:18:58.560 --> 00:19:00.500 Yeah, it's so bad. 00:19:00.500 --> 00:19:01.400 Yeah, it's, like, perfect. 00:19:01.400 --> 00:19:02.880 It could just come out of Excel. 00:19:03.520 --> 00:19:03.840 Yeah. 00:19:03.840 --> 00:19:03.920 Yeah. 00:19:03.920 --> 00:19:20.300 So, some of them are fairly mundane, but others, like MI5, the British Intelligence Agency, bugged over 1,000 wrong phone numbers because the 000 and the last three digits of the number got, you know, misstated. 00:19:20.300 --> 00:19:21.180 Oh, no. 00:19:21.460 --> 00:19:21.900 Yeah. 00:19:21.900 --> 00:19:21.900 Yeah. 00:19:21.900 --> 00:19:21.960 Yeah. 00:19:21.960 --> 00:19:22.100 Yeah. 00:19:22.100 --> 00:19:33.580 Or Eastman Kodak was forced to reinstate financial results for two quarters by from 2 million and 13 million respectively due to a spreadsheet mistake. 00:19:33.580 --> 00:19:37.780 Yeah, there's just all these crazy examples of stuff just going wrong. 00:19:37.780 --> 00:19:42.120 Like, oh, sorry, that was a billion dollar mistake because we were off by some random thing. 00:19:42.120 --> 00:19:44.160 Anyway, there's a bunch of errors like this. 00:19:44.160 --> 00:19:48.880 And it's really interesting to think how you might use the Python tools to not have these errors. 00:19:48.880 --> 00:19:49.240 Yeah. 00:19:49.820 --> 00:19:52.340 I think Excel has too much influence over the world. 00:19:52.340 --> 00:19:52.800 It does. 00:19:52.800 --> 00:19:57.920 But if you were going to use Python and you had a Jupyter Notebook, would you run it in your downloads folder? 00:19:57.920 --> 00:19:58.460 No. 00:19:58.460 --> 00:20:01.020 No, definitely not. 00:20:01.020 --> 00:20:07.040 Yeah, so this is another just kind of an interesting and shocking, wherever you think about it before. 00:20:07.040 --> 00:20:12.940 But Glyph has written an article called Never Run Python in Your Downloads Folder. 00:20:12.940 --> 00:20:15.000 It's not just about that. 00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:16.440 Okay, so there's your advice. 00:20:16.440 --> 00:20:18.080 Don't run Python in your downloads folder. 00:20:18.520 --> 00:20:26.880 But I think it's a good article to spread around and read because it's a nice short tutorial on how syspath works and how it's populated. 00:20:26.880 --> 00:20:32.180 So Python has this thing called syspath that is, that's where it looks up. 00:20:32.180 --> 00:20:39.560 So if you say import something or mostly that, where it's importing things, also the dash M or something. 00:20:39.560 --> 00:20:43.740 If you say dash M and then some module, where does it find that? 00:20:44.300 --> 00:20:45.960 And it finds it in lots of places. 00:20:45.960 --> 00:20:51.220 One is the normal system include directory or the system packages. 00:20:51.220 --> 00:20:53.300 But there's other places too. 00:20:53.920 --> 00:20:59.520 And one of the places where Python uses is the location you're in when you run Python. 00:20:59.520 --> 00:21:20.780 So a little example, he talks about a lot of people are now using, instead of running pip directly, they run python-m pip, which I also am including that in my advice usually, because I'm tired of trying to fix people's errors when their Python and their pip are pointing to two different places. 00:21:20.960 --> 00:21:21.960 That's frustrating. 00:21:21.960 --> 00:21:31.460 So what happens if you run python-m pip install something, some wheel in your downloads directory? 00:21:31.880 --> 00:21:34.780 Well, normally, everything's fine. 00:21:34.780 --> 00:21:45.960 Except if there's a malicious fake pip.py in your downloads directory that happens to have gotten there because somebody wrote some malicious JavaScript code, stick it there. 00:21:45.960 --> 00:21:47.260 It's possible. 00:21:47.260 --> 00:21:49.620 I don't know if it would happen, but it's possible. 00:21:49.620 --> 00:21:50.780 It's more likely now. 00:21:50.780 --> 00:21:52.340 Yeah, especially now. 00:21:52.340 --> 00:21:53.340 Thanks, Cliff. 00:21:53.740 --> 00:21:59.940 But then it's going to run that instead of the pip that you expect it to run, which is bothersome. 00:21:59.940 --> 00:22:00.840 So this is hidden. 00:22:00.840 --> 00:22:02.780 There's some extra advice in here. 00:22:02.780 --> 00:22:04.900 I encourage everybody to read the whole article. 