Mac OSX: Things To Do First If You’re a Developer

If you’re a developer moving to a Mac may I recommend, from my own experience, you do these three things before you try and do anything at all other than using iLife or M$ Office:

1. Install XCode Tools. You’ll need your OSX install DVD, select Optional Installs/Xcode Tools, and run the XcodeTools.mpkg. Budget an hour for it to install, hope for 40 mins. Maybe better on the Intels.
2. Install MacPorts. It makes life so much easier than trawling the web trying to understand the esoterica of Mac OSX standard installs of various things like mysql, sqlite, python and ruby. None of them work quite the way I expect them to, and the hacking to try and understand what’s different, and then how to fix it, is so time consuming I have bypassed them and use MacPorts. It looks like a shedload of other people do too.
3. create a .bash_profile file in your home directory. Use this for aliases (.bashrc doesn’t work).

All I can think of right now.

Tell RDBMS Intra SQL Transaction?

Trying to capture some sql server/sybase related research (minimal). I need to tell the underlying RDBMS type the current statement is running on and run a raiserror dependant on it (as the method signature is heterogenous). Intra-procedure to support portable code. However, @@servername is the closest I’ve got so far, which is crap, and the syntax check fails on both anyway cos of the method signatures. Nuts and bolts. I think I’m going to have to construct the SQL in calling process which knows what type of rdbms it’s using. Ah well.

DECLARE @errorString varchar(50), @errorValue int
SET @errorString = 'processing date hack'
SET @errorValue = @@error
IF LEFT(@@SERVERNAME, 3) = 'SYB'
BEGIN
RAISERROR 17000 'Failed while processing %1! with error no %2!.', @errorString, @errorValue
END
ELSE
RAISERROR ('Failed while processing %s with error no %d.',
16, 1, @errorString, @errorValue)
END

cURL FTP Usage

Transfer file by FTP

curl -T /home/mrsock/tactical/recurseExceptionMessages.txt ftp://login:password@ftpserver.com/test/recurseExceptionMessages.txt

FTP rename transferred file:

curl -Q "RNFR test/recurseExceptionMessages.txt" -Q "RNTO test/recurseExceptionMessages.txt.newname" "ftp://login:password@ftpserver.com"

Visualisation of Number of Tracks By Artist

Wordle – My Tracks By Artist

This is built up from my iTunes library. I extracted the artist name for every track in the library and removed the spaces in the names. It could probably stand a little data cleansing (Cafe Del Mar for example has registered as “Caf” and separate artist “DelMar”). Wordle counts the repetitions and sizes it like a tag cloud. I removed Douglas Adams and Roald Dahl because each of their books are broken down into many. many wonderful tracks and they were massively larger than anything else. And cos it’s my data and I can so nerrrr

I hasten to add they’re not ranked or sized by play count. Haven’t sussed that yet. I can honestly say I’ve got zero count on all the Abba tracks.

Thanks to Dan for pointing me in the right direction for this stuff.

Averages

• all particles (waves?) behave chaotically within boundaries, averaging at at some mean that allows us to predict gross, or macro behaviour.
• as with all laws, they can be stretched, and, with the laws of averages, they allow for outliers on any sides of a mean (3dimensional mean? 4d?), so you’ll get the odd atom behaving totally out of character. But because it’s averaged out, rarely see any effect… but sometimes you do.
• Einstein(?), Galileo, Newton(?) working on the averages

Easy Group Twittering?

@danielbower was wondering whether there is a way to address multiple twitter users in a reply easily. There are a couple of ways that spring to mind:

1. You create another twitter account specially for the group. Let’s call it @keystone. Everyone in the group friends up @keystone and posts group messages to @keystone. Simple.
2. Decide on a keyword for the group twittering. Let’s call ours grpKeyStone. Have a crontab watching each of the group members twitter rss. When a post is on the rss starting with grpKeyStone , the script re-tweets to each of the other members of the group with the usual @name.
3. Option 2 doesn’t address your other friends getting tweets with the incomprehensible grpkeyStone on the beginning of them, so may be worth combining the above options. Have a separate twitter account to target the group messages at, and a script watching and re-tweeting the messages to the specific members of the group.

Clear as mud

Will McCallion

Will McCallion

Originally uploaded by parttimesock

Will McCallion born 5th June 2008. How bloody chuffed am I?

What Did Chamberlain Do?

Brilliant. The sussed out guy just keeps going. Worth watching all of it.

Jensen Interceptor

There was one outside work, so I took a photo for all you lovely people. This of course put me in mind of The Saint. So that’s Song Of The Day.

I’ve never seen the The Saint on TV (it was probably on ITV). I always vaguely thought Roger Moore drove the Volvo and then at some point changed to the Jensen. No. Roger Moore played Simon Templar in the 60’s. The Jensen The Saint was a 1976 model, driven in the remake series in 1989. The chap playing Templar was Simon Dutton (Duttons are another fantastic make of car, but I digress).  You learn something new every day.

I chose the Orbital version cos:

1. It’s the only version I own
2. It’s quite kick arse.

The Cult’s Saint is quite good too, and very kick arse, but not quite aligned with the Jensen.

Money Makes the World A Bit Mad

No, never will I post Money Makes The World Go Round, but, in light of this thread on the Sam Smiths forum which Mr Web3point11 pointed me at, I suggest Depeche Mode – Everything Counts today.

Disclosure: I am Spanger, the poster who suggests a reason why; I like beer; I like some Sam Smiths beers; I used to live round the corner from a number of pubs; um; can’t think of anything else pertinent.

Very annoyed about the Sam Smiths stuff if it is indeed true. I really like those pubs, and the beers. That pub you always see in the background on the news when York floods is a Sam Smiths. Used to spend half my life in there, as did various sibs.