Debugging Before and After hooks in Cucumber

Had a heck of time trying to figure out why all my Cucumber steps were completing successfully, but my Cucumber scenario would fail. Seems that I had an issue with the web app that I was testing which would hit a REST endpoint asynchronously during the Cucumber scenario, causing an error. Cucumber seems to eat this normally, but running with the command line option of --format pretty dumps the backtrace of the exception. Blogging about this so I don't forget about it. Reference: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cukes/WTJDVWGQkTM

Python Imaging Library (PIL) on OS X Mavericks

Upgraded to Mavericks (10.9) over the weekend, not taking into account my current Python/Google App Engine development work. Thus, this Monday morning, I'm spending some quality time getting my Python environment back up and running. One of the things that I needed to re-install in this new environment is PIL or the Python Imaging Library. Unfortunately, doing a naïve pip install results in an error when looking for an X11 header file. This StackOverflow comment solved my problem, so I'm sharing with others who might get hung up on PIL on Mavericks. The pre-built PIL stuff doesn't seem to install on Mavericks, so the pip install seems to be the way to go for 10.9/Mavericks.