Fighting Rabbits » Software.

Django on Snow Leopard

Richard Cooper — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:24:15 +0000

Having just been given an new MacBook Pro as an early birthday present, it didn’t take me long to try and install Django on it. Rather than use the MacPorts solution I decided to use the native python 2.6 and build the rest, apart from MySQL (use the Mac OS X 10.5 (x86_64) package from here)

Before proceeding make sure that you have installed XCode (It’s on the Snow Leopard install disc) as we need it to install libjpeg and PIL (all of my Django projects use this!)

Download libjpeg then:

tar -xzf jpegsrc-1.v7.tar
cd jpegsrc-1.v7
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
set env MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET 10.6
./configure --enable-shared && make && sudo make install

Now we can download the source and build PIL

tar -xzf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
cd Imaging-1.1.6
sudo python setup.py install

Last thing to do before we install Django is to install the MySqlDb connector – you will need to do add the following to your .bash_profile

PATH="${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin"

Then:

sudo easy_install mysql-python

Now we can easy_install Django:

sudo easy_install django

and we are all set to go :)

Thanks to these guys for the help in figuring this out:
http://dryan.com/
http://www.brambraakman.com/blog/
http://colbypalmer.com/
http://www.agapow.net/

Better Fonts in Safari for Windows

Richard Cooper — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:21:12 +0000

I have been experimenting with the fonts available from typekit for web design, and was really disapointed with their rendering on Windows.

Safari Font Rendering

Firefox Font Rendering

After a bit of digging in the settings of my Typekit browser of choice (Currently Safari 4 as my day-to-day browser Chrome 4 is not supported by the Typekit admin yet!) I found the following font settings within Safari.

Safari Font Settings

There are 5 possible settings for font smoothing, and I recommend you try them all for yourself as the results depend on your screen (and eyes!)

Standard Smoothing

Light Smoothing

Medium Smoothing

That’s Better!…

Now why can’t Chrome and Firefox implement something like this?

Why free software is worth what you pay for it…

Richard Cooper — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:09:02 +0000

We have recently swapped from running our virtual machines in VMWare to Sun’s Virtual Box. The performance of virtual box is equal if not better than VMWare, and we will save quite a bit of money on licenses, as all our users would require the workstation version of VMWare. All was well with this plan until we needed to shrink some of the machines after restoring large DB backups onto them. The command to do this is given as “VBoxManage modifyhd MyMachine.vdi compact” unfortunatly the output from this is currently:- ”Error: Shrink hard disk operation is not available!” You can see the help ticket for this at http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2833 and it makes pretty horrific reading if you are a fan of open source and expect decent customer support.

This brings me onto the rant section of this blog. If this was paid for software I could influence the decision – I could take my cash elsewhere, I could ask to have it fixed as part of my support contract, or several other routes to resolution. As this is “Free” software I am reduced to arguing with someone in a defect log item as to whether my issue (and several other peoples as well judging by the defect log) is going to get fixed.

And with comments like “You are in no position to tell us what to do or not. No amount of complaints from your side will change the priority of this issue.” it’s nice to know we are valued customers…

At the end of it all however we are still going to use VirtualBox, and I am just going to have to hope that Sun will ask their support staff to be a little friendlier.

PuTTY in my Hands.

Richard Cooper — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:41:01 +0000

Just when I am ready to dump my Nokia N95 along comes a killer app that I can’t live without and suddenly makes the Nokia indispensable (at least until I get an iPhone) – PuTTY for Symbian S60! You can get it here if you want it. Hint – if you don’t know what PuTTY is then you don’t need it :)