00:22:04.900 --> 00:22:18.720 Understanding how the Python path variable works as well, because sometimes other applications will, and if the installer of an application can change things and change your Python path. 00:22:18.740 --> 00:22:21.980 It shouldn't, but sometimes they'll do that out of convenience. 00:22:21.980 --> 00:22:32.300 So occasionally look at your Python path and make sure that there's nothing weird in there, and maybe contact application developers or if they're doing something odd. 00:22:32.520 --> 00:22:36.700 If you are mucking with Python path, the recommendation is put absolute paths. 00:22:36.700 --> 00:22:38.520 Don't put anything relative in there. 00:22:38.520 --> 00:22:41.160 You want to be able to have complete control over that. 00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:49.500 The problem with the downloads folder is not that the downloads folder has weird permissions or higher permissions or anything of that nature. 00:22:49.500 --> 00:23:03.440 It's just that web virus maliciousness might, it's most likely to drop the payload there, and the Python path plus that operation or that aspect is what is likely to lead to trouble. 00:23:03.440 --> 00:23:03.700 Yeah. 00:23:03.700 --> 00:23:04.000 Right. 00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:08.880 Like you wouldn't say don't run it in your documents folder unless you copy virus Python files in there. 00:23:10.320 --> 00:23:10.760 Yeah. 00:23:10.760 --> 00:23:22.660 And the example was real of like sometimes, like let's say you're behind a firewall or something like that, and pip install just doesn't work, and you haven't figured out how to do proxies yet, and you really just need some package. 00:23:22.660 --> 00:23:24.740 You might just download the wheel somewhere. 00:23:24.740 --> 00:23:25.720 Okay. 00:23:25.720 --> 00:23:29.660 You might have that, and the wheel might be fine, but put it somewhere else. 00:23:29.660 --> 00:23:31.260 Don't leave it in your downloads directory. 00:23:31.260 --> 00:23:32.160 Put it someplace else. 00:23:32.160 --> 00:23:34.400 And please use virtual environments. 00:23:34.400 --> 00:23:35.820 That'll help things as well. 00:23:35.820 --> 00:23:36.060 Yeah. 00:23:36.060 --> 00:23:36.540 Absolutely. 00:23:36.540 --> 00:23:40.180 Good advice, and definitely another thing to be aware of. 00:23:40.180 --> 00:23:42.820 That internet, it's a scary place. 00:23:42.820 --> 00:23:45.380 Yes, but we love it. 00:23:45.380 --> 00:23:46.080 It's also a good place. 00:23:46.080 --> 00:23:47.800 It goes both ways, because we do love it. 00:23:47.800 --> 00:23:52.540 That's it for our main topics, but I do want to share two quick things, and they both have to do with the internet. 00:23:52.540 --> 00:23:57.320 Number one is we just passed 5 million downloads, Brian. 00:23:57.320 --> 00:23:57.960 Wow. 00:23:57.960 --> 00:23:58.660 That's awesome. 00:23:58.660 --> 00:23:58.940 That's awesome. 00:23:58.940 --> 00:24:04.680 Yeah, and we're in the top 150 or so of all tech podcasts in the world. 00:24:04.680 --> 00:24:08.760 So I just want to say thank you, everyone, that's helped to make that happen, because that's kind of a milestone. 00:24:08.760 --> 00:24:09.460 So that's really cool. 00:24:09.460 --> 00:24:10.100 Yes, thank you. 00:24:10.100 --> 00:24:10.360 Indeed. 00:24:10.360 --> 00:24:17.220 Also, I recently finally broke down and got a Wi-Fi mesh router. 00:24:17.220 --> 00:24:18.140 Routers? 00:24:18.140 --> 00:24:19.260 Can you say singular router? 00:24:19.260 --> 00:24:20.220 It's got to be plural, right? 00:24:20.220 --> 00:24:24.800 So one of those routers where it has a bunch of different stations, and they all work together. 00:24:25.200 --> 00:24:31.040 But because of the way it works, you don't actually have to connect to different ones at different places. 00:24:31.040 --> 00:24:32.360 It's just all one Wi-Fi. 00:24:32.360 --> 00:24:33.420 Okay. 00:24:33.420 --> 00:24:42.580 And man, I got this Linksys Wi-Fi 6 mesh router, which is quite pricey, but man, it is so, so awesome. 00:24:42.580 --> 00:24:46.260 So if people are suffering from being home all the time, they're like, gosh, I got to get better internet. 