Sebastian Rittau

Author: srittau

  • Fury Road: A Fate Accelerated Adventure, Part One

    Fury Road: A Fate Accelerated Adventure, Part One

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    Inspired by other FATE “Example of Plays”, especially Station53’s “Avengers Accelerated“, I wanted to create my own Fate Accelerated version of a famous movie. After some deliberation, I decided to partly retell George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s action-driven nature and small cast lends itself to this style. Since I was not sure which scene…

  • python-dectest — Improved unittest.TestCase

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    I have released the first version of dectest for Python (Github), an improved version of unittest.TestCase. It is a drop-in replacement with two improvements: decorators for tests, setup, and teardown methods. This is not only more explicit than the “magic” names of unittest, it also allows multiple setup and teardown methods per class. A patch() helper method that calls unittest.mock.patch(),…

  • Python asserts and json-get with type hints

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    I released new versions of python-asserts  (0.8.2) and python-json-get (1.1.0) that include type hints, so that typecheckers like mypy will now be able to type check calls to those libraries. json-get uses asserts for its tests and it’s now possible to type check it without –ignore-missing-imports. In addition, json-get now has a json_get_default() function that returns a default…

  • Friendly Printers

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    At the offices of one of my customers, the printers are extra-friendly. Whenever I arrive or leave, they all greet me with a small concert. I suspect that connecting or disconnecting USB devices from my laptop (such as the mouse dongle), CUPS is sending a broadcast over the network, querying printers of their status. This…

  • A Blast from the Past

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    I guess someone needs to update their download pages:

  • dbupgrade – A Database Migration Tool – published

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    Yesterday I published dbupgrade, a simple database migration tool, written in Python. It allows you to put database migration files (simple SQL files with a special header) into a directory and upgrade your database schema. While this is a new project, it was extracted from an internal library I’ve been using for years and should…

  • Chipcard Woes

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    One of my customers, a large dental practice, had a problem from time to time when reading Krankenversicherungskarten (German health insurance card, KVK). The insurance number got all garbled up, which led to problems when reading the patient’s insurance data into the health care application. After their sysadmin and I analysed the situation it seemed…

  • VirtualBox on i386 with amd64 Kernel

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    I have recently started to use an amd64 kernel on my i386 Debian unstable system. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE does not work with that setup. When I try to start a virtual machine, it fails with an oblique error message: RTR3Init failed with rc=-1912 (rc=-1912) The VirtualBox kernel modules do not fit to this version of VirtualBox. The…

  • Helmar Fanselau dies aged 56

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    I just learned that one of my former teacher, Helmar Fanselau, died on January 13th, aged 56. He was a strange man. Many students liked him because of his antics and strange sense for humor. Others did not like him for his harsh and unforgiving marks in his subjects, Latin and History. I think he…

  • Upper Deck Entertainment vs. Konami

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    This is my take on the conflict between Konami and Upper Deck Entertainment (UDE) that is currently upsetting the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game community. While I don’t play Yu-Gi-Oh! myself, as a Magic: The Gathering judge I have a certain interest in what happens in the industry overall. Oh, and I like soap operas. All information presented is scrounged from various…