Rhonabwy

I’ve been hammering away at a technical problem that’s been gnawing at me, and I’m just not getting it solved. In the process, I’ve found out that one of the services that runs on my box responds to http://localhost:8000, but not http://cwch.local:8000 (the machine’s name is cwch). On a mac with ZeroConf, aren’t those supposed to talk to the same place? Christ.

And too boot, what appears to be a perfectly valid RSS feed isn’t showing up in NetNewsWire, and it’s driving me nuts. I’m beginning to suspect the feed is actually fine, and it’s some quirky thing about accessing the feed from localhost or something.

Argh! All this, and it’s nearly midnight and I never got out to dinner. I had some vague plans of having sushi tonight, but I suspect that’s hosed. Or at least, I wouldn’t want to eat what’s being served at the very tail end of the night - even if the places were open.

The 5 Spot has a decent late night nosh menu though. Maybe dinner there.

It’s one of those just gorgeous days in Seattle - clear, cool, and sunny. The mountain is out (that’s Mt. Ranier for you non-locals) and we have a crystal clear view from downtown and points nearby. I’ve got to say that it was really, really hard walking into the office today - I really didn’t want to go inside.

In my opinion, you just can’t beat summer time in Seattle.

First day back with the left pinky swaddled in bandage. Man, what a pain in the butt this is. You don’t realize how much you use the pinky (I’ve renamed it “Mr Shift Key”) until you don’t have it available to use. Every now and then muscle memory kicks in and attempts to use it - and the resulting swatch of control-shift-alt-windows-Z-A invariably invokes something interesting.

I think it’s just going to take a little bit to get used to this… wracking the hand a little to the left to use my ring finger for the shift is awkward and tiring.

This whole thing makes me wish the other interfaces for computing were more effective for me - pen based, or multi-modal interfaces…. Speaking of which, I think I’ll go grab a pen and give the kayboard a rest for a bit…

My typing is a tad skewed for a while - turns out the shelf won the last wrestling contest… I’m back in Seattle after a rather eventful morning which included a few stiches on the outside of my left pinky.

Damn, I gotta tell you - anesthetic burns like a sonuvabitch when they’re putting it in.

After reading the article on the Googleplex in the IHT, it struck me that Apple and Google are going to be radically changing the processor market as they push technology forward. The biggest being (I suspect) a fundamental change in “what’s important” in a process. Instead of “processing speed at any cost”, it is (or will be) moving to “processing power per watt”.

There has been lots of this sort of background story for a while. The article in Computerworld about “Apple pushing Intel in new directions” is one. An article by the notoriously unreliable CNet on “Power costing more than CPUs” another. (The ACM Queue article An Economic Case for Chip Multiprocessing is probably the definitive…)

Natural allies - both wanting, for the own reasons, more zing for the watts. Apple for laptops, Google for their googleplex…

For all two of you who are interested in Mac programming and don’t go to the XCoders meetings here in Seatle, we’re moving that setup. Andrew Carter is donating some hosting, and the site is up and running:

http://seattlexcoders.org/

Included with the site is mailing lists (ala Mailman) - http://lists.seattlexcoders.org/mailman/listinfo. And in the near future, hopefully we’ll see a little subversion and Trac action as well.

For those curious, the driving factor was wanting a subversion repository to support group projects. The followup was a general disliking of the Yahoo Groups privacy rules by a few members - and the ever changing mailing list ads and crap. With our own list, no ads. Nice, eh?

Anyway, if you’re in to Mac programming - come join the site and get involved.

Yes, google, this is for you. Or more precisely, for me - when I forget what I did later…

* create a new user on the local machine named “postgres” (Marc Liyanage’s Postgres package site has a nice little postgres tiff icon for the user too)

* pick and make a directory where the data is going to live : mkdir /opt/local/var/postgres/

* set the ownership to the new postgres user id : sudo chown postgres /opt/local/var/postgres/

* in ther terminal window, switch to the postgres user : su -l postgres

* initialize the databases : /opt/local/lib/pgsql8/bin/initdb -D /opt/local/var/postgres

* make a log directory : mkdir /opt/local/var/pglog

* set it’s ownership : sudo chown postgres /opt/local/var/pglog

* fire up the database : su - postgres -c ‘/opt/local/lib/pgsql8/bin/pg_ctl -D /opt/local/var/postgres -l /opt/local/var/pglog/postgreslog start’ (this bit actually went into a StartupItems launcher that I borrowed from Marc’s postgres site and edited)

Now for the databases:

* su - postgres

* /opt/local/lib/pgsql8/bin/psql

* create database mydb

* create user myuser with password ‘foo’

And verify I can get in there:

* /opt/local/lib/pgsql8/bin/psql myuser mydb

There’s some handy (although slightly different paths) documentation on Apple’s site about setting up and using Postgres as well. Tweak the paths and you should be all good.

Well, I’ve got to say it’s been interesting getting things sync’d with doing Django development on the new MacBookPro.

I’d really hoped to take advantage of the great work that PythonMac has done with their packages, but in the end it was darwinports that got me down the road. I suppose I just should have expected that, but I wanted to try. In the end, I’ve installed Postgres twice (same version, just different places on the hard drive) so I’ve some cleanup yet to do…

There’s been a decent thread on the Django-user’s mailing list about getting everything set up. Turns out the lynchpin of the whole set is really the psycopg 1.1 package - it’s sort of a pain to compile, and DarwinPorts makes it so smooth if you do it all with them… You just type:

“sudo port install subversion”
“sudo port install py-psycopg”

It all falls into place from there. I still have yet to install the Django component bits, but it’s coming along nicely with the basics. Between installing Subversion (why doesn’t MacOS X include this anyway?) and the postgres/python library, here’s what I’ve got:

apr @1.2.7_0 (active)
apr-util @1.2.7_0 (active)
bison @2.2_0 (active)
db4 @4.3.29_0+darwin_8 (active)
expat @2.0.0_1 (active)
libiconv @1.10_1+darwin_8 (active)
neon @0.25.5_0 (active)
openssl @0.9.8b_0+darwin_8 (active)
postgresql8 @8.1.3_0+darwin_8 (active)
py-mx @2.0.5_1 (active)
py-psycopg @1.1.21_0+darwin_8 (active)
python24 @2.4.3_1+darwin_8 (active)
readline @5.1.004_0 (active)
subversion @1.3.2_0 (active)
zlib @1.2.3_0 (active)

Cool, huh?

El Diablo Coffee Company

It’s (as in It Is) here! And wow - that screen is really something. Karen and I took it outside, in the full sunlight, and you could still read it. Just amazing!

I’ve got it doing that “transfer stuff” thing that Macs come built in with. I’ve never used it before so I’m trying it out! And who knows, I may bag it and rebuild from the install disk before all is said and done.

The glossy screen does show a little glare, but damn - the contrast is just incredible! I’ll have to really try reading something extensive on it and see how my eyes handle it.