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- Written by: Jason Ross
What Is Docker?
Docker is a system that allows processes to run in self-contained environments called “containers”. These containers are similar to Virtual Machines (VMs), in that you can run a different operating system in them to the one running on the host machine. They differ from VMs because they’re much more “lightweight” than a full VM; instead of installing a complete operating system they use the same Linux kernel as the host server, but with the specific packages for the guest OS in each container.

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- Written by: Jason Ross
In the never-ending process of improving my web site, or what my wife calls "fiddling about with it", I've been working on another of the "opportunities" Google has presented me with. It seems that declaring CSS stylesheets as, well, CSS stylesheets, is a bad thing as far as Google is concerned, because that makes them "render-blocking resources". I first encountered this back in Updating An Old Web Site To HTML5 - Part 2 - More Google Analytics "Opportunities", so let's take a look and see what we can do about this, and see whether we can asynchronously load CSS stylesheets.
Read more: Updating An Old Web Site To HTML5 - Part 6: Google Analytics "Opportunity": Eliminate...

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- Written by: Jason Ross
A brief Introduction to Python

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- Written by: Jason Ross
Python 3.9 was released on 5th October 2020, and lots of people got very excited about it. With the new yearly release schedule for new versions of Python, is it really worthy of all the excitement, or is Python 3.9 just a small incremental improvement over Python 3.8?

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- Written by: Jason Ross
If you're running Ubuntu 16.04 or later, the first time you try to create a virtual environment with Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8 or Python 3.9, you'll get the following error:
python3 -m venv ./venv The virtual environment was not created successfully because ensurepip is not available. On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv package using the following command. apt-get install python3-venv You may need to use sudo with that command. After installing the python3-venv package, recreate your virtual environment. Failing command: ['/home/mystuff/Development/venv/bin/python3', '-Im', 'ensurepip', '--upgrade', '--default-pip']
Read more: Cannot Create a Python Virtual Environment On Ubuntu - ensurepip is not available

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- Written by: Jason Ross
In my last article on AWS Lambdas - Creating An AWS Lambda With Dependencies Using Python - I described how to create an AWS Lambda using Python, where the Python code has dependencies on other packages such as requests, and you're seeing errors like:
Unable to import module 'lambda_function': No module named 'requests'
That method works well for many packages, but there are limits.

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- Written by: Jason Ross
I’ve worked for large companies from both the UK and the USA, and they all loved making their staff watch training videos about “standards”. The UK companies’ videos were mostly about financial regulations, health and safety, and things like that. The American companies though, took a slightly more “intense” attitude. Their videos were about the danger of talking to people who may be on the list of people banned from trading with the company, the perils of bribing foreign officials, and people who never took their vacation. This might strike you as odd; after all the rest of the world doesn’t usually think of US companies forcing staff to take all of their vacation allowance, but in this case they were making a point of it.