"Morphex's Blogologue": Focusing on the simple things

This morning the internet became unavailable, after also being unavailable this weekend for several days.

So I decided to take a look at my demo board which does surveillance with a webcam using the surveil app, surveil is here:

https://github.com/morphex/surveil

Well, one thing lead to another (...), and I locked myself out of the demo board.

Which was all-in-all a good thing, because when I decided to make things easy for myself, I instead ran the surveil app on my laptop, with the webcam attached there.

I was a bit surprised and embarrassed when the surveil script which should have given a helpful error message on the wrong command-line arguments, instead failed with a TypeError, because I had forgotten a comma.

So I fixed that, and noticed that the contents of the surveil directory (images taken with the webcam that could contain sensitive data) was included in the commit.

This was a big deal, and I included the surveil and longterm data storage directories in the .gitignore file.

Finally, I made the video capture device a configure option, as I don't use the webcam integrated in the laptop, but rather /dev/video1 - which is the device the USB Webcam gets when attached.

A commit of these changes is here:

https://github.com/morphex/surveil/commit/42743c4f3785e1e9dd...

Last week I drifted off in an interesting conversation on the Python-User list:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2018-November/...

Which I guess shows that I could've spent the time thinking about an interesting concept on more pragmatic things, like testing the surveil script on another machine.

Finally, I'm looking for a way to do testing; and I'm wondering of a good way to test that the command-line interface functions as expected as well.

I guess that's more of a functional test, but maybe there is a package which integrates unit and functional tests / integration tests.

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