Now Reading: Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide

Packt Publishing has kindly given me a free review copy of the eBook edition of

I'll be reading it and publishing my review here and on the PyATL Book Club blog.

Back to flipping out...

Announcing My First Real Open Source Project

I ported the dark-background variant of the Solarized project to Pygments. You can see the results here.

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Note to Self: A NetBSD domU Doesn't Have An Entropy Source By Default

I discovered this after a curious problem led me to email my VPS provider and get back a pointer to mailing list exchange. Possibly more interesting than the original problem, I also learned that this exists.

Back to flipping out...

Note to Self: Source Django's bash Completion Automatically

If you're using Doug Hellman's awesome virtualenvwrapper to manage your Django projects—and you really should be—try adding the following line to your $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate script:

source "$VIRTUAL_ENV/build/Django/extras/django_bash_completion"

If you used the --no-site-packages option to create the virtualenv, that should automatically source the Django bash completion script everytime you workon into your project. If you didn't, you just need to figure out where the Django bash completion script is squirreled away on your system and use that path instead. BTW, --no-site-packages should really be the default.

Back to flipping out...

Note to Self: Changing info for the postgres system user

Do you use MacPorts? Ever switch from one version of PostgresQL to another, e.g., 8.4 to 9.0? Did you notice that it started complaining about a non-existent home directory for the postgres system user? Me, too.

My first instinct was to edit the user, but there is no entry for postgres in /etc/passwd. That led me to this excellent article. Using that info, I cooked up the following command:

sudo dscl localhost change /Local/Default/Users/postgres NFSHomeDirectory /opt/local/var/db/postgresql84 /opt/local/var/db/postgresql90

Back to flipping out...

Sneak Attack: The Smell of Hell

Excellent article on code smells.

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Sneak Attack: Oops, I forgot to sudo in Vim

Ever forget to sudo before you started editing that file in vim? Here's a nifty, tee-based trick to save you some hassle.

Back to flipping out...