Shallow Thoughts : : May

ICE Detention Numbers

This image, from Indivisible, has been floating around social media. I saw it on a Mastodon post though curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their website anywhere.

But is it true? I wasn't going to share it until I knew that. So I investigated.

A few people on mastodon asked, and other people (not whoever posted the image for Indivisible) replied with two links: a Common Dreams article about ICE planning to buy/rent lots more warehouses for more detention centers, and an MSN article about the history of concentration camps. Neither article addresses the "first six years" claim at all. The MSN link says that Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps in his first year (that turns out to be way off according to Wikipedia; I'll address that later).

The first question: how many people is ICE currently holding?

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Unit Testing TkInter Apps

I've been making a lot of tweaks lately to MetaPho, in particular its Python/TkInter based replacement for my C/GTK2 image viewer Pho.

Pho has always had quite a few modes: it can be fullscreen, in a window sized for the current image, or in a fixed-size window; images can be scaled to the window/screen size, or you can zoom in/out, or you can view them at full size (pixel for pixel). It's fairly common that when I fix a bug in one mode, it introduces a new bug in a different mode because of the way the scaling code works.

Ideally, in a complicated program, you guard against problems like that with automated tests. But that's hard to do in a GUI (graphical user interface) app. A window comes up, but how do you make it do different things? How do you check whether it's showing the right thing, or if it's the right size?

I've tried a couple times to find hints on how to unit test Python scripts in either Tk or GTK, but there's not much help available. I think most people just give up and don't test their GUIs — just as I've always given up.

This time, I decided to really dive in and see if I could write a TkInter unit test script for testing all those different TkPho modes. It wasn't easy, but now I have a basic framework that I should be able to use for other GUI apps as well.

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Coffee Shirts

I'm not a major coffee drinker, but Dave is, and he's varied over the years in how he prefers to make his coffee. For a long time he used an espresso maker, then a French press, then cold press, but lately, he's been making a variety of cold press he calls "sun coffee". It's similar to "sun tea", where you mix tea leaves with water in a pitcher in a sunny window for a few days.

That means that eventually, it has to be filtered. We don't want want to use disposable paper filters. There are lots of options, but I like the solution Dave came up with: he uses an old white t-shirt. Two layers of t-shirt material does a pretty decent job of filtering (you might need to shift to another place on the shirt halfway through, depending on how much coffee you brewed and how finely it's ground).

After filtering, you wring out the filter and dump the grounds in a bucket where eventually it can be transferred somewhere like a path out in the yard. (We used to use it in the garden or in the compost bin on the theory that plants like more acidic soil, but the plants didn't do well so we've stopped that.) The coffee gets stored in the fridge.

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