Measure your program's power consumption

🌡️ Intro For those running a datacenter, or just a simple homelab server, the arrival of summer heat means an increase in air conditioning use. On this post I asked myself how a Linux engineer can measure how much energy is the system consuming so we can start to reason about workload optimization for better power consumption patterns. 🔋 Idle power drain As a starting point, let’s measure how much power my PC is consuming when idle, doing absolutely nothing; or better: nothing useful for computation or service but just running usual, default operating system tasks....

June 30, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

Headless Testing of PySide/PyQt GUI Applications with pytest-qt

🤓 Intro Manual testing of GUI applications can become tedious and error-prone as features and complexity increase. Headless testing offers a solution by automating UI interactions without the need for a physical display. This approach allows for faster test execution, improved repeatability, and seamless integration with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. In this post, we’ll explore how to leverage pytest-qt, a powerful framework for headless testing of PySide/PyQt applications....

May 22, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

A different approach to terminal user interfaces

Intro Bubbletea is a framework with a philosophy based on The Elm Architecture: Making it simple, it breaks into three parts: Model: the state of your application View: a way to turn your state into something to display Update: a way to update your state based on messages The framework’s runtime manages everything else: from messages orchestration to low-level rendering details. Example Let’s say you want to create the classic to-do list:...

May 3, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

SEGFAULT: Debugging a crashing application

🙀 Something breaks If you use linux running some applications you could have seen sometimes a similar error message: [1] 24975 segmentation fault (core dumped) what’s meaning and how it can be useful ? Let’s dig it out. 🧪 Lab Setup To make a proper case study, we need a crashing program. Of course they are very rare nowadays 😁 so we just create a new one ourself, showing off our worst C coding bad skills and practices....

April 5, 2024 · Andrea Manzini