duh my bad. my new style of copying the new h2o_args.* arguments to the legacy h2o.* module, was only at the start of cloud building, and didn't work if they're referenced pre-cloud build (ray's test).
Messy because nose uses a different runner than python standalone, and the h2o.unit_main() block isn't run when nose runs the test.  (no args when nose runs it)
Also clean up the h2o_args "test name" extraction from the stack frame to correctly handle the nose vs standalone variance.
some other random things.
was reminiscing about peta when looking at his very early python peta_singletest.py talking to h2o. bye-bye.