The 2017 list of books I have read As every year here is the list of books I have read. I would call this year the “Iain M. Banks Year” because most of the books I read were from this author. I really like the Culture Universe. Some classics in between and some heavy non fiction books make this year a very enjoyable reading experience. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises What better to start off the year with some really good classic.

The 2016 list of books I have read This years books have a strange mixture in it. Some really short ones like “Neverwhere” and one really long one like Infinite Jest. There was no really bad book this year where I totally regretted reading it, but the “Kingkiller Chronicle” is very close to disappointment. Only worse was “The Magicians”. On the other hand the last book of the “Three Body” problem was exceptional good.

The 2015 list of books I have read Another year closes and another year with a lot of interesting books. Overall it felt better than last year where I read some real big duds. This time I also read some really interesting books from authors that I would normally never read. My first non western sci-fi novel with the “Three Body” Series from Liu Cixin. Amazing read. I also stumbled on one of my top books this year “The City & The City” by China Miléville.

The 2014 list of books I have read 2014 is coming to an end pretty soon, so it is time again for the year “Books I have read” list. This year was a bit of a bummer and is currently averaging out to 3.6pt out of 5pt compared to the 4.1pts last year. Some duds I read, some really big duds. On the positives side I read some really great books, like “Wind, Sand and Stars” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A.

Python: Output Formatting Double Byte Characters' This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/python-output-formatting-double-byte-characters-6d6d18d04be3 Everything below still stands as of Python 3.9/10/11 But I updated the code below to be compatible with current Python rules Gist with updated version is here: https://gist.github.com/gullevek/4d2a5175c23a37d4b0e7fa2db26437a4 If you want to print out some data to the terminal and have it perfectly align and formatted with double byte characters (aka Chinese, Japanese or Korean) it will pretty much be impossible with the standard format in Python as this goes on the length of the string but not on the actual width of the string.

Reading XMP sidecar files with Python and libxmp This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/reading-xmp-sidecar-files-with-python-and-libxmp-a4c52e9955bb I just wanted to read some XMP sidecar files, change some data and write that back to the file. A quick google search brought me to the libxml library (github page) and it looked like exactly what I needed. Sadly lacking documentation made something that should have taken 10 minutes take around 3 hours. To make everyone elses journey easier I write this simple help file

2021 Year End Book Review This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/2021-photo-review-ea3192c5fde9 There is pretty much none, as Covid-19 happened. Because of that I started to work at home, without a commute there was no reading time. So since March of 2020 I haven’t finished a single book. Year 2020 Rama: The Omnibus (Book 1) Clarke, Arthur C., (Book 2–4) Gentry Lee Lets split this into two parts. The one part where a book was written by an author and the other part where some wannabe writer tried to build upon that work and utterly failed.

Mocking final classes in phpUnit 9 This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/mocking-final-classes-in-phpunit-9-dee1944ca292 This is an add on to this wonderful article: https://tomasvotruba.com/blog/2019/03/28/how-to-mock-final-classes-in-phpunit/ It describes the basic flow, and also a way how to do this the current version of phpUnit (9.5.20 as of writing) I want to add help to Point 4 Single Hook file setup. It is a composer package, but that doesn’t matter for the phpUnit setup part

PgBouncer with auth_query This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/pgbouncer-with-auth-query-79c622d08ea4 While preparing to upgrade to PostgreSQL 15 I realized I never pushed the auth type from md5 to scram-sha-256 and while researching this I found out that there is “auth_query” to query the PostgreSQL auth table directly and not having a double set of of logins in the userlist file for PgBouncer. Problem is that all the documentations were great but none perfect.