00:24:46.660 --> 00:24:54.340 My internet was actually pretty good here, but we started getting a ton of radio interference from different sources, and it would degrade it and stuff. 00:24:54.340 --> 00:24:58.820 So I have my recording area office above my garage. 00:24:58.820 --> 00:25:04.640 It's like a little studio apartment thing we built above the garage, which is a separate building across from the house. 00:25:04.640 --> 00:25:10.040 And over here, if I go speed test, I get 400 megabit measured off my Wi-Fi now. 00:25:10.240 --> 00:25:11.360 That is solid. 00:25:11.360 --> 00:25:14.960 Okay, so how far away are the mesh nodes? 00:25:14.960 --> 00:25:21.320 It's probably 50 feet, but it goes through several outside walls, through a couple inside walls. 00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:23.060 There's layers it's got to go through. 00:25:23.060 --> 00:25:30.000 But now with the mesh, I could put one of the nodes much closer to the wall that I'm close to that spans that gap between houses. 00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:30.420 Okay. 00:25:30.420 --> 00:25:32.400 And how are they talking to each other? 00:25:32.400 --> 00:25:37.700 They have their own channel, and they do some kind of back channel Wi-Fi 6 thing. 00:25:38.240 --> 00:25:40.600 So anyway, super good recommendation. 00:25:40.600 --> 00:25:40.920 Yes. 00:25:40.920 --> 00:25:41.960 How about you? 00:25:41.960 --> 00:25:43.300 Any extra stuff you want to share with the world? 00:25:43.300 --> 00:25:43.940 No. 00:25:43.940 --> 00:25:48.440 Just that I'm sort of sick of it and fires and all that sort of stuff. 00:25:48.440 --> 00:25:49.180 Yeah, man. 00:25:49.180 --> 00:25:51.120 It's looking a little smoky outside. 00:25:51.120 --> 00:25:53.300 And yeah, the whole West Coast. 00:25:53.300 --> 00:25:55.880 And my sympathies go out to the folks in Northern California. 00:25:55.880 --> 00:26:00.160 I just had a meeting with someone, and oh my gosh, is it smoky there. 00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:02.480 It looked like night in the daytime. 00:26:02.480 --> 00:26:07.740 In the background, I could see their window, and it was dark, as if they were in a different time zone. 00:26:07.740 --> 00:26:08.960 But they weren't. 00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:09.700 Not good. 00:26:09.700 --> 00:26:12.040 So hopefully that'll end soon. 00:26:12.040 --> 00:26:17.880 But before we end this episode, I got a question, Brian, for you. 00:26:17.880 --> 00:26:19.760 Are you a real programmer? 00:26:19.760 --> 00:26:20.960 Like a real one? 00:26:20.960 --> 00:26:21.580 Like a hardcore? 00:26:21.580 --> 00:26:24.080 I mean, you do C++, so that puts you a little closer. 00:26:24.080 --> 00:26:24.940 Oh my God. 00:26:24.940 --> 00:26:28.320 Imposter syndrome flares every time I get that question. 00:26:28.320 --> 00:26:30.000 So I don't think so. 00:26:30.100 --> 00:26:32.060 Let's go to XKCD and answer it. 00:26:32.060 --> 00:26:32.420 Okay? 00:26:32.420 --> 00:26:32.680 Okay. 00:26:32.680 --> 00:26:35.820 So XKCD has this cartoon called Real Programmers. 00:26:35.820 --> 00:26:42.220 And it starts with two people debating about what kind of editor they're using, right? 00:26:42.220 --> 00:26:44.120 It says there's somebody working. 00:26:44.120 --> 00:26:46.240 They're using Nano, the editor. 00:26:46.240 --> 00:26:48.660 And the person, come on, Nano? 00:26:48.660 --> 00:26:49.420 For real? 00:26:49.420 --> 00:26:51.260 Real programmers use Emacs. 00:26:51.880 --> 00:26:53.060 And then Brian walks in. 00:26:53.060 --> 00:26:55.040 Hey, real programmers use Vim. 00:26:55.040 --> 00:26:55.600 Come on. 00:26:55.600 --> 00:26:58.280 Oh yeah, well, real programmers use Ed. 00:26:58.280 --> 00:27:01.460 No, no, real programmers use Cat and just stick it on the end. 00:27:01.460 --> 00:27:05.140 Real programmers use a magnetized needle in a steady hand. 00:27:05.140 --> 00:27:08.620 Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies. 00:27:09.620 --> 00:27:11.100 Everyone turns and looks at the person. 