Ephes Blog

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

Software

• django-simple-deploy 1.0 is out | Hmm, should I move my deployment stuff to a plugin?
• Entity Mapping, Cloning, Disabling, and more | This Week in Bevy Engine

Videos

• Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos | Distance ladder part 1 | Very cool, I had no idea how complicated this stuff is
• The Macroeconomics Of Privacy and Dignity - Mike Hoye | Framing Privacy as agency over your dignity is a strong move
• Neural networks (3Blue1Brown series) | Best visual explanation I've seen so far

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!

Articles

• Rendering form fields as group in Django | Ok, nice
• Better unit-tests for your emails with Django 5.2 | Cool
• The UK's Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All | Groundhog day, again?

Books

• Inclusive Components | Blog / Book

Software

• FawltyDeps is a dependency checker for Python that finds undeclared and/or unused 3rd-party dependencies in your Python project
• Pearcleaner - A free, source-available and fair-code licensed Mac app cleaner

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

Software

• llm-anthropic. I've renamed my llm-claude-3 plugin to llm-anthropic
• Mastering RAG: Techniques for Improved Retrieval and Generation
• boltons should be builtins

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?

You all died in 2016. And yes, this is Hell. --God

I went to a PyDDF meetup and had a great time! I also managed to get my video setup working again, so I might create more video content soon. I've been experimenting with storing code and plugin templates for a Django project in database models - it's somewhat working, though still a work in progress. I've also been playing around with generating context for few-shot learning in LLMs.

Articles

• Django
  • Push notifications without a mobile app: an experiment (with Django) | might come in handy 🔨
  • How to check if a Django template has been overridden
• Python / AI
  • Anthropic’s new Citations API | Interesting
  • The Vision of a new World | Linked data would be really valuable. We might be able to leverage LLMs' need for context to make this happen. Could be an interesting approach! 🤔
  • What I've learned about writing AI apps so far | Yep, trying to use LLMs in apps atm and I have much to learn
• Frontend
  • The ten Most Popular Codepens 2024
  • 6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2025
  • CSS Wishlist for 2025
  • How would you share state between Web Components?
  • Browsing with a keyboard
• Build the abstraction first | True
• A Definitive Guide to External Displays on macOS | Just to be able to find this article later...
• Static Full Text Search

Software

• Pure CSS 3D Cat | Just 1.5k lines of CSS 😅
• Holy shit it's actually done — we just tagged Tailwind CSS v4.0
• PydanticAI - Agent Framework / shim to use Pydantic with LLMs
• Robyn is a High-Performance, Community-Driven, and Innovator Friendly Web Framework with a Rust runtime
• Oh Shit, Git!?! | Surprisingly useful 😁

Fediverse

• Just a reminder... it's certainly my life. ;)

Videos

• Classic Design Patterns: Where Are They Now - Brandon Rhodes - code::dive 2022 | Ah, missed this one - good talk!
• SQLite: How it works, by Richard Hipp | SQLite is just awesome!

therapist: it’s normal for painful memories to soften over time

me: but what if they don’t? what if they only hurt more as i age?

therapist: do you have any memories in particular you’re thinking of?

me: yes, it’s… *sobs* the end of google reader --April King

Normal week (in the mathematical sense). Just a few links.

Articles

• Python / AI
  • Agents | The term is famously ill defined, but this article brings some clarity
  • o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) | Yep, different models need different prompting techniques
• Frontend
  • Misconceptions about view transitions | View Transitions A collection of demos to show off View Transitions | Nice demos
  • :hover > :not(:hover), sorry not sorry | Cool, never used this one
  • Say goodbye to resource-caching across sites and domains | Ah interesting
  • Relatively New Things You Should Know about HTML Heading Into 2025
  • Element: animate() method
• Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail | Yes

Software

• spacer is a simple CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops
• Easing Wizard CSS easing functions made easy
• jc JSONifies the output of many CLI tools, file-types, and common strings for easier parsing
• superwhisper - dictate to text iOS and mac..

Fediverse

• Hits a little too close to home… | ADHDinos web comic