No One Is Perfect

A reluctant foray into the world of blogging.

Archive for category Reminders

PostgreSQL & Python on Mac

Aug 31

Posted by Tom in Mac, Reminders | No Comments

I’ve been playing with Django & MySQL for a while but for my next project I wanted to integrate it with a PostgreSQL database. Everything went well until I wanted to install Psycopg as my python adapter to PostgreSQL.

After a bit of blundering about here’s what it eventually took:

  • Download and install PostgreSQL one-click installer from http://www.postgresql.org/download/macosx. Remember to read the README file before actually running the installer.
  • Download the psycopg2 source from http://initd.org/pub/software/psycopg/.
  • Edit the setup.cfg file to provide a path to the pg_config executable. On my Mac it sits in /Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin/pg_config and is not by default on the PATH so if you don’t put it on the PATH or in this configuration file the next step will fail in a spectacular manner.
  • Run ‘sudo easy_install .‘ in the top level psycopg2 source directory.
  • Specify postgresql_psycopg2 when you configure Django’s database layer for your project.

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UUID as an ActiveRecord primary key

Feb 28

Posted by Tom in Reminders, Software Development | No Comments

I like non-sequential identifiers for resources. Easy to do in Java (with java.util.UUID) and in Python (using the uuid module). This has been a bit of a pain in Rails, until now – check out Ariejan de Vroom’s post. I especially like his solution as it plays well with RSpec, although to be picky I would have chosen UUID.random_create rather than UUID.timestamp_create.

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Command-Tab and friends on Mac

Jan 2

Posted by Tom in Mac, Reminders | 1 Comment

Most people who work with a Mac know Command-Tab to cycle through currently running applications, but few know of Command-~ (tilde): it allows you to cycle through all the windows of the current application. No more mucking around with F10.

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