00:27:11.100 --> 00:27:15.060 They open their hands and they let the delicate wings flap once. 00:27:15.060 --> 00:27:20.180 The disturbance ripples outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere, 00:27:20.180 --> 00:27:25.760 which acts as a lens that deflects incoming cosmic rays, focus them to strike the derived platter 00:27:25.760 --> 00:27:27.060 and flip the desired bit. 00:27:27.060 --> 00:27:28.300 Nice. 00:27:28.300 --> 00:27:31.020 Of course, there's an Emacs command to do that. 00:27:31.020 --> 00:27:32.400 Oh yeah? 00:27:32.400 --> 00:27:33.040 Yeah. 00:27:33.040 --> 00:27:36.040 Command X, Command M, Command Butterfly. 00:27:39.300 --> 00:27:39.860 Nice. 00:27:39.860 --> 00:27:40.840 Yeah. 00:27:40.840 --> 00:27:41.320 Yeah, yeah. 00:27:41.320 --> 00:27:45.440 CXCMCM Butterfly. 00:27:45.440 --> 00:27:45.800 Indeed. 00:27:45.800 --> 00:27:47.480 Damn it, Emacs, they say. 00:27:47.480 --> 00:27:50.000 Does anybody use Emacs? 00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:50.400 Yeah. 00:27:50.400 --> 00:27:53.420 Well, I don't know, but I'm not a real programmer because I don't use butterflies. 00:27:53.420 --> 00:27:54.000 I'm sorry. 00:27:54.000 --> 00:27:55.400 No, I don't use butterflies. 00:27:55.400 --> 00:27:56.540 Okay. 00:27:56.540 --> 00:27:57.960 Well, we're in the joke section. 00:27:57.960 --> 00:28:00.720 I got to share a terrible joke that my wife came up with. 00:28:00.720 --> 00:28:01.000 You wait. 00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:01.420 Okay. 00:28:01.420 --> 00:28:03.460 99 bottles of beer on the wall. 00:28:03.460 --> 00:28:04.720 99 bottles of beer. 00:28:04.720 --> 00:28:05.760 Take one down. 00:28:05.760 --> 00:28:06.620 Pass it around. 00:28:06.620 --> 00:28:08.080 Now everybody's infected. 00:28:08.080 --> 00:28:09.060 Morons. 00:28:09.060 --> 00:28:15.000 Hey, that sounds like college here in the US. 00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:16.300 I think that's what they're doing. 00:28:16.300 --> 00:28:18.040 I'm going to tell from all the news I'm watching. 00:28:18.040 --> 00:28:18.840 Oh my gosh. 00:28:18.840 --> 00:28:19.720 Jeez. 00:28:19.720 --> 00:28:20.140 Sorry. 00:28:20.140 --> 00:28:20.460 Yeah. 00:28:20.460 --> 00:28:23.160 These jokes are the 2020 jokes. 00:28:23.160 --> 00:28:23.740 Oh yeah. 00:28:23.740 --> 00:28:25.680 So this won't make sense in the future. 00:28:25.680 --> 00:28:26.040 Yeah. 00:28:26.040 --> 00:28:26.360 Yeah. 00:28:26.360 --> 00:28:26.580 Yeah. 00:28:26.580 --> 00:28:32.380 So in the future, when you speak to a historian and you say, oh, you're a historian. 00:28:32.380 --> 00:28:33.280 What do you study? 00:28:33.280 --> 00:28:37.040 Oh, I actually study the year 2020. 00:28:37.540 --> 00:28:38.800 Like that won't be enough. 00:28:38.800 --> 00:28:40.980 You have to say, well, which part do you study? 00:28:40.980 --> 00:28:42.560 Like the beginning? 00:28:42.560 --> 00:28:45.660 Do you study the financial crash? 00:28:45.660 --> 00:28:47.040 Do you study this crazy election? 00:28:47.040 --> 00:28:48.500 Do you study the pandemic? 00:28:48.760 --> 00:28:52.560 Like you got to be like 20, that year is not enough to say what your specialty is. 00:28:52.560 --> 00:28:53.340 You got to pick one. 00:28:53.340 --> 00:28:54.300 Pick a quarter. 00:28:54.300 --> 00:28:55.300 Yeah. 00:28:55.300 --> 00:28:56.340 It's a crazy time, right? 00:28:56.820 --> 00:28:58.260 I study the flyers. 00:28:58.260 --> 00:28:59.420 Oh boy. 00:28:59.420 --> 00:28:59.920 Anyway. 00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:02.360 Well, good talking with you as always. 00:29:02.360 --> 00:29:03.000 You as well. 00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:03.520 Catch you later. 00:29:03.840 --> 00:29:05.440 Thank you for listening to Python Bytes. 00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:07.960 Follow the show on Twitter via at Python Bytes. 00:29:07.960 --> 00:29:10.820 That's Python Bytes as in B-Y-T-E-S. 00:29:10.820 --> 00:29:14.060 And get the full show notes at pythonbytes.fm. 00:29:14.060 --> 00:29:18.260 If you have a news item you want featured, just visit pythonbytes.fm and send it our way. 00:29:18.260 --> 00:29:20.960 We're always on the lookout for sharing something cool. 00:29:20.960 --> 00:29:24.080 On behalf of myself and Brian Okken, this is Michael Kennedy. 00:29:24.080 --> 00:29:27.500 Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.