Kaixing Si's Blog

This article explains how to add a self-signed certificate to a private API and verify that the client is genuine.

Background

I wanted HTTPS for my GitHub Pages blog. CloudFlare helped, but browsers still complained about the certificate. GitHub Pages only supported HTTPS on the default github.io domain at the time (custom domains are supported now), so I moved to GitLab Pages, which lets you upload your own cert.

My blog runs on Hexo.

Decorators let you wrap extra behavior around a function without touching its source.

A grab bag of small issues I ran into recently.

The initial error

While loading HTML with lxml.html.soupparser.fromstring() I hit:

ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes or control characters

Problem

While processing a page with lxml I noticed that closing </font> tags moved outside the <p> elements they originally wrapped. Whenever a <font> contained <p> elements and sat inside a <div>, the closing tag jumped outside the block so the paragraphs became siblings.

The problem

QListWidget exposes itemClicked and itemDoubleClicked, but triggering the double-click signal also fires the single-click slot. That is fine when the actions are unrelated, but not when the logic overlaps.

Dash is a popular API browser on macOS. Alternatives on Windows include Zeal and Velocity.

In one of my recent apps a long-running web request blocked the UI, so I wanted a status bar message to show what the background task was doing.

List comprehensions

List comprehensions let you build a new list from an existing one in a single